At the beginning of each year, it seems there are more and more people becoming “sober curious.” With dry January becoming super trendy and probably just my age, it seems more prominent than ever before. Now, as a person working on sobriety, I feel that understanding what it means to be sober curious would have been so helpful years ago when I first started drinking.
In November 2020, my counselor told me that being sober is “like actually cool now.” And while I knew Nikki Glaser and Lauren Elizabeth, and my counselor, were all sober and all totally cool, I did not associate being sober with being cool. Months after this conversation I began to see sobriety in the world around me. Nikki Glasier was on my favorite podcast talking about sobriety, I would stalk Lauren Elizabeth’s Instagram to figure out what being sober was all about, I saw drinks labeled as mocktail ingredients at Whole Foods.
Between November 2020 and January 2021, I was what you would call sober curious, but I didn’t know it at the time. When I finally decided to stop drinking, all I could do was listen to podcasts about sobriety, read books about sobriety, Instagram stalk sober people, etc. The support and evidence that sobriety isn’t “un-cool” and that people were having fun sober was SO necessary for me.
Over a year ago, NPR published an article detailing what it means to be sober curious and explaining some of the benefits of taking breaks from or quitting drinking alcohol. Authors, Allison Aubrey and April Fulton, write that, “there are a handful of studies that point to some benefits of abstinence for even moderate drinkers — in addition to the widely recognized benefits for people who have alcohol use disorder.”
Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman; The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, explains her frustration with the way we expect everyone to consume alcohol and if someone chooses not to, they need a title: alcoholic. In one of my favorite quotes of the book, she says
“We’re conditioned to believe it’s normal to imbibe, abnormal to abstain, and because of this, we are not conditioned to ask the most reasonable questions of all: Is alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me?… Does it make me hate myself, even just a little bit?”
To be sober curious means to be comfortable asking ourselves those questions, and being open to the honest answers. When I first opened up to my counselor about my relationship to alcohol it felt cathartic. After a long and tired summary explaining my alcohol patterns, she offered me a choice. She said you can either accept that this is how you feel after drinking, or you can make a change. I chose the latter and at that time, the change was not drinking as much, trying to be a gray area drinker. I would have two drinks, and be done. And this worked for a week, two weeks? I would love to be a gray area drinker, but I’m not! So, I am learning to be sober. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t become comfortable being uncomfortable analyzing my relationship with alcohol.
I am very new to being sober and I truly don’t even know if I count as being sober yet?? In my head it totally counts because this sh*t is hard. But, this is the right kind of hard! Not everyone needs to be sober. Sober means different things to different people. But, I do think everyone would benefit from being sober curious. Being sober curious is just inviting ourselves to be mindful of our drinking and the impact it has on our life.