Measuring Sobriety
Why it's important to find quantifiable ways to track our growth.
As an active alcoholic, I used to fantasize that sobriety would fix all of the problems in my life. However, after I quit drinking, I realized that life would always be filled with ups and downs—whether I’m sober or not.
It’s been over seven years since my last drink, but life still goes wrong all of the time. Last month, for example, my grandfather died. It’s an obvious example of how life is inevitably filled with upsetting and depressing moments, regardless of the choices we make. [I’m not going to rehash the details again, but if you want to read more, you can check out my newsletters from last month: Staying Sober Through an Awful Week and Sobriety and Grief.]
This past weekend was another down for me. I had a weird falling out with one of my friends. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it still left me upset.
When I first quit drinking, these kinds of events always made me question my sobriety. I’d ask myself, “Why bother to stay sober when bad things keep happening?”
Now, however, I’ve learned to take a step back and see the big picture. I know that even though I’ve gone through a couple of rough moments this year, I’m overall far happier than I’ve been in the past couple of decades.
My life is pretty amazing right now: I’ve got a great group of friends, I’m living abroad (which was a longtime dream of mine), and I have a job I love.
If I hadn’t gotten sober seven years ago, I wouldn’t have any of this. I’d still have most of the bad moments, but I’d have far fewer of the good ones.
The trouble is that it took years for me to reach this mindset. Earlier on in my sobriety, I just couldn’t convince myself to think this way.
Back then, I let every problem in my life become a potential excuse for a relapse. Instead of seeing the big picture, I’d convince myself that sobriety wasn’t helping at all.
Fortunately, I found a way through it: I focused on the quantifiable, measurable improvements that sobriety had made in my life.
What Can We Measure?
During my first few years sober, I often asked myself, “Has sobriety improved my life?” My answer varied depending on the mood I was in. Sometimes I thought it had fixed everything, other times I thought that it had made my life even worse.
So, instead of asking such a broad, abstract question, I tried to pay attention to narrower, objective changes.
For example, one of my earliest motivations for quitting alcohol was that my drinking habit had caused me to gain a ton of weight. I went from a skinny college student to an obese law student in about five years.
After I quit drinking, my weight immediately started dropping. It might sound superficial, but seeing this clear, quantifiable change went a long way in keeping me sober. On the days in which I felt like sobriety hadn’t helped me at all, my weight loss provided measurable proof that by quitting drinking, I had achieved one of my goals.
Another example comes from my finances. In the years before I quit drinking, I had been spending an insane amount on alcohol. Every single day, I spent at least $10 on beer. And that was just the bare minimum. I often spent far, far more.
At one point, I had amassed thousands of dollars in credit card debt due to my drinking habit. Although I was able to pay that down after getting a higher-paying job, my drinking still got in the way of building my savings or ever having extra money for entertainment and travel.
After I got sober, I immediately noticed that my monthly credit card bill was hundreds of dollars less. That savings made my entire life much easier.
In the years since then, I’ve managed to avoid ever carrying a balance on my credit cards. I’ve also begun to regularly invest in a retirement account. I can see my Roth IRA grow month after month, providing another clear, measurable example of how sobriety has helped me.
Losing weight and saving money aren’t necessarily the most important benefits of sobriety, but for me, they were the most easily quantifiable. On the days when it felt like my life was going all wrong, these examples gave me a more objective way of seeing that certain parts of my life were still improving.
I’ve also found motivation through tracking improvements in other parts of my life—parts that are only tangentially related to sobriety.
The best example of this comes from exercise. Before getting sober, my exercise habits were more or less nonexistent. I’d sporadically attempt to get into running or going to the gym, but I’d never stick with it for long.
After getting sober, my exercise habits became far more consistent. I’m still not a machine, but I regularly work out at least a few times each week.
My main exercise over these past seven years has been running, but I’ve also dabbled in cycling, weight lifting, climbing, and more.
One of the things that I love about exercise is how easy it is to see my progress. As a former drinker and smoker, I was in terrible shape when I first started working out regularly. I couldn’t even run a mile.
These days, I run several times a week, normally including at least one long run of ten miles or more. I track nearly all of my runs, and I manage to set new personal records just about every year.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m still just an intermediate runner, but I can see myself improving year by year. The same is true for my abilities in other types of exercise.
I’m in the best shape of my life, and I have the data to prove it to myself.
Even though my exercise habits aren’t a direct measure of my sobriety, they still provide a way for me to see how far I’ve come. If I had kept drinking, there is absolutely zero chance I’d ever have stuck with running for as long as I have. It just isn’t possible (at least for me) to get drunk every night and run regularly.
I don’t think that being able to run a faster 5k is the most important change I’ve experienced since getting sober, but I love that it provides an objective way for me to see my growth.
Even after getting sober, we’re going to have some days that are better than others. Many of us will even have a few bad years.
It’s easy to let the bad days and years turn into an excuse for a relapse. It’s easy to make ourselves believe that life in sobriety is just as bad as life as a drunk.
To overcome that, it helped me to find a few easy, quantifiable ways of measuring my growth—even if they aren’t the most important parts of sobriety.
I think that anyone who has gotten sober can benefit from doing the same. Your goals might not be the same as mine—you might not need to save money, lose weight, or run faster. However, whatever your goals are, I hope that some of them can provide motivation and focus, even through the rough days.