Dry January

But good luck Rob! I have never tried to give up alcohol, but then I don't drink that much anyway (no raised eyebrows at the back there please). I don't think I'd miss it except at times of stress, when the thought of a nice gin and tonic or brimming glass of wine waiting for me when I get home does sustain me...

I imagine the hard bit will be not turning to other comforts like chocolate etc, but I'm sure you can do it! Treating yourself to yummy non-alcoholic drinks (rather than flat Coke or warm, fake orange juice) might be a good idea. Fruity smoothie things will also aid the detox.

I just end up reading books and watching glorious garbage on telly.

I shall endeavour to stop drinking on my own. But it's such fun sometimes!!

Good luck, Robster.

I have been drinking much more than usual over the past week or so due to xmas, new years, etc. Not having any in the house would be the best idea. Right now I've got lots of wood chuck hard ciders in the fridge along with wine coolers. Then I've got a couple bottles of wine and some rum around too. And those cool drinks, wood chucks and hard ciders, are easy to grab when I'm out of soda. So go buy yourself a bunch of fruit juices and sodas to quench your thirst and try not going to bars at all.

(A stone is 14 pounds Sarah.)

And yes, fruity smoothie things are U & K.

problem is, long-term abstinence is untenable, and may actually lead to binge drinking 4 relief. i am trying to drink more in moderation- learn 2 have a glass of wine w/dinner and stop- which i seldom do. this seems a better long-term solution.

but good luck with it. it really isn't as hard as it seems once u get past the first week.

But then, that's a plus: more cash means you can indulge any vices you want....

also, as an aside, a pint of OJ&L is likely to be the most expensive drink in a round (esp in SS pubs, where beer is cheap), so ignore em's comments on round getting in :)

Should've said before: the best thing about not drinking is knowing you will have a clear head the next morning, I definitely noticed a great increase in general well-being thanks to this, no wasted days recovering from the previous night.

i mean, thats the other thing, if you're going to go dry, why not also stay in for the month too, you can catch up on all the other things theres never enough time for

month without bouze vs month without pub: TS

more seriously i've had dry spells several times (once lasting about a year); the clear head thing is great, the rubbishness of pubs for the non-drinker less so. i tended to lose touch with quite a few friends as a result, which makes it a dud in my book.

Seriously, just drink some nice fruit juice. Or even a lassi.

I'm trying this and just want to eat every snack in the house now :{

Yes, you'll be missing the extra sugar, that's been my experience. I just took two days off and I was wandering through the store aisles craving something--I got fruit popsicles :)

yeah, not my first rodeo but it feels like the timing is right... everything else is going fine, I took some melatonin and sleep doesn't seem to be an issue

but there's a bunch of left over Xmas candy that my sister sent, I better hide it

This is our third year I think. For many years we used to start with a one- or two-week alcohol fast, but the full month really isn't bad. This year I'm going to try extending it with a hybrid approach — for Feb and March, no drinking at home, just when I'm out.

I'm not really trying to "change my relationship with alcohol" or whatever people say about dry January. I consider alcohol a net positive in my life in all respects except health — I accept that it's by far the least healthy I do regularly, so moderating it in various ways is worthwhile. (And btw I totally recognize that it is not a net positive for everyone, I'm not an evangelist. I just feel like I have a good relationship with it, except for the cumulative effects of its poisons on my aging internal infrastructure.)

Mostly what I replace it with is other beverages. I kind of always have a beverage at hand all day long — coffee, seltzer water, tea, etc. In the evenings, that is most often a cocktail or glass of wine. So in dry times I mostly drink more tea (as noted on the tea thread).

before Covid I had a (pretty) hard/fast rule about never drinking alone, but in the early days (like summer 2020) I used to meet a couple buddies in the park (all the bars were closed) and we'd drink beer and maybe a little whisky and then little by little my self-restraint eroded and I've been drinking alone, usually a tall can (or two) on a walk after work
It's become something I expect these days so I'm ready to disrupt that habit and get back to something more celebratory/occasional and less automatic

I enjoy drinking alone with a book so much! More than with people, I think. At some point of getting tipsy I'm going to regret that I'm not reading in peace.

Still having the most trouble with sleeping sober, unfortunately. Does melatonin really help? I can doze off but I can't stay asleep.

