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

by Catherine Gray

‘Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.’ – ANNE LAMOTT

Under the misnomer of wanting to ‘dance’, I would badger whatever friend/s I was out with to stay out with me and go clubbing. I didn’t want to dance; I know that now. I wanted to drink.

I totally relate to what Eminem has to say about nature. ‘I speak to Elton [John]. He’s like my sponsor....He was saying things to me like, “You’re going to see nature that you never noticed before.” Shit you’d normally think was corny but that you haven’t seen in so long that you just go, “Wow! Look at that fucking rainbow!” Or even little things – trees, the colour of leaves. I fucking love leaves now, man. I feel like I’ve been neglecting leaves for a long time.’

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and author of 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, says, ‘When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics being transferred: to you. So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you.’

Every now and then I find myself excoriating somebody’s character. Or thinking something catty about someone I meet. The difference now is, afterwards I feel dirty, like I need to scrub myself clean. To make up for it, I write a list of nice things about them so that I can flip my focus to their positives, or I give them a compliment. The nice nixes the nasty.

Most of all, I actively avoid those who love to bitch. I recently was witness to a conversation between two perfectly nice acquaintances. ‘Oh, she can’t write for shit. And she’s just...weird. And her clothes... OMG.’ I could see what they were doing. It was a bitch-bond. And I couldn’t have been less interested in pitching in on the trash-talk. I sat on the sidelines, silent.

‘WHY DON’T YOU DRINK?’ The almost-inevitable ‘why?’ Answering that question is probably the scariest thing about sober socializing. Saying ‘no thanks’ to a drink and being confronted with a ‘why?’ in response, is like having to turn yourself inside out, and let the crowd have a look at your soft secrets.

It’s so much easier to say ‘yes’. Saying ‘no’ is crazy hard, socially. Because of the questions. Which is why droves of trying-to-be-sober people wind up making up excuses about taking antibiotics, being on fitness or diet missions, driving and so on. I totally understand why they do it. I did it too.

It’s thick with irony, our self-consciousness around not drinking. I was more than happy to get so lashed that I was unable to stand, unable to get food successfully into my mouth, unable to say intelligible words, unabl...

But when we’re drunk, we’re socially anaesthetized. We don’t feel the social disgrace of these things. However, when we’re sober, we feel every awkward silence acut...

THEY SAY: ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ Most people expect a moment where thunder and lightning illuminate the sky, and ‘fuck, I need to quit drinking’ is there written in the stars. Most people expect a big story. Where you wake up in a shopping trolley outside a supermarket wearing a flower-pot as a hat and clutching a can of super-strength lager. 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.

THEY SAY: ‘CAN’T YOU JUST HAVE ONE?’ Oh, man, I never thought of that! You’re a genius! Just one, you say? Rather than five or six? Thanks, Captain Obvious.

‘WHY ARE YOU NOT DRINKING?’ ONE-LINERS Being badgered? These lines are neat ways to stop people’s shot-shoving.

1. See that girl over there? The one spilling her drink and talking too loudly? That was me when I was drinking. I prefer to be this girl.

4. If I drink one, I want five. So now, I just don’t have any. *Cheery shrug*

6. I found that alcohol makes me pull people I don’t fancy.

HD SOCIALIZING

Sober time with friends is so much more…real. And that scared me, at the start. Do you remember when HDTV was introduced, and the picture was too clear, too real, too unfiltered? ‘I don’t like it,’ said viewers, across the globe.

That’s what it feels like, when you first socialize sober. You no longer have a veil. You can’t plug those little infinitesimal cracks with the social Polyfilla of booze, which used to fill in the tense silences, or smooth overlapping sentences, or obs...

But the only reason alcohol is a social Polyfilla, is because it dulls your brain. While also dulling your wit and vibrancy and compassion and intelligence. It takes a while to acclimatize to socializing in HD, but once you do, you wouldn’t go back to the old b...

