I’m Officially 6 Months Sober! - Why I Quit Drinking
It’s Been Over 6 Months Since My Last Sip Of Alcohol!
8 Reasons I Quit Drinking
Four years ago I went to the doctor and he asked me how many ounces of alcohol I consume per week. I lied and told him between 80-100 ounces a week. The truth at the time was that I was consuming between 120-160 ounces every week.
When I tell people that story they typically ask me how I was functioning, and how I’m still alive. The truth is, I actually was functioning fine, just not as well as I could have been.
Being a partner at a nightclub, promoting for a few others, and just being obsessed with partying made it really hard to not drink regularly.
Picture this: you go to the bar and someone asks if you want to take a shot.
You say yes, naturally… but what if for every shot you took, you made $1. How many would you take? Quite likely more than you normally would.
That was my logic for years.
Owning a nightclub meant that every time someone bought me a drink, I made money. Even promoting a nightclub, most of the time we were getting a kickback from liquor sales. That meant I was profiting every time someone bought me a drink.
Sometimes I “bought” my own drinks and even those were free as I had a few hundred dollars in bar tabs given to me every time I was at the club.
On top of all that, as a promoter (and owner), you want to connect with people and help them have fun. This leads to a lot of drinks to help socialize and build your connection.
If you want to connect with even more people, you end up going out on your “off-nights” to drink and build relationships with others.
Needlessly to say, it was far too easy to rationalize drinking far too often.
When everything shut down during the lockdowns, I was bored and had a ton of alcohol stored at my house… so even after I lost the club, the drinking continued.
Was I an alcoholic? No. In fact, I went sober for a month or two at a time, a few times.
Did I have a drinking problem? Yes. It was getting out of hand and affecting other areas of my life.
As of March 25th, I am 6 months sober. I have not had a drop of alcohol since September 24th, which was for The Wine Festival.
This blog post serves to tell you exactly why I went sober.
My Brain Health
Over the past 18 months, I’ve been working on learning as much as possible with the goal of becoming a better entrepreneur. Everything from listening to podcasts, doing courses, talking to experts and reading books.
It started to seem a little counter-productive to be drinking excessively while trying to optimize my brain’s ability.
I was noticing some troubling issues arising.
My memory, ability to focus, ability to talk clearly, and many more areas were all declining. That made me concerned for the long-term health of my brain.
I heard Andrew Huberman (as well as other doctors) talk about the effects of alcohol on your brain. It was concerning.
I love goal setting, and when reviewing my goals, I realized I would have a much better chance of achieving everything I want to if I quit drinking.
Optimizing my brain health was one of the main reasons I went sober.
For more on how alcohol affects brain health, you can read this article.
Improved Sleep
Have you ever heard Matthew Walker talk about sleep? He literally wrote the book on sleep.
If so, you’ll understand why quitting drinking seemed like an obvious choice to increase my sleep quality.
You may not think drinking affects your sleep… you may even think it helps, but you don’t realize that even if you are asleep, the quality is drastically affected.
Sleep is when you recover. Your brain and body need to recover properly and I was noticing both areas were starting to have trouble doing so.
Why work out constantly and spend so much time learning if you’re going to ruin your recovery with excessive drinking?
Read this by Sleep Foundation.
Mental Wellness & Emotional Health
Do you suffer from anxiety or depression?
Or maybe you just feel more emotional and make poor decisions when drinking, or the day after.
I noticed that the day after, and sometimes for a couple of days after, I had bad side effects (aside from being hungover). I was anxious, and more emotional, made poor decisions, felt sad, angry and pretty much anything bad you can name.
It came around to the same question… Why would I spend time learning and trying to improve myself to just go ruin it with excessive drinking?
Your life is a compilation of decisions. If you want to change where you’re going, you have to increase your ability to make decisions. Reducing your alcohol consumption could be one of the best ways to do this, not to mention one of the best decisions in general.