Does melatonin really help?

works for me but I think it's meant to be used occasionally, not routinely

have done it about three or four times now, maybe more, can't remember before covid. i drink a fair bit so i enjoy a break. it can be hard. it leads to an absolutely huge amount of free time, i find, as at weekends means i'm up very early. but over time i find you build routines to make it easier, for example i'll go somewhere for breakfast early on saturday or sunday. last year i went to early films at the bfi or other good cinemas, they often have something old screening at 11 or 12am. the prevalence of zero alcohol options helps a lot too, if you do go out.

i treat it a bit also as a chance to be alone a little more as after xmas i find myself a bit tired of so much socialising. it is nice to go out and have a zero beer or two but it can be very isolating and weird if everyone else is drinking alcohol.

the drinking i miss most in dry january is:

- wine with dinner on a sunday
- wine with a meal at a restaurant (it's just not the same without)
- a beer on a friday after work
- definitely a beer alone with a book (tho this can be nice with a zero beer as it's more about atmos)

i don't find myself craving the sort of longer drinking sessions so much even tho i do those once a week or so with friends during normal months.

Still having the most trouble with sleeping sober, unfortunately.

Ah, well here's where "California sober" helps. Understand that's not for everyone either, but thc does way more for my sleep than alcohol. Alcohol's actively bad for sleep for me.

I have some strong (2400mg) valerian root capsules that help to knock me out as well

I did this last year, and I think I drank fewer than 25 drinks the rest of the years. As some of you might know, I used to be what could be called a "functional alcoholic." Honestly, it was the best decision I ever made, totally changed the way I live my life and relate to alcohol. Still not sober, but approaching it.

Tho tbf a lot of the user descriptions of weed read vaguely, like they were written after smoking a load of weed.

Alternatively, they're mostly bullshit. Kind of like when I buy a beer with tasting notes, and I try it blind and guess, like, "orange, herbal and ginger" and then look at the can and see "tangerine, pineapple and vanilla" and go, oh yeah, it does taste like those things.

Actually there was/think still is a website where people log ecstasy tablets and do user reviews. Always thought a found poem from it would be great. The usernames were all like "gurnking_2001" or whatever and the comments would be "normal, smooth come up, very pleasant, then after an hour it was like I have been hit with a bible, wow! danced all night!"

I think weed descriptions and specific purported effects are kind of like audiophile snake oil.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91CojPTqKjL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

The indica-vs-sativa thing certainly seems overblown, and these days almost everything is some hybrid or other. Not like I've ever been very scientific about any of this, but the main differences I experience have to do just with dosage. I will say that the "hemp derived" stuff like Delta-8 and Delta-10 does feel different and not as potent as good ol' Delta 9. On the other hand there's a whole lot about the plant and its interactions with the human body that aren't all that well understood, including the possible effects of non-THC components (CBD, terpenes, etc). Which is to say that I think it's plausible that there are different strains that may have somewhat different effects, but in general more weed will get you more high regardless.

Also good for us for turning the Dry January thread into a weed thread lol

Weed, sugar, ecstasy, is there anything else we can get in here?

fwiw I've definitely experienced more upper type effects from some of the modern strains that are new to me

now we're talking 'california sober' heheheh

I quit weed for January too also, just wanted total clarity for a while. Tho I always think of that Spinal Tap "too much, there's too much perspective" line when doing dry January.

Weed, sugar, ecstasy, is there anything else we can get in here?

Caffeine! I know some people who can't or won't drink caffeine and cut it out entirely, to the extent that if there's any sort of coffee in something (like a dessert, for example) they get paranoid they'll be up all night.

Is there any sort of Dry January for nicotine, or is that stuff so hard to quit that if you go without for a month you might as well go forever?

or is that stuff so hard to quit that if you go without for a month you might as well go forever

I have friends that are like two-three cigarettes a month (usually bumming when drinking) and I could see them taking a month off without too much duress

I train at my local running track once a week and the other day there were two guys in the bleachers smoking a huge blunt adjacent to the track sending a plume of dankness down the backstretch and I stopped to tell them that the park less than one block north and the neighborhood two blocks to the east are both actually rather famous for open-air weed smoking for the past 60+ years.

I felt like a total Karen.... but I think COVID warped people's sense of civility and self-awareness.

I'm semi-dry this month not for any reason other than lack of opportunities and I'm trying to get in shape after an injury last month.

i'm at the point of looking forward to a drink on friday 31 jan quite strongly now. tho another part of me would like to do another month, there are too many plans in february once people are around more.

calzino, I'm very sorry to read about your step-father.

when I was 22 I didn't drink for six months. I was prescribed medication for my mental health and I thought, if I'm going to do it properly then it means no drinking since there's no point mixing a depressant with an anti-depressant. I kinda loved what it did for me - it made me realise that a lot of my friendships at the time were based solely on habit and rituals of social drinking rather than shared interests and values. I would recommend everyone considering it to try a period of sobriety, even just a few weeks, just because it shakes up your routine and habits. But don't everyone pick January please, it's grim for us Capricorn babies to have fully sober birthdays.

