Reflections on an undisciplined month of sobriety

Last month, I ran an experiment with my body.

Throughout the pandemic and into my senior year, I self-identified as a health-and-productivity-maxxer; I looked for every opportunity to optimize my performance and well-being. Cold showers, meditation, morning routines- you name it, I tried it. I was so ass-deep in health optimizations that I would probably end up rubbing coconut oil on my balls if Andrew Huberman hinted that it might improve my life.

These optimizations were no-brainers during the lockdowns when there was Literally Nothing Else To Do, but stepping back into the real world after lockdowns meant shifting priorities. Graduating college, traveling, and starting two corporate jobs in two different cities in a 12-month span meant that outward action once again took priority over inward action. This year, I found myself in the exact opposite conditions as the ones that led to my meticulous ascent (or descent) into the health & wellness rabbit hole.

When I found out last month that the Founder of Edge, Brooke Leblanc, was running her first month-long sobriety cohort, I couldn’t resist. The weekly coaching calls and community felt like a great way to hold myself accountable and learn from others’ journeys. Most importantly, it felt like an opportunity to recommit myself to myself, or at least see try that feeling on again.

In this post, I want to share the biggest observations I made during my (undisciplined) alcohol-free month.

1. Straightforward is not the same as easy

Okay, so I decided to go sober for a month. Easy. Right?

All I have to do is not drink, which sounds like it should take less effort than drinking. Right??

Not so much.

Even as someone who only drinks every couple of weeks as it is, I found it difficult to cut my alcohol intake down to zero. After all, who likes being sober at the club?

Examples of simple but difficult healthy habits abound; losing weight is as simple as moving more and eating less, but Americans can’t seem to hack it. Listening is all about shutting the f*ck up, but it’s become a lost art. Formal meditation is a scientifically sound cure for basically everything and is allll about doing nothing, but few people do it with any regularity.

A challenge that seemed straightforward turned out to instead bring me face-to-face with challenging questions about my values and priorities. This grappling turned out to be the main theme of the month, but more on this in a bit.

2. Failure is an opportunity to strengthen your commitment

Sometime in the middle of the experiment, I found myself at a team retreat with a fully-funded open bar. After some deliberation with my coworkers and a short-lived internal conflict, I folded like a lawn chair.

I had initially committed to an alcohol-free month with the intention of winning back time on my weekend mornings; I love spending Saturday and Sunday mornings writing, reading, coding, or exercising…whenever I'm not hungover and low on sleep from a night out. This particular weekend, I took a trip out of the city and ended up drinking on a night when I knew that I wouldn’t be doing work the following morning anyway. I made a conscious exception to drink knowing that despite violating the literal word of the agreement, I wouldn’t be violating the primary goal of the experiment. Or at least, those were the mental gymnastics I did to justify my decision.

Lo and behold, I felt like absolute shit the following morning. I found myself wrestling with both a hangover and the pain of knowing I had broken my commitment to myself. After that night I considered discontinuing the challenge; in my mind, I had already failed. Once I forgave myself for the slip, though, I discovered that addressing the shame and guilt that arose in the wake of my relapse turned out to make the challenge more impactful, not less. I remembered again why I decided to take on this challenge in the first place and doubled down on the rest of the experiment, this time with a new fuel to burn.

More importantly, I also made the meta discovery that the experiments’ biggest contribution to my long-term health was providing a framework for me to audit my drinking habits and pay careful attention to when I did and didn’t feel the need to drink and why.

"Failing" the challenge helped me recognize the experiment for what it was: an exercise in mindful drinking and an opportunity to reset my relationships with alcohol as opposed to a test of my willpower. “Mindful hangover” might sound like an oxymoron, it was exactly what I needed to internalize why I cared about this challenge in the first place.

3. Always have a backup plan

While we’d all like to live undefeated, the truth is that we should expect to lose sometimes when we do hard things. There will always be challenging days on the path to a better you. In my case, venturing into the lawless land of failure didn’t just teach me how to get back up and recommit, but it also showed me the importance of anticipating exceptions in the first place.

Navigating the post-plan space can be scarier than navigating plan A. If I had planned out my trip and anticipated having some drinks, I like to think I could have negotiated a 2-3 drink cap for myself even in spite of the open bar. Instead, I tossed all rules out the window after my first drink and used it as an opportunity to give myself my worst hangover in recent memory.

This doesn’t just go for drinking though. Having a plan for the difficult days means you can negotiate with yourself to go to the gym for 30 minutes instead of 60, or meditate for 2 minutes instead of 10, or work on your side hustle for 20 minutes instead of 2 hours. Approaching new habits with an all-or-nothing mentality stacks the cards against us and sets us up to develop unhealthy relationships to well-intended new habits.

Anticipating challenges and exceptions gives us the flexibility to slip up and recover gracefully, often with stronger resolve than before.

4. The real battle is against entrenched perceptions

To my surprise, the biggest obstacle to my sobriety wasn’t a longing for alcohol or an itch for social lubricant. Instead the big battle of the month was trying to shift my close friends’ view of myself and my values.

Peoples' perception of us can be pretty sticky. Outgrowing our habits necessarily means outgrowing others' perceptions of our identity which can be the most uncomfortable shift you will face when trying to evolve, which can often be a bigger challenge than the evolution itself.

Throughout the pandemic, I cut my drinking to zero for 9 straight months with barely a thought. This wasn't because I was around alcohol less, it was because I was around people less. Sobriety for me, as it is for many, is not about changing your relationship to the substance, but changing your relationship to the people with whom you consume it. This is the bottleneck. This is the sticking point. Choosing to change your identity forces you to wrestle with uncomfortable questions like:

• What is it that my friends like about me?

• Can I continue to have the same friends and develop new habits?

• If I have to choose, which one is more important to me?

You will be surprised who pushes back and who doesn't.

5. Movements happen one person at a time

Although an undisciplined 30-day trial didn't result in any permanent sobriety converts, I learned a lot from observing peoples’ varied reactions to the experiment and the kinds of questions they asked; I could see the gears turning as people thought about their own relationships to alcohol and the assumptions that they themselves had taken for granted. Maybe the most surprising observation I made this month was how often people leave the decision of whether or not to drink up to others; "Are we drinking?", "Who's drinking?", and "I'll only drink if you drink" were common exclamations that I hadn’t noticed before this month. My decision not to drink often gave people an excuse or even permission not to drink themselves.

I could see immediately how a lifetime of holding myself to a higher standard could encourage and inspire others to do the same, if and when they happen to be ready. More importantly, I could see how every individual’s decision to live healthier lives could create ripple effects that free others to do the same.

While I don’t think I’m ready to commit to sobriety for the long run just yet, this month has felt like a turning point in my relationship to alcohol that I hope will become the bedrock of a healthier, stronger life.