THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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A month off alcohol

I finished a year off alcohol last month,

And I’ve been drunk ever since.

Just kidding 🙂 - I took a whole year off the sauce, starting last November about a week after my brother’s wedding. It was a great experiment for me, for many reasons. I learned a few things, and also reinforced my confidence that I’ve built a pretty solid relationship with alcohol over the past decade.

I’ll share a few of those learnings, and also a few reasons I think it’s a good idea for most people to have periods of zero alcohol, but first a brief history of my life with alcohol.

• I started drinking at 15 - 3 Miller lite Ices and 3 Zimas and I was plastered.

• I drank on weekends in high school - once we discovered alcohol my friends and I mostly tried to drink whenever we didn’t have school or sports the next day.

• I drank heavily in college - I played division 3 lacrosse which helped temper it during the spring season - I didn’t really drink unless we had a day off the next day during season. In the fall we drank most days.

• In my 20’s I didn’t drink much during the week, and binge drank on the weekends periodically. Not every weekend, but often.

• In my 30’s my drinking transitioned into having just a few drinks, a few times a week, with the occasional binge day or evening. Having kids dramatically reduces the big nights of drinking, which I substituted with having a few (3-4) drinks on more and more weekday nights.

• This habit continued and slowly became a mostly daily habit - I’d have 2-4 drinks most days of the week. And because I got so used to it and enjoyed it - I eventually got to the point where I had to apply a great amount of willpower to skip a day.

• This volume didn’t feel like too much of an issue going into my mid-30s, other than being slightly annoyed that it was hard to take a few nights off. I had high energy during my days building my businesses and didn’t notice any real negative effects.

• This continued until I did notice some negative effects - not necessarily from alcohol - but getting divorced and having serious business challenges at the same time cause me to develop extreme anxiety for the first time in my life. Lacking any real tools to deal with it, I increased my alcohol consumption to help me fall asleep. Which shockingly only made things get worse and worse.

• Getting on anxiety medication at this time (early 2019) helped me tremendously, to first get some good sleep again, and then start dealing with my anxiety in more productive ways.

• Around mid-year 2019 I decided to take some time off alcohol to have a rest from it and test my ability to go without. That break lasted 9 months - through May of 2020.

• That break was tremendously helpful - I learned a bunch of the things I’ll share, and that timing coincided with steady improvement in my mental health after it took a serious dip the previous year.

• Since that time I’ve enjoyed relatively moderate alcohol use. I don’t think I’ve been overly intoxicated in at least 2 years - so long I can’t remember the last time.

The last year off

The year leading up to taking a year off from booze was a pretty moderate year of alcohol consumption. Looking back the only complaint I had about it was I still kind of wanted to have a drink every night, and although I’d probably have 1-2 drinks on 2-3 nights, I’d still think about it every other night - which is annoying to me.

The main reason I took a year off was to dial in my sleep.

As mentioned above - my sleep completely collapsed in 2019 and I got on an anxiety medication called Mirtazapine - that you take at night, and it made me sleep like a dead person every night.

That predictable sleep was AMAZING for a few years. And the drug had very little side effects, so it was a pretty great fit for me. After a few years, however, I wanted to get off the drug for multiple reasons.

Which meant I had to re-learn how to sleep without it. That was somewhat difficult, and especially difficult if I had even one drink at night. I made modest improvement in my sleep for about six months last year. But I also had a newborn at home, so any factor that would hurt my sleep was extremely noticeable.

So in the effort to become a good sleeper again, I quit booze for a year.

And it worked!

It honestly took much longer than I expected, and I had to work in a bunch of other ways to improve my sleep over the past year - but I’m consistently getting high quality sleep without the aid of any drugs for the first time since 2019.

That result alone made it worth any difficulty in taking a year off alcohol. My cognitive and physical performance, energy levels, mood consistency, and feeling of wellbeing after consistently getting great sleep makes me feel like a different person than when I was getting poor sleep.

So the first major learning is one that we pretty much all know at this point - alcohol hurts our sleep, and removing it is guaranteed to improve anyone’s overall sleep.