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.

As for the fear that people were going to like me less without alcohol, that it was making me funnier, sexier and more charming. That seems laughable now. Alcohol doesn’t make people funnier, it only makes them louder. Alcohol doesn’t make people sexier, it only makes them feel like they’re sexier. Alcohol doesn’t make people more charming, it makes them less charming once they cross the three-drink mark. Which I always, always did.

Once you learn to socialize sober, you will inspire that same wonder in those that you meet. Being able to socialize without drinking is like a superpower that you should be proud of. We’re not afflicted, we’re liberated. Let’s remove our imaginary cones of shame. Right now.

‘When you no longer need approval from others like the air you breathe, the possibilities in life are endless. What an interesting little prison we build from the invisible bricks of other people’s opinions.’ – JACOB NORDBY

DRY DANCING CHEAT SHEET When I first found myself staring reluctantly down the barrel of sobriety, I thought I would never dance in public again. I put it on the ‘things that will now be impossible’ list. Oh well. No more dancing for me.

I decided that the solution to my ‘learn how to dance sober’ mission was to learn how to dance properly. I’d long ago decided that I was a bad dancer, so maybe if I had some moves, I would feel more comfortable striding onto a dancefloor.

Then, I finally realized the truth. The reason people dance is because they like the music and it’s fun. Once I stopped caring about what other people thought of my dancing, I was able to leap around on dancefloors with wild abandon. Here are my sober dancing shortcuts.

1. THE STICK FIGURE MODEL When I was in my first few months of sobriety, one of my dear sober friends Brigette said something that really stuck in my head. It helped me tremendously. She said that in our own heads, we’re giant stick figures, while everyone else is a little stick figure. But, here’s the thing. In other people’s heads, they’re the giant stick figures, and we are miniscule, amid a sea of other stick figures. People are so wrapped up in themselves, that you are pretty insignificant.

2. START WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS

3. ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU CAN’T CHANGE YOUR MOOD When you’re in the mood to dance, you’re in the mood. When you’re not, don’t force it. ‘No thanks’ is a complete sentence. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people who are a few drinks in, but you don’t really have to explain. ‘Knock yourselves out, I’m fine here’ works. Also, it’s really, really difficult to dance to music you don’t like when you’re alcohol-free.

4. TRY THE FIRST DANCE IN PRIVATE Another thing that works for me, is buggering off once the dancing starts, and kicking off my dancing in private.

Another thing that works, is something my ex Tom suggested to me, ‘Just think of it as exercise’. Rather than some sort of crowd-impressing performance, akin to a bird-of-paradise display. He hit upon something. I feel zero self-consciousness in a trampolining exercise class, or sweating through a savage HIIT session that features burpees and star jumps. I started thinking of dancing as exercise. As a result, my dancing now involves rather a lot of jumping. Like a kid hopped up on too many sweets. I’m desperately uncool, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.

‘If you think it’s uncool to be dancing foolish, forget it! I’ll be dancing like an uncle at a wedding’ – RIZZLE KICKS, ‘COOLER THAN THIS

‘Something I wish more people would realize, is that addiction is not the brain being irrational,’ says Korb. ‘It’s the brain doing its job. When you have anxiety, your brain says “alcohol is the solution to that”, because it has worked in the past. With many years of repetition, that sticks, so that the brain then automatically suggests it. Your brain is merely trying to solve your problem.’

A HABITUAL NEURAL PATHWAY FORMS ‘The more you drink to soothe social anxiety, the more that “drinking is the solution” gets encoded into the habit centre of the brain,’ explains Korb. ‘And the more appealing it becomes in future. Eventually becoming something that is no longer pleasurable, and is just a compulsion. It becomes a coping habit written into the brain. The brain then gets stressed when you don’t choose the drinking coping habit. So when you don’t drink, you feel stressed about the not-drinking. It’s a catch 22.’

