Everything I Know About Self-Improvement I Learned From Getting Sober
Overcoming my addiction required extraordinary perseverance.
When someone gets sober, other areas of their life tend to improve as well. Since I quit drinking eight years ago, I’ve gotten in better shape, improved my social life, move to a more fulfilling career, and pursued hobbies that had long interested me, like learning how to draw and how to speak Spanish.
That one initial change—quitting our addiction—begins a snowball effect, and we start to make more and more improvements in our lives until eventually we’ve completely transformed ourselves.
Why is it that sobriety leads to so many other changes? One of the answers is obvious: With our addictions out of the way, it becomes far easier to pursue meaningful change in other areas of our lives. Once I stopped spending all my time and money on drinking, I was able to focus more on exercise, socialization, and other important parts of my life.
In addition to this however, there’s a second reason that sobriety leads to so many positive changes: Because the process of quitting an addiction teaches us how to pursue self-improvement.
To quit drinking, I had to develop an entirely new mindset. Later, I was able to apply this to a wide variety of other goals, such as running regularly and learning Spanish.
The Sobriety Mindset
What was the mindset that let me stay sober? It was to accept that sobriety was going to take a long time and to learn to shut my mind off and live with the grind.
There were a lot of challenging moments after I got sober—terrible days at work, failed relationships, fights with friends and family. It was hard to resist going back to drinking when things got rough like this, but that wasn’t the hardest part of staying sober.
Although the extreme emotions were difficult, they tended to pass within hours or days. I knew that I could get through those moments by calling my friends and talking through my emotions, reaching out to other recovering alcoholics, or even just going for a run.
The hardest part of sobriety wasn’t getting through those extremes. It was getting through the long, boring stretches between the emotional highs and lows.
For most of my first two years sober, I was depressed and anxious. It wasn’t as if every day was filled with emotional turmoil. Instead, it was that every day just kind of sucked. Even though most days weren’t the worst day of my life, all of those fairly bad days added up to the worst year of my life.
It’s incredibly hard to keep going with sobriety when everything still feels miserable. All of those positive changes that I mentioned earlier were still years away. During those early days, my life in sobriety felt just as bad as my life as a drinker.
The vital skill that I developed, which got me through those first two years, was to stop thinking so much about it. Whenever I started to ask myself why I was staying sober, instead of allowing myself to get into an internal debate, I just distracted myself and forgot about the issue.
This evasive strategy probably rubs a lot of people the wrong way. We’re trained to confront our problems head-on, to work through our emotions, etc., etc. However, I truly believe that during the first year or two of sobriety, most of us just aren’t thinking rationally enough to do that.
It’s worth talking about our problems with other recovering addicts or therapists, but it isn’t worth debating ourselves. In the former case, we have someone to check our craziness. In the latter, we’re going to end up spiraling and going back to our addiction.
It’s not easy to shut down our thoughts, but it’s a skill that can be developed like any other. The more times that I practiced ignoring my thoughts about alcohol, the easier it became.
I don’t think there’s any shortcut to learning this skill. No amount of reading about it will teach you how to do it. It’s a skill you have to develop through practice.
However, the really great news is that once you learn how to do this with your addiction, it becomes far easier to apply to other areas of your life.
For example, I had tried to learn a language many times before but always given up due to my lack of progress. I’d try hard for a few months, feel like I wasn’t getting better, and talk myself out of continuing. I’d tell myself that it was taking up too much time, that I’d never stick with it, or that it was too hard. (All thoughts that were very similar to my thinking on alcohol.)
However, getting sober taught me to shut these thoughts down. About four years ago, I started learning Spanish, and this time, I stopped questioning it. I just kept going and going, and anytime that I started to doubt whether it was worth it, or whether I’d ever learn it, I just shut the thoughts down.
The strategy worked. I now speak Spanish, have read dozens of books in Spanish, watch movies and TV in Spanish, and even live in Spain. None of that would have been possible if I hadn’t learned to shut my brain down and accept the grind.
A similar strategy has helped me to get better at running than I ever thought I could. It also allowed me to learn to draw, and plenty more.
Getting sober taught me that change takes time, and that to improve our lives, we have to stop getting caught up in our doubts and simply have faith in the process.
Of course, I don’t want to go too far and say I’m grateful for my alcoholism. Surely, there could have been easier ways to learn this lesson. However, I am grateful that in getting sober, not only did I overcome my addiction, but I also learned how to stick with self-improvement in general.
It’s taken a long time, but sobriety has rewired how I think and turned me into a more successful person.