The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a happy, healthy, wealthy alcohol-free life

by Catherine Gray

Stigmas grow in the shadowlands. So, let’s floodlight the sober movement. Alcohol is an addictive drug. There’s no shame in not being able to use it moderately. You are not unusual if you can’t stop at one or two. You’re not broken. Or weak. You’re actually the norm.

We should be able to drop ‘I don’t drink’ or ‘I’m teetotal’ or ‘I’m taking a break from drinking’ into conversation just as smoothly as we say ‘I don’t eat meat’ or ‘I’m a non-smoker’ or ‘I’m taking a break from dairy’. There shouldn’t be any cringe around choosing to do something positive for your body and well-being.

Alcohol has long been up on a throne. Anointed as the fun-king, the joy-giver, the golden gateway of social connection. Whenever anything good happens, we automatically associate celebration with the pop, fizz and glug of champagne.

I found myself with dozens more hours in the week, heaps more energy, £23,000 more money over four years, deepened friendships, revived family relationships, better skin, a tighter body, tanned legs for the first time ever, the ability to sleep for eight uninterrupted hours, a bone-deep sense of well-being, a totally turned-around positive outlook and an infinitely more successful career. What’s not to like?!

But once you learn the superpower of socializing sober, it never leaves you. And you’ll never want to go back.

Once you see the world through sober eyes, it becomes clear that after one drink, most people are indeed looser, quicker to laugh, unclenched. However, at drink three that social alchemy begins to tarnish and rust. The looseness turns to sloppiness, the laughs become too loud, the jokes become muddled, quiet confidence turns to arrogance, mascara starts to smudge, cuddles become inappropriate. You’ll wish you could hoover the wine out of their system and return them to being sober.

I never really feel like I have a choice. Once I start drinking, I finish. And 99.9 per cent of the time, I get trashed. Hammered. Wasted.

booze was anaesthetic for my ever-present anxiety.

Life was too sharp, too painful, too real and too loud when I was sober. Drinking softened the edges and blurred the clarity. It turned an intimidating Andy Warhol pop-art world into a misty Monet watercolour.

Blackouts were commonplace right from the get-go. I thought everyone experienced lost hours of nights out – turns out they don’t. I thought everyone felt jangly-nerved and ill-fitting until they’d had a drink – turns out they don’t. I’d always felt like I was on the outside, looking into social situations, never quite able to fully shed my inhibitions and engage.

I suffered from Wishful Drinking. Tonight would be the night I cracked it. The night I would have two drinks in the pub, laugh with my friends and go home, rosy-faced and aglow with wine, to make a stir-fry and have an early night. Tomorrow would be the morning I would actually get up and go for the 7am run before work, rather than groaning and stabbing at the alarm to make it stop. Like the desert spring the dying man crawls towards endlessly, but never reaches, I was never able to locate that oasis.

I truly could not see that booze was a villain, rather than a hero. I thought it was the pain-remover, rather than the source of the pain. And I couldn’t see that I was complicit. I was happening to life; life wasn’t just happening to hapless me. I was the architect of my own destruction every single time, along with my trusty sidekick, wine.

Now that I wasn’t in my early 20s, when you’re ‘supposed’ to be a hellraiser, I was starting to worry. I had noticed that my friends’ drinking was slowing down, as mine sped up.

It was so demoralizing, never being able to live up to my best intentions. What I wanted to do, and what I ended up doing, never matched.

My life was just a string of ‘next time’ moderation attempts.

Regardless of my best intentions, I would always stagger home after five drinks, or sneak back out to the shop for ‘just one can of cider’

I knew, somewhere at my very core, that this was not ‘normal’. That other people didn’t put this much time and energy into trying to only drink three drinks.

I never, ever, ever bought my sum-total night’s alcohol in one shop. Two trips to the off-licence was standard. This was because I always started the night with the intention of consuming a certain amount. And it would always, always end up being more.

For me, each rock bottom was what recovery people call a ‘convincer’. They added fuel to my desire to get sober. Without them, I would never have stopped drinking. They’re pitch-black moments in my life, but they serve a bright purpose in the long-term. It’s because of those blood-chilling moments that I finally scraped together the wherewithal to start swimming as fast as I could for the sober shore.

I can see what I look like to them. A bizarre collage of expensive wheelie suitcase, bedraggled clothes and clearly no place to go. I can see that I’m going to end up homeless, begging for shrapnel to buy super-strength cider. I can see this so clearly, as I stare out over the lake. A thought in my head repeats over and over, like a train announcement tannoy stuck on a loop. ‘I need a drink, I need a drink, I need a drink.’ I’m drinking, but I still need more to drink. And then, I suddenly know what I have to do. I am at a fork in the road here. I can either pull myself together to go buy some wine.

I can’t do it. I have to go home. I don’t have the grit to be homeless.

That would be a neat ending to my drinking, wouldn’t it? That would tie everything up with a pretty bow. But no. Still, I drank. I made excuse after excuse to go out to the garage and drink the beer there. Once they realized and locked away the booze, I drank mouthwash.

I sit there waiting to see if I’m going to die. Maybe this is a good thing, I have now committed suicide by accident. I wanted that, didn’t I. Fucccck. I might die today. I sit there and try to absorb that fact into my brain. And with that, I finally realize. I do not want to die.

I suddenly understand that if I continue drinking, I will die. I will DIE. Maybe it will take decades, but still, drinking will eventually kill me prematurely. And I don’t want to die. I want to live. THE NEXT DAY I don’t drink.

