Why You Should Give Up Drinking for 30 Days

The holidays are a great time of year, stuffed full of fun, family, friends, and food, and—if you are anything like me—washed down with an abundance of beer, wine, and the occasional cocktail.  

When the season is done, I often feel bloated and like I need to do something.  I’ve thought about taking January off from drinking and never done it. I have my reasons/excuses (No beer when I’m cooped up inside? During the NFL playoffs?).

So I did a test run this fall. I took a month’s break from drinking (for the most part, qualifier to come). It wasn’t that difficult, and I wanted to share my experience and what I learned with you as an encouragement if you had similar thoughts and resistances. Consider this pre-gaming on abstinence.

Off and Running
I did it after Labor Day. The first couple nights were weird, but I soon settled into a routine, substituting green tea or sparkling lemon water for the beer and occasional wine while watching TV, talking with my family or a friend, or tapping away at a keyboard. I thought weekends would be difficult, but they weren’t really, though I did break with my intentions twice—both times for wine tastings at previously-scheduled social events. Each time I drank about one full glass of wine.

So here were my takeaways from this 30-day experiment:

1. I slept better. I knew this from a slew of studies, and from my own experiences when reviewing an activity tracker from Jawbone, but the month proved it again: alcohol, even a comparatively small amount, messes with my sleep. It tends to wake me in the early morning (between 2 and 4 a.m.) and I don't sleep deeply again till just before dawn. It doesn’t seem like much of a disruption, but once I was aware of it, I could feel it in the morning and see it in my tracker’s overnight report.

2. I didn’t feel that much better. Maybe my expectations were too high. I thought that I'd feel a big increase in energy and  function substantially better. That didn’t happen, which was disappointing. On the other hand, it confirmed that my drinking wasn’t a real impediment to my health. And it did make me sharper at both ends of the day: I woke up feeling ready to go (credit #1 above), and it kept me sharper later at night, so I was more engaged socially and able to get more reading, writing, and thinking done in the hour-plus before bedtime. Bonus!

3. I gained weight (at first). This shocked me. I expected that jettisoning 6,000 calories over the course of a month would have me swimming in my pants. No such luck. In fact, after two weeks, I had GAINED 3 pounds!  The good thing is once I noticed it, I was able to adjust and ended the month back at 186 pounds.

I spoke to Mike Roussell, a Men’s Health nutrition advisor, and he told me that I might have been making more of the weight gain than I needed to. He pointed out that a normal person’s weight can fluctuate as much as 4 pounds in the course of a day, depending on how one’s kidneys regulate body fluid balance.

And some of it could have more to do with my noble intentions than my stomach. It has to do with what Rousell calls The Good Samaritan Effect.

“When people think about doing good things, they reward themselves,” Roussell said, "even before they do something."

So I might have been sneaking a few extra calories here and there, basically spending my caloric savings as quickly as I collected them. And the fact I couldn’t remember doing this? No surprise, he said.

"We’re terrible as humans at remembering all the caloric high-5s we give ourselves,” Roussell said.

"If you look at research for rewarding effort vs. outcome, it’s better to reward effort. Encourage the behavior rather than the outcome. It matters what you’re rewarding yourself for: If you didn’t have a drink, don’t reward yourself calorically."

4. I thought about drinking pretty much every day. It wasn’t an overbearing compulsion or an urge, but it was a consistent daily feature, a tug on my consciousness, and it made me think about the nature of habit. In their book,Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, authors Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir talk about “tunneling,” which they write is what the mind does when confronted with scarcity.

An example: As World War II ended, the U.S. Army sent psychologists into German POW camps where Americans had been held. The U.S. soldiers had basically been starved toward the end of the war when there wasn’t enough food for German soldiers and their captives. The psychologists were shocked by the level to which food dominated the American POWs’ thoughts and even their behavior. They could do very little except think about food, and it affected their ability to think about anything else. They were also willing to do almost anything to get food.

This isn’t a new idea. Many people are captives to their own reactions to scarcity. Tunneling and cravings are powerful roadblocks for people in all sorts of paths to recovery.

And a 2012 study showed that some people's brains are more likely to respond to alcohol with feelings of pleasure and reward. That can lead them to chase the sensation more frequently than those who don't have that disposition. It's not hard to see how this  would make moderating drinking difficult for people wired this way.

For me, the thoughts were most prevalent on weekends, in the late morning and early afternoon, when I had a little free time and tasks that didn’t require a lot of concentration. I thought about what kind of beer I’d like, or I would swallow and be reminded of the feelings of a beer in the back of my throat, of a bottle in my hand. What’s weird is that I didn’t have these thoughts at night, only in the day, and I never came close to acting upon them except for the already-mentioned wine tastings.

That said, I was surprised by the persistence of these cravings; I thought they’d subside by the end of the second week or so., but that wasn’t true.

The other surprising thought, though, was an equally stubborn one that settled in during the third week—that I should continue this for another month. Alas, I broke my beer fast on Day 1 of the new month.

5. I have never been so hydrated. Between tea, water, fizzy water, coffee, and soda (my true guilty pleasure, and part of the weight issue, I’m sure), I drank way more fluids than I did previously. I spent roughly one-third of the month, zipper down, d*k in hand, peeing into one basin or another, including one overnight trip to the bathroom each night on average. That might have some effect on my weight as I often felt like a large, slightly distended, pink balloon. 

6. It brought me closer to my wife. I didn’t ask her to join me in this little experiment, but she did, on weeknights. I know some people who have done similar experiments say one of the negatives was the loss of “happy hour” time to survey the day or the week. We didn’t experience that; talking over tea worked just fine. And not being quite as dulled at bedtime had other benefits.

So, all in all, it was a positive. After I finished, I committed to maintaining the weeknight ban and holding myself to two beers on (most) weekend nights. I get a passing-though-not-perfect grade on that.

Mostly, I am pleased that a habit that I felt was developing a life of its own felt firmly back in check. I know it can be controlled. 

And you can do it. Maybe it’s not a full month off. Roussell says that one of the first things he recommends to people who want to lose weight is to curtail their drinking. "I’ll try to get clients down to 4 drinks a week,” he says. “14 to 4 makes a big difference calorically."

A couple other helpful tips:

• Stay active. 
• Don’t skip social functions to avoid alcohol. That kind of isolation isn’t going to help.
• Reward behaviors, not outcomes.
• Believe you can do it. “There’s a great quote,” Roussell told me. “People are reluctant to make a change unless they think it’s possible."

It’s possible, and the benefits that come from developing this mental discipline are at least as powerful as those that come from avoiding a couple hundred calories at night. You can do it. Imagine the sense of accomplishment you’ll feel. What a great way to start a new year.

And now, back to the Santa Swap.

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