I do really enjoy drinking now, and being drunk, and sometimes I find myself getting the 4pm Friday itch, the "what's your weekend plans?" text to everyone in my inner circle to see who fancies opening a bottle if I've had a boring or testing week. But I can go for weeks without drinking without realising. I had three drinks on my birthday last week and if it wasn't for that it would have been a full month, and it's only this thread that made me realise it's been that long.

The indica-vs-sativa thing certainly seems overblown, and these days almost everything is some hybrid or other.

as someone who has worked in the industry, has a medical card, and has smoked a lot of weed in my life, i am going to say, politely, that you are very very very wrong.

Once a budtender explained to me which one is in-da-couch, I never looked back.

Tables I will defer to your knowledge, I certainly couldn’t even tell you what my own experience is because most weed I’ve ever consumed has not been labeled.

The science on it, to the extent it is exists, is fuzzy. Sativa has a higher concentration of THC, indica has more CBD, but an awful lot of what gets grown and sold now is not strictly either.

If I lived in a legal state it would be interesting to try several clearly identified strains on different days to test the differences. Alas around here we take what we can get.

As I understand it, there are many things at work in cannabis - many active compounds, like over 150 (though only three that get you high?) - so that in so far as it's even been studied much at all it's really hard to isolate exactly what does what. Different strains, sure, but different effects? Whether or not they are responsible for specific effects, I still think our brains do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to use and uses. And even as far as strains go, one strain called "Dirty Diaper Skunk Butt" and another with the same name might be chemically distinct from each other. And call a strain "Sleepytime" and I bet many reactions would be as expected.

Our brains are amazing. From that same Proof book about alcohol:

A study titled, simply, “The Color of Odors,” will destroy your faith in anybody’s ability to taste anything. Here’s how it worked: three French researchers started with two wines from Bordeaux, a white made with Sémillon and Sauvignon grapes and a red made with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

The researchers first had a group of subjects taste both the white wine and the red, under white light in clear glasses, and write down all the words they could think of to describe each one. In this test it didn’t matter whether the tasters perceived the same things. Inter-rater reliability wasn’t a factor here—the researchers didn’t care if tasters agreed with each other about the wine color and taste, just that each taster would consistently call one “red” and one “white.”

Then the researchers took an odorless, tasteless extract of the grape-skin pigment anthocyanin and dripped it into the white wine, turning it red. And they called the tasters back for a second go-around, asking them to compare the white wine and the colored wine—the same wine, in other words, with red food coloring. The result was a taste-test catastrophe. Almost to a person, the tasters chose to use the same words for the white wine from the initial tasting on the white wine in the second. And they used the same words for the red wine on the red-colored white wine. They simply could not tell the difference. Color alone—not aroma, not flavor—told them what to expect, and that’s exactly what they tasted.

that anecdote doesn't surprise me at all, wine tasting is mostly horseshit... though I'm sure there are some actual pro wine folks who would be like 'what the fuck?'

I was once gifted a book called "Cork Dork" about a writer that takes a year off to try and become a master sommelier. She succeeds, and to that end discovers that there *are* some skills that can be learned that allow you to make specific, educated observations about wines, like regions or variety or expression or whatever, but that there are some things she thinks are BS. And her conclusion in the end, iirc, was that if you have an exceptional glass of special wine on the steps of a beautiful home in the south of France while watching the sunset, then have that same wine at home after shoveling dirty snow on a cold New York night, it may not seem like the same wine.

probably the same with weed lol

If I lived in a legal state it would be interesting to try several clearly identified strains on different days to test the differences. Alas around here we take what we can get.

it's illegal in the uk but i defo notice v specific differences with the ones i've tried.

also sorry but that is total nonsense about wine, lol.

it's not even about 'skills', it's just this grape tastes diff to that one. or storing this thing in wood makes it taste different to steel or something, are wood and steel the same too?

I favor delta 9

yeah what

I went out to dinner tonight and drank a (perfect) martini and a glass of Argentinian malbec. I'm good.

this thread has hopelessly gone off the rails, love it

i sold four bottles of wine at work last night, a wednesday
alcohol is alive and well in case anyone wondered

xps

thanks boxedjoy, it's rough on my mum who has lost her 3 remaining siblings to cancer in the last year.