In a way, dedicated drinkers have many of the same qualities as athletes. A tolerance for physical pain, a monolithic stubbornness, an all-or-nothing leaning towards the extreme. Once we find an activity that gives us an endorphin rush, maaann, we embrace it. We don’t hold back! Which is why so many newly sober people discover a tiny athlete tucked away inside their drunk self.

Addiction is all about seeking external relief from mental pain; whether you use cocaine, online poker, shopping, sex, razors, cake or exercise. Addictions are all the same ultimately. You seek to treat an internal pain with an external substance or activity. You pursue a once-pleasurable activity to the point of self-sabotage. Alcoholics often lose their jobs, houses, relationships, friends, everything; how can anyone call that self-indulgent?

For me, I had to stop hating myself and start liking myself in order to find sobriety. I had to replace self-loathing with self-soothing. I had to start to believe that I was worth something. That I deserved better than drinking.

I finally got to a headspace whereby I realized that I deserved not to drink. I deserved not to have a life of 3am nausea and unreliability and zero money and bloodshot eyes. I deserved better.

‘When we’re torn between two possibilities, such as “do I drink tonight or not?”, the limbic system is amped up. The uncertainty of indecisiveness means our limbic system has to sort through all the different possibilities of this dilemma. Once you make a clear-cut decision, you eliminate the uncertainty, and the multiple outcomes, meaning the limbic system calms down. The act of making a decision feels scary, since you may fail, but once you make a decision and set a definitive goal, the brain likes it more.’

I was afraid to silence the ‘here’s all the things you’re doing wrong, here’s all the ways you are broken’ voice for a long time. I thought that’s what kept me motivated, humble and on the right path. Not so. It kept me down and wanting to drink.

Whenever I started becoming my own cheerleader and refusing to go down the ‘you’re shit, you are’ neural pathway, I became more motivated, happier and kinder to others. And most of all, I stopped wanting to drink.

We’re programmed by society to look up to the Party Girls of this world. It’s a key scene in any coming-of-age movie (She’s All That, Clueless, Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) whereby the gawky, mousey girl manages to peel herself off the sidelines after a shot or two, and join the party. Yeah! Watch her go! She’s finally cool!

The price tag of being the Party Girl was – and is – too expensive. I was never really her anyhow.

As a teenager, I was painfully shy. So guess what I did? I drank to manufacture fake confidence.

I used alcohol as if it was a computer game cheat code. I didn’t need to learn how to motor through levels three to seven. All I had to do to take me from level two (terrified) to level eight (bouncing around a dancefloor to Blur) was to drink. So I did. With gusto. Until I was utterly reliant on it for any sort of socializing.

If you’re an introvert too, as 50 per cent of people are, you’ll find you need to be judicious with your energy. You’ll soon learn that parties are indeed fun sober, but they are also draining. You’ll learn not to say yes to every party. To save your socializing credits for those who you really want to spend them on. Parties are expensive.

Hunting gratitudes alters the way you see the world; when you seek the good, rather than point out the bad, everything looks rosier.

Of course, it was all peacocking. Flashy feathers and prancing around and showing off. To distract from the fact that beneath my smartass comments and punchy putdowns, I was hiding an ever-growing cache of self-loathing. Savaging other people allowed me to escape from it, get a hit of smugness, a gleeful buzz.

While I had an illustrious launch in my early 20s, towards the end of them, I started to feel left behind. Like my life was frozen in amber, in suspended animation, while everyone else was evolving around me.

Fantasies of being able to moderate? Get down and give me 20 examples of when you tried moderation and utterly, irrevocably failed. It’s a mental muscle which is steeled by fighting fantasies with reality.

Hard times in sobriety seem like a wall. But they’re just a cardboard wall. That you have to punch your way through to get to the magical stuff in the next room. I’m really learning that if you just sit with the discomfort and trust it will pass, it always, always does. And then really great times roll in. It’s as if the universe rewards you.

They ask you, wide-eyed, what happened? You have to tell them that nothing actually happened. Well, thousands of things happened, and they filled up a bucket of despair drop by water-torture drop. Until finally the bucket just capsized.

In general, when people dig for dirt, I would say this: your decision to not drink isn’t something you have to explain in depth to others. They’re on a ‘need to know’ basis, not a ‘right to know’. I’m pretty much a wide-open book (certainly now, hello world!), but you don’t have to be.

Socializing is also a lot more efficient. Eight-hour drinking binges from 5pm to 1am become three-hour lunches in sobriety. And you do, oh, about ten times more bonding in that time, because it’s authentic, rather than chemically altered.

Drunk bonding is like a glue stick. It’s cheap and it sticks quickly. But it’s also easily torn asunder. Whereas sober bonding is more like cement. It takes a heckofalot longer to set. More effort. But once it’s there, it’s solid as a rock. Ain’t no shifting that bad boy.

There’s nothing more frustrating to a former hellraiser than to be pigeon-holed as a pious bore.

Drinking has become our socializing mother tongue. Learning how to socialize without drinking, is like learning a whole new language, say Spanish. And having to resist using our mother tongue.

remember, dopamine is the ‘wanting’ neurotransmitter. See booze, hear booze, smell booze; want booze. Out of sight, out of mind is absolutely true.

We’re not meant to put alcohol into our bodies. It’s like putting diesel into a petrol engine. And our poor bodies have to work crazy hard to cleanse the neurotoxin out. Traditional thinking says that a hangover lasts one day, but after a big session, it actually lasts for three days. ‘If you have a binge, you are essentially creating a mini period of dependence, so you have a mini withdrawal after it.

Without inhibitions, we are naked and immensely vulnerable. Removing them is madness.