Basic Strategies for Staying Sober
How I've made it seven years without alcohol, and how I hope you can too!
This past weekend was New Year’s Eve and the seventh anniversary of the day that I quit drinking.
Every year, around this time, the recovery world swells with another huge group of alcoholics who are ready to turn their lives around. At this very moment, countless individuals around the globe are in the first few days of their sobriety, fighting as hard as they can to quit drinking.
If you’re among that crowd, let me say congratulations!
Getting sober was truly the most difficult thing that I have ever done in my life, but it was also the most rewarding. No matter how hard sobriety is for you, I hope that it will improve your life as much as it has improved mine.
In my case, the first three days without alcohol were the absolute hardest days I’ve ever gone through. That’s not to say that sobriety magically got easy on day four. It wasn’t until a couple of years without alcohol that I truly started feeling great.
However, at the very least, day four marked a turning point. That’s when the worst of the physical symptoms started to subside and also when I began to feel a little more like a functioning human being again.
Although sobriety will likely present challenges for months and months, I truly believe that if you can make it through the first three days, you’ve proven to yourself that you have what it takes to stick with sobriety for the long haul.
So, for those of you who have just quit and are struggling through those early days, I want to share some of the most helpful techniques that I’ve found for staying sober. I hope that these will help you through your first three days and that they will continue to help you for many more days to come.
Practice Visualization
One of the single most important tools that I ever learned for staying sober is a technique called “playing the tape through.”
This simple visualization technique asks you to do just one thing: Imagine what would happen if you gave in to your cravings and went back to drinking.
Often, when we’re struggling with sobriety, we try to convince ourselves that we could have “just one beer” or “take a night off.” However, the reality is that for those of us who suffer from addiction, “one beer” or “one night” always turns into more.
When we play the tape forward, we imagine going to the store, buying that beer, and then continuing with the rest of our evening. What would happen after that beer? Would we go right back to being sober? Or would we drink another beer and another?
We can keep playing the visualization out and ask ourselves what would happen the next day and the next. Instead of lying to ourselves, imagining that we could have a single beer, we force ourselves to reckon with reality: That even one drink would derail our sobriety and lead to a relapse.
Sometimes, I play the tape even further and think about how my alcoholism would have led to health crises, poverty, and eventual death. It may sound dramatic, but it’s the hard reality of alcoholism, and it’s something that can provide serious motivation for remaining sober.
Stay Busy
On a lighter note, another important way that I’ve learned to protect my sobriety is by staying busy with hobbies.
When I quit drinking, I was caught off guard by just how boring sobriety could be. I was so used to filling my days with drunkenness that I didn’t know what to do with all the new free time.
This is a more serious problem than it may sound like. A few hours of boredom might not be a big deal, but when the boredom stretches for days or weeks, the temptation to drink can grow awfully powerful.
To overcome my boredom, I had to find hobbies. As a drinker, I didn’t do much other than watch television, play video games, and surf the internet. None of these activities are terrible, but they don’t exactly add up to a fulfilling life either.
Since I’ve gotten sober, I’ve turned to running, weight lifting, drawing, writing, and language learning, among other hobbies. Each of these helps to keep me entertained while also improving other aspects of my life—like my physical or mental health.
I’m not one of those productivity nuts who tries to live every second of my day purposefully. There’s still time for watching TV and playing video games. However, now I have more healthy hobbies to go alongside them, which goes much further in keeping me entertained.
During my first few days sober, I sat around and did nothing. Sobriety got much easier when I found these new ways to occupy my time.
Focus on the Current Day
If you’ve spent any time at all reading about sobriety, you’ve probably already heard the advice to “take it one day at a time.” So, I won’t dwell on this one for too long, aside from saying that it really does work.
Worrying about the future is an easy way to overwhelm ourselves. I used to think about staying sober for years and tell myself that it was impossible, so I might as well not bother.
When I felt that way, I reigned it in by reminding myself that all I had to do was get to the end of the current day sober. I had plenty of time tomorrow to worry about tomorrow.
Connect With Others
I’ve saved the most important tip of all for last: Connect with other people.
Sobriety is far easier with help than it is alone. I’m speaking from experience, having tried it both ways.
When I tried to quit drinking without any help, I always found a way to talk myself into a relapse. No matter how hard I tried not to drink, I just couldn’t do it.
When I started talking to other sober people, I was amazed at how much easier everything became.
I learned new sobriety techniques from them, like “playing the tape through,” which I described above. It also gave me a chance to vent about my emotions, rather than letting them build up. In addition, I was inspired by their stories and by learning what they had overcome.
The difference between trying to quit with a support system and without one is like night and day.
Where do you find other alcoholics? AA is the traditional answer and is still a popular option. If AA isn’t for you, there’s a similar group called SMART that is less spirituality-based but also focused on peer support. (There are quite a few other peer recovery groups as well, but these are the two I’m most familiar with.)
In this modern age, there are also a ton of online groups. I’ve seen both AA and SMART meetings that take place over Zoom. There are also forums and chat rooms for people in recovery.
My favorite online space is the subreddit “Stop Drinking.” It’s a mix of people getting sober through different programs (or no program at all). You can post your own topics or simply read through what other people have to say. The forum helped me through a couple of the darkest days of my sobriety.
That’s it for today’s newsletter. This isn’t a complete guide to sobriety, but I’ve hit on the techniques that were most personally helpful to me, and I hope that they’ll be just as helpful to you.
Again, to everyone who has recently quit, congratulations and good luck!