My Sober Year
Today marks a year sober for me. I’m not perfectly clear on how I feel about it, hence why I’m writing things down to work it out for myself. The one thing I’m fairly certain about is that it’s one of many changes I’ve made in my life over the past 18 months that have added up to a positive improvement.
The last time I had a drink was with the dads from our kids daycare. We went down to the brewery a few doors down from the daycare. Haha, that doesn’t sound great when you think about it. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. I had a decent number of beers, had a good time chatting with a few old mates and a few new ones. The night was fine, that’s not why I stopped drinking.
I woke up the morning after with a bit of a hangover. But what I mostly woke up with was the crushing pain in my chest of anxiety. I’ve written about this in my piece about my relationship with alcohol, but the short version is, I had conditioned my body to associate a hangover with having something serious to worry about. Whatever it was that morning, I’m not sure. I was in the midst of a prolonged depressive episode and was on edge a lot. But I just thought to myself, I can’t do this anymore. Actually it was more like, if I do this too much more something bad is going to happen.
So I decided that would be it. I talked to my dad about his father (my grandad), who also gave up alcohol. It somehow gave me the confidence that somehow, genetically, I had it in me to stop. But to be honest, I didn’t find it that hard. We’ve still pretty regularly had beer and wine in our fridge and I still have bottles of whiskey sitting on the shelf. This being said, I think I was ready for this. I had committed to making changes in my life. If this had been a few years ago, it would probably have been a different story.
The one thing that was very noticeable within the first few weeks was that I lost weight, fast. I dropped about 10kgs and have kept it off. My wife says she could see my face changing as I lost weight. It probably wasn’t just the drinking, I was exercising more too. But it was noticeable how quickly I dropped the weight once I stopped the beer.
Other than the weight though, I don’t think there is any one thing that I can pinpoint as a direct benefit of being sober. I obviously don’t get the morning anxiety hangover, but I still get anxious from time to time. It’s being sober in conjunction with the tools I’ve developed that help me manage it. Which I think is part of the reason for me sharing lots of this stuff, is that there is no silver bullet or life hack. It’s about making the healthy and best choices for yourself.
As a result of this anniversary coming up, I’ve been asking myself ‘now what?’. My honest answer is still that I’m not sure. I’ve thought about trying to have like one beer or a whiskey a week as a treat and trying to repair my relationship with alcohol. Unpicking why my body serves up anxiety with the hangover and trying to re-route that response.
That’s been a theme of my therapy, re-routing. If there is one single thing that I’ve done in therapy it’s that principle of re-routing. The pathways we’ve built up for responding to things are changeable. The way we do things now is not always the best or healthiest way to respond. We can recognise and reprogramme those responses (with a great deal of focus and effort). My decision now I guess is whether attempting to re-route my response to alcohol is more important than the other things on my list!
Anyway, what I think I’m saying about being a year sober is that there isn’t anything profound in isolation. Not drinking in and of itself wouldn’t have got me to a better headspace without everything else. It all adds up though, and I’m glad I did it. Mainly because it signifies to me, my own commitment to being the best version of myself for me, my family and my friends.