I've almost completed my dry mon-fri shift and friday officially ends at 6pm or thereabouts by my dryness rulebook. So I'm going to drink some red wine tonight, maybe a few beers as well. Catch up with some highly rated modern movies I have missed in the last year. The greatest show in town imo.

https://preview.redd.it/7l8z7joekdf81.jpg?auto=webp&s=5686e2588e2722b87ef7d59312f18f75737ecc28

Have drank so, so much tea this month.

Anyone doing this again? I stopped from Sunday. The first week is always p easy, also been sick which means even less inclination to have a drink.

Going up to Scotland next week so it's literally an impossibility.

Yeah prob would be the same if I was going back to Dublin. One year I was a week or two in and had to go back home for a funeral, that was obviously that.

I'm 4 days dry with no intention of keeping it up, got red wine and beer ordered for the weekend. It's good to have some days off for some renewal, it's good to feel more energetic and vital. But fuck it, I still like booze and don't have any longevity plan and there won't be any pension to live on if I did.

I usually do Dry January but I was so well behaved over this Xmas that I feel I dont need to lol

I'm doing a Dry January and a Dry February and a Dry First Four Days of March. I have a self-imposed deadline for something I need to focus on and I'm putting myself into bootcamp mode as much as possible

Three days ago I didn't have a single drink all day, does that count?

My wife and I are going dry the first two weeks of January. This is a first and a pretty big deal for us (we drink usually 5 days a week). I'm also giving up marijuana for the same period, which is usually 4 days a week. So far so good. I made a pasta the other night and thought about how good a glass of wine would be with it, but quickly moved myself on from those thoughts.

Those are the moments. It can feel so easy for days and then something like that comes along. Obviously Friday circa 4pm or 5pm also just incredibly hard.

I’m doing it - will see how long I last. it’s a nice chance to try all the AF beer options you get these days

i lasted a week

I am, alas, dry year-round for health reasons but I have a lot of NA opinions.

Note that it's best to compare NA beverages to one another rather than assess the degree to which they taste and act like the alcoholic drinks they're trying to replace.

If you start from a standpoint of "can I tell the difference?" you will focus on the difference, and be disappointed. You will be constantly thinking about what it isn't, and be unable to appreciate it for what it is.

If you go at them with an attitude more of "do I want this in my mouth or not?" you can enjoy NA beverages for their own sake.

Anyway the Athletic beers are generally well regarded (I like the hazy, pale, and golden ones). Unfortunately they have become a default choice in some places, crowding out other things like the equally drinkable Trail Passes.

I do mixed drinks where bitter, sour, peppery, and sharp flavors can make up for the intenser sensations of liquor. The Ritual gin and whiskey alternatives get a lot of their pep from pepper. (A budget version is to just put a few drops of caynne extract in whatever you're drinkng). I also sometimes dig the resinous vibe of Pathfinder, with ginger ale or Dr. Pepper.

There are okay white and sparkling NA wines but I have yet to experience a convincing red.

I had a few drinks on New Years Day, as I was at a large event with poets and artists all day (lmfao), so it was a little inevitable. That said, I said to my friend Ryan when I was there that I could could on two hands the number of days that I drank during all of 2025, and certainly had fewer than 20 drink during the entirety of the year. In other words, I drink so little, having one or two here and there is fine at this point, and I no longer keep track.

Those are the moments. It can feel so easy for days and then something like that comes along. Obviously Friday circa 4pm or 5pm also just incredibly hard.

― LocalGarda, Thursday, January 8, 2026 9:08 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow!

I'm focusing on things I'm gaining rather than what I am missing: better sleep, less irritability.

That said, I said to my friend Ryan when I was there that I could could on two hands the number of days that I drank during all of 2025, and certainly had fewer than 20 drink during the entirety of the year.

This is where I’ve been for years and years except I’m pretty sure I’m a problem drinker and there’s been a slight uptick in frequency since one of my childhood friends died over the summer and I find myself reacting to tense and overwhelming moments by drinking straight away more often than i try to let it pass. The one thing that stops me is my sleep is already poor and erratic and anything to not make it worse. But still it’s very common to go weeks and weeks without drinking and not think about it.

We (spouse and I) have been on the temporary wagon since Jan. 2. We can't start on Jan. 1 because there's a traditional New Year's Day party at a friend's house, so we get to toast in the new year and then take a break. Honestly it's fine. I miss the sort of comforting routines more than anything else, making a cocktail before dinner or having a little whiskey after. But we stocked up on NA beer, which is nice just to have something with flavor with dinner. And my wife made a nice hisbiscus-tea-based phoney Negroni, which doesn't really taste like a Negroni but is tasty.

I'm not rawdogging tho. told my brother I was California Dry, but realized the actual right name for it is High and Dry.

Anyway, a toast to you all with my can of LaCroix.