Tips For Staying Sober

From a guy that's failed many times

Sometimes when I meet new people, they’re surprised to find out that I used to have a drinking problem. Understandable. I almost never have puke on my shirt anymore - I’m basically the perfect man.

However, in my late teens and early twenties I was a bit of a mess. I’m not sure at what exact point you graduate from just partying hard to becoming alcohol dependent, but I’m pretty sure planning trips to different stores each day so the staff don’t recognize you is long after you’ve thrown that drunk mortarboard in the air. What started as a way for me to loosen up and have fun at house parties, became the only thing I wanted to do, and I made many bad decisions - mostly growing a goatee (Honestly, how did no one see the signs??).

I first decided to quite drinking cold turkey in a somewhat dramatic fashion when I was 21. It hasn’t always been a success. I’m 28 now and just about to pass 3 years, so you do the math. I still have a long journey ahead, and there are many people with more time under their belt, but I have learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t along the way.

Replace drinking with something

The first problem to solve when becoming sober is what to do with all your time. Alcohol takes up entire evenings (and sometimes days) at a time, so when you take that part of your life away, you’re suddenly sat twiddling your thumbs. I think this is why a lot of people relapse early on. When you’ve been drinking hard, your life is not usually that great - which makes it all the harder to rawdog it everyday with the blinding light of consciousness. Addicts often like indulging because it’s the one time where they feel okay, and that means being sober means feeling not okay all the time.

So, the first thing I recommend is replacing alcohol with something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be a calling, although callings help. For me, it was stand up comedy. I started doing stand up out of university (shameless plug), and that required writing jokes every day and performing as much as I could. When disaster would strike, and I wanted to relapse, my next thought was usually “If you’re hungover, you’re not going to write tomorrow, and that means you’re going to bomb”. Bombing is not fun. Trust me, I have a lot of experience. So, taking stand up seriously motivated me to stay on the straight and narrow. I don’t do much of it anymore, but nowadays I’ve replaced it with work, family, and ranting online about myriad things.

The trick is finding something that you like enough that you don’t want to jeopardize by getting wasted. You want to convert alcohol from being an escape from your life, to being an obstacle in your way as quickly as possible. You want to cultivate a situation where you think “I can’t drink tonight, I gotta do X tomorrow, and that’s non negotiable!”

Accept you’re gonna fuck up

I made a mistake early on of thinking that “this was it”. If I didn’t make it work first time, I was never going to make it work, and my life would be shit forever (I can be quite dramatic when I want to be). It turns out, you can actually try as many times as you want. I love getting sober so much, I’ve done it dozens of times!

I remember having a conversation with someone once, lamenting that I had relapsed after a streak of a few months. They said “So, you’re telling me that in the last three months, you’ve only drunk once? That’s pretty good!”. When we fuck up, we feel like all our work has been undone when it wasn’t. Even though I slipped up, I had still made far more progress over those last three months than I would’ve done had I drank the whole time. Just showing up, just attempting, is enough to move the needle. As time goes on, it gets easier, because your life when you’re drinking sporadically is still leaps and bounds better than your life if you do it consistently - and when your life is better, you want to numb yourself less and less.

Develop a Coping Strategy

Really, at it’s core, addiction is about an unwillingness to feel negative emotion. It’s about shutting up the voice in your head for five minutes. Unfortunately, I’ve been told that living life requires that you go through things you don’t like, and that means you’re going to feel bad every now and then.

I only really started making progress when I adopted coping strategies instead of relying on willpower alone. For me, it’s been a mix between mindfulness and reading Stoic philosophy. Honestly, reading The Enchiridion is such a life hack. Something will upset you, you’ll flick open a few pages, and Epictetus will say “Hey bro, have you tried just not fucken worrying about it?” and it actually works. I remember listening to the audiobook in bed for the first time a few years ago and feeling like I could take on the world. I have yet to take on the world, but only because I’ve decided to spare it - I’m just a nice guy like that.

There are other options. CBT, breathing exercises, listening to David Goggins compilations - whatever you can turn to in times of need to recentre yourself. You want to break the habit of imploding every time something doesn’t go your way, and accept that this is not only a part of life, but it’s a good part of it. Life would probably get stale if we never ran into challenges. It’d be like playing a video game where you’re stuck on the tutorial forever. Eventually, you can reach a point where you see problems as opportunities to improve or learn.

“Sure, you’re an avatar of the Elder Gods themselves, but I have something you’ll never beat. A can do attitude!”

Learn to be compassionate to yourself

This is actually a recent development of mine, and very much not a practice I’m in a good habit of doing. When browsing Youtube a couple of months ago, I found this webinar on self compassion which I found very insightful. You don’t really notice it until you practice meditation, but the way you speak to yourself in your head is awful. Legitimately, I probably call myself an idiot out loud several times a day.

If I spoke to a friend the way I speak to myself, they would rightfully chokeslam me through the nearby table we conveniently keep around for such occasions.

---

“I take it back! You’re not an idiot for sleeping through your alarm, I’M SORR-”

---

Yet, almost all of us have a habit of talking to ourselves with such contempt, that you would think we were our own arch nemeses. Hot take - you are no less deserving of compassion than those around you. You should start talking to yourself the way you would speak to a friend.

One practice I find particularly helpful is imagining you’re faced with yourself at 2 years old. Toddlers are totally innocent. It’s pretty hard to imagine looking into those big dumb eyes, and hoping for anything but the best for them. You know every heartbreak, every victory, every disappointment that awaits them down the road. It’s easier, when imagining a younger version of yourself, to realise that you really do want them to live a happy life - and you’d consider it a shame if they grew up to talk to themselves to poorly. So cut it out!

---

Sobriety isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. I remember speaking to an older guy early on and he told me “I know where you’re at, I know you don’t get it yet - but you’re going to get it, I promise you” - and he was totally right. Living alcohol free should not be seen as imposing limitations on yourself, it should be seen as liberating yourself. You’re not limiting your life by saying no to alcohol, you’re expanding it by saying yes to everything else.

Take a chance on actually living, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Just remember to bring your sword and shield - the Elder Gods don’t fuck around.