Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober – forever

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Why three months? A UCL study found that while a new habit can become automatic within just 18 days in some cases, on average it takes 66 days for a new habit to become second nature. Personally, I noticed that something magical happened after my 60 th alcohol-free day, and I started to find my stride, like a runner that’s pushed through the punishing first mile and is now flying, starting to feel the buzz of endorphins. You may experience the same, you may not. What matters is, that you’re going to give it a whirl just to see. I asked if she had ever used real beer and a non-alcoholic beer placebo in the lab. She had not, she said, because the alcohol content in beer is much lower than in vodka: “Vodka gets people to 0.08 faster.” Shufelt drew pints of Two Trellises for himself and Walker and pulled up a stool near mine. He said that on graduating from Middlebury College, in 2005, he had gone to work for a financial firm in Jersey City, and then for a hedge fund in Stamford, not far from Darien, where he grew up. “Everyone I knew was in finance, so I went into finance,” he said.

A reflective, raw and riveting read. A beautiful book on what it takes to root for yourself' - Emma Gannon, Ctrl Alt Delete In years dot to four of sobriety, I learned how to do the basics. How to breathe, socialise, date, dance, kiss, go to weddings, do Christmas, do life without alcohol. So here, we’re going to cover that which I haven’t told you about: years five, six and seven. As the millions who choose to stay sober now know, the propaganda around drinking and sobriety is wonky. Sober doesn't feel stony, or cold. Best of all, at a Fourth of July party at our house, I was able to drink my Run Wilds while the guests drank their craft beers. The laughter seemed louder, the smiles seemed brighter, and my companions were none the wiser that I was drinking a placebo—a necessary condition for the psychological effects to work. Still, I was reminded of how I used to conceal alcohol. Now I was concealing non-alcohol. Could I restore the old customs to my evenings, using non-alcoholic wine and liquor placebos instead of alcohol? When I ran my concept, “zero-proof therapy,” by George Koob, he pronounced it “very dangerous.” To Lisa, it sounded like an argument made by Wile E. Prevaricator, once and future alcoholic—a clever way to introduce and rationalize the idea of my returning to real drinking.Whether you're a dedicated boozehound, flirting with teetotalling, or already sober, this witty, gritty read may just change how you think about alcohol forever. My glass was almost empty. My string of alcohol-free days had come to an end. I’d hung around the barbershop too long, and now I’d had my haircut. No other author writes about sober living with as much warmth or emotional range as Catherine Gray. Her deep insight into the subtle psychologies of drinking, and of life, means that everything she writes is both utterly relatable and stretches our minds. Hers is a rare wisdom.' - Dr Richard Piper, CEO, Alcohol Change UK

One day when I was away from home, I asked my wife, Lisa, to look out for a case of BrewDog’s Nanny State and one of Bravus’s Blood Orange I.P.A. As I talked with Shufelt and Walker, I realized that I was feeling a bit buzzed. My face felt hot, and my pulse was elevated. It wasn’t the beer—my glass of Two Trellises contained hardly more alcohol than an overripe banana, and my body was metabolizing the ethanol within minutes of my ingesting it. The buzz that I was feeling was a kind of placebo effect, produced by aroma and taste but also by the dimly lit taproom, the stools, the bar, and us in a close circle, talking and drinking. The results were startling. One man in the group that expected alcohol but received tonic began acting intoxicated and tried to make a date with one of the lab assistants, and several men in the group that expected tonic but received alcohol experienced tremors—a symptom of withdrawal—even though they’d downed multiple vodkas.Germans have been making far better N.A. brews since the nineteen-seventies, when a brewery in Berlin began producing Aubi, short for Autofahrerbier, so that drivers could drink the national beverage without exceeding Germany’s strict legal limit of 0.05 per cent blood-alcohol content. (In the U.S., the legal limit for drivers is 0.08 per cent, except in Utah, where it is 0.05 per cent.) The number one advice I would give is to immerse yourself in the teetotalin’ world. Listen to every podcast you can, read every book, follow sober influencers, join Facebook groups, find alcohol-free role models in the shape of great thinkers, artists, writers and actors who are ‘out’ (there are lists of these in both The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and Sunshine Warm Sober). A good rule of thumb, and advice given to me very early on, is to spend as much time thinking / talking / reading about sobriety, as you did drinking. As time rolls on, the ‘immersion’ time you’ll need will become less and less. But in the beginning, I treated learning about being alcohol-free much as I did studying for a degree. No other author writes about sober living with as much warmth or emotional range as Catherine Gray. Her deep insight into the subtle psychologies of drinking, and of life, means that everything she writes is both utterly relatable and stretches our minds. Hers is a rare wisdom.’– Dr Richard Piper, CEO, Alcohol Change UK Phenomenal; only a 14 per cent falter rate. But hang on, pipes up the negative-seeking drone inside me; that’s not zero, is it? That’s still 14 per cent. And the central theme of my last few years has been about that number, if I had to be a reductionist. About casting around for ways to feel as protected from it as humanly possible. Not living in fear, but being productive in protecting this rainforest from deforestation.