Here’s a few other learnings, some maybe less obvious:

• I don’t need alcohol to lubricate conversation - I grew up shy, and alcohol made it easy to talk to people. Like many people who grew up with alcohol present in nearly all their social situations, I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to have great conversations or have fun in social environments without it. That’s simply not true for me. After enough repetitions without it I learned it’s not necessary at all.

• My personality is addictive - if I remove alcohol my brain will get sneaky and try to find other sources of dopamine. Sugar is always the fastest craving I’ll have. Cut out alcohol and I’ll immediately start craving dessert at night. One of the biggest benefits of a year, instead of a month, was the ability to work through some of those additional addictive tendencies and have enough time to work through them. One month isn’t enough for me to work through those.

• My mental clarity isn’t negatively affected by 1-2 drinks of alcohol. Bad sleep negatively affects my mental clarity, and that’s over a consistent period of time. cutting out alcohol didn’t immediately improve my mental clarity. The only thing that really has is figuring out multiple factors that I needed to improve to consistently get good sleep. Alcohol is one of those factors, and if I’m overall getting great sleep - having 1-2 drinks once a week isn’t going to negative impact me there.

• It took longer than a month of no alcohol to consistently improve my sleep. It’s kind of counterintuitive - if I’m sleeping well on a daily basis, having a few drinks will noticably affect my night of sleep - so it’s clear it has an immediate negative effect. But if I’m having average sleep in general, cutting out alcohol doesn’t coincide with an immediate improvement in my average sleep quality. It takes a little more time to start noticing benefits for me.

• Cutting out alcohol helped, then hurt, then helped my anxiety. At this point I would say I’m pretty much anxiety free - meaning I don’t have uncontrollable ruminations that negatively affect my mental state. Drinking alcohol consistently kept my anxiety around, and reducing it coincides with a reduction in anxiety. However, after a few weeks of no alcohol and no other drugs that numb my emotions, I noticed a period of higher anxiety that I had to deal with. Those anxiety spikes faded over time, but it took more than a month for them to start fading.

• My energy levels improved greatly. Over the past year I noticed a more consistent level of energy throughout the days, and the biggest energetic improvement I noticed was how I started each week. When I’m drinking I feel like I’m playing catchup on Mondays, even into Tuesdays, and then hitting my stride on Wednesday. When I’m not drinking (and getting good sleep) I start Mondays at full stride and have a much higher level of productivity, energy, and feeling of well being.

• That’s probably the most noticeable benefit I’ve felt from my time off. That feeling of starting my week at full speed, instead of dragging and feeling like I’m recovering from something.

• My digestion improved over the past year. Prior to taking time off I had periodic periods of digestive distress that occasionally felt close to IBS - those symptoms are entirely gone.

• I saved money - I like to go to restaurants often - A drink costs $10 now - cutting 2 drinks 2x a week saved me $2080, and I likely saved substantially more.

• I proved to myself I’m in control - I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can control my alcohol consumption, and that if I ever get to a point where I’m consuming more than I want, if I can’t reduce I’ll just remove. This is an important for me as someone who has many alcoholics in his family.

• I’m more present with my family and friends. Especially my kids - I’ve noticed that drinking alcohol with friends is great for conversation. But drinking alcohol while I’m with my kids makes me lazy and less engaging with them. Without it I’m a better parent - period.

My one-year experiment helped me tremendously. Based on my experience, and that of many people I know who have taken periods off to reset, I know it will help anyone who drinks alcohol more than 1-2 drinks a week. There are definitely people who have no issue whatsoever with alcohol and don’t need to bother “taking a break”. Everyone else can use one.

One month is a great start - Doing a dry January will get you 80% of the benefits I got from taking a year off. There’s a few you can’t get from just a month - like improving your sleep which I think takes longer, and permanently changing any habits you want to change - 30 days just isn’t enough time for permanent behavior change.

But if you haven’t ever done it - a month off is a great start. See how it goes, and if you find you need a longer break, make it longer next time.

Oh - last benefit that comes to mind. I wasn’t sure I could make it through the holidays without booze - it turned out to be no problem at all. In fact I’m back off the booze for 2 months, in solidarity with my partner Erin in our last two months before baby #5 comes. Easy peasy.

Talk to you next week,

Mike