THE ‘DRINKING IS THE SOLUTION’ PATHWAY

Way back in my first month sober, I read an academic paper called ‘Addiction changes the brain’s communication pathways’. It changed everything for me. I finally understood what the devil was afoot in my brain.

The paper says that neural pathways in the brain, including addictive pathways, are formed in a similar way to hiking trails. The more a hiking route is used, the smoother, wider and clearer it becomes. It becomes the default, easiest route. Should you need to forge a brand new path through the forest (or form a newborn sober neural pathway), the paper points out that it will be arduous initially. ‘At first, this new path will be narrow, difficu...

THE SOBER BRAIN When people put together building blocks of abstinence, ‘their neuroplasticity returns,’ says Marc Lewis. ‘Their brains start changing again – perhaps radically.’ Your brain literally restructures. But this takes time. ‘Which is why it’s very rare for people to get sobriety on the first try.’

Another way to think about it is thus. 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. ‘It’s a brilliant analogy that has struck more than once,’ says Marc Lewis.

‘The language analogy is a great one,’ adds Korb. ‘The brain wants to respond with the easiest, reflexive route. If your first language is English, your instant knee-jerk will be to respond in English when someone asks you a question. Responding in Spanish instead takes more effort and requires the PFC to intervene. If you’re trying to learn Spanish (to be sober), it makes sense to hang out in Spanish-speaking (sober) circles. If you just hang out with English-speaking friends (drinking buddies), then it’s so easy to sl...

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. So, yes, 72 hours is the likely period of withdrawal,’ says addiction psychiatrist Dr Julia Lewis.

ACNE I was never blighted with teenage acne. People regularly complimented me on my porcelain, near-perfect skin. Heavy drinking changed that. In my mid-20s, I started getting terrible, self-esteem-crucifying acne. Of the cystic variety. Arguably the worst type. We’re talking marble-sized lumps deep within my face.

Apparently, the liver is the most important organ when it comes to clear skin. ‘Alcohol is actually one of the worst, most aggressive compounds to destroy your skin,’ New York nutritionist Jairo Rodriguez told Vogue magazine. ‘I always joke with my patients, “If you want to get older, go ahead and drink!”’

When the liver can’t handle all the toxins overloading it, it often pushes them out through the skin. Hence, heavy drinking shows on your skin. Also, beer and cocktails are loaded with candida; a fungus that leads to outbreaks. Booze shrinks the pores, making them more prone to blockages. Finally, a weakened immune system means that bacteria runs riot on your skin. The b...

Alcohol prevents us from getting enough REM sleep, the sleep stage in which our brain learns, makes and retains memories. As well as disposing of unnecessary ones. The brain makes important neural connections during this time. Rats deprived of REM had a shortened life cycle, dying in five weeks rather than two–three years.

Inhibitions. They’re there for a reason. When I set about dismantling my inhibitions with alcohol, I turned from a buttoned-up, shy teenager into a sexual predator. My buttons became well and truly unbuttoned. I transformed from a wallflower into a man-climbing vine, as if in some botched botanical splicing experiment.

Once I’d removed the chains (or so I thought) of my inhibitions, I made terrible sexual decisions. Inhibitions stop you from doing things like going home with a man you’ve just met in a nightclub, who may or may not have a penchant for killing and taxidermy-ing the women he takes home. Inhibitions stop you from taking your clothes off when you don’t even know a man’s last name. Inhibitions say, ‘Hey, maybe don’t do that’ when you are about to go house-party-hopping with two dubious men, simply because you’re not done drinking.

HERE’S THE THING I’VE NOW REALIZED. INHIBITIONS ARE GREAT. THEY KILL BAD BUZZES, NOT GOOD BUZZES. WE SHOULD NOT WANT TO TURN THEM OFF. THEY PROTECT US.

I didn’t like who I was, sexually. This is not to say that women who sleep around are ‘bad’ women, because they’re most certainly not, any more than men who sleep around are.