I believe that cutting alcohol is the first step you should take if you have any issues with your mental and emotional health.
To read about how alcohol affects your mental health, click here.
Physical Health
The worse kind of hangover is when you’re sick to your stomach. That’s because it’s much harder to go to the gym and put in the work.
It became hard for me to function physically when hungover. Being useless for a day was just too unproductive.
Excessive drinking takes a significant toll on the body. Aside from hangovers, alcohol has a lot of unnecessary calories. It really just slows you down.
Alcohol will decrease energy levels, dehydrate you and destroy your immune system.
During one of my drinking benders in 2017, I developed psoriasis and alopecia barbae. Both of which are auto-immune diseases.
After a few months of dealing with those, I went sober for a couple of months, and they went into remission. That was my first sign that I should start managing my drinking better.
Physical health was another reason for my decision to quit drinking.
Saving Money
I won’t get into exact numbers of how much I spent on alcohol, but let’s just say I could have bought a couple of houses if I didn’t drink.
Earls rent might have been paid by me.
Aside from the direct cost of liquor, the decisions I made while intoxicated cost me far more.
I love gambling. Even when I lose I still have fun.
Blackjack, roulette or even worse, over-leveraging crypto & forex trades. Whatever it is, if it’s a high-risk move, my love for it comes out even more when I am drunk.
It’s safe to say, that through poor gambling decisions, while intoxicated, I lost multiple 6 figures of money, if not 7.
The worst came from a trade that was going well while sober. I adjusted it while drunk to try to make extra money, which led to me losing what would have been a multiple 7 figure profit.
With that in mind, it should be no surprise that quitting drinking has been a good financial decision.
Regular Schedule
Alcohol ruins your sleep and makes you stay up late which leads to the inevitable consequence of a lack of a regular routine.
Having a properly structured routine day after day now allows me to get a lot more done.
I currently have an obsession with being as productive as possible. That’s why in order to maintain a regular schedule, quitting drinking was a must.
Meaningful Conversations
It’s ironic because I used to drink to be more open when talking to people. It removed my filter and gave me some liquid courage.
However, as years went by, and more so after slowing down my liquor consumption, I noticed my conversations were becoming far more meaningful. I still had confidence, but the difference is it wasn’t just blurbs of things I likely wouldn’t even remember the next day.
I’m sure others can relate.
When I started to realize this, not only did I want to quit drinking, I realized it would benefit me in social situations whereas prior, I was worried it would take away from it.
My Girlfriend
The day I officially stopped drinking, was the day after I got really drunk at The Wine Festival. Nothing bad happened, aside from spending a little too much, but I did realize I was 100% certain I wanted to date this girl.
My 6 month anniversary with my girlfriend is also the mark of 6 months sober for me.
It’s worth noting that I had only drank once in the 6 weeks prior to that day.
She by no means asked me to quit. In fact, she might prefer if I still did sometimes (big might). However, I wanted to see how a relationship would go while I’m sober.
In the past, I tended to make bad relationship decisions when hungover, or drunk.
I’ve never cheated, but I did have the tendency to shut down the day after drinking or just not care as much as I might have if sober. That always affected my relationships.
I love my girlfriend and I knew that from the day we started dating. Going sober seemed like the best decision in order to start our relationship in a healthy manner.
Six months in, I now know it was the best possible decision as our relationship is incredible.
As you can see, the benefits of not drinking have been massive.
I am far healthier, far happier and a far better decision-maker than I would have been otherwise.
Truth be told, I didn’t have a plan of going sober for more than a couple of months, but the longer I stay sober, the less I want to drink again.
One day I’ll drink again (not sure when), but it won’t be to get drunk. When I do start drinking again, it’ll be a casual glass of wine with dinner or a nice cocktail at a bar top.
My hope is that this gives you the motivation to go sober if you’ve been thinking about it. That, or maybe it just helps convince you to manage your liquor more responsibly.
If I can do it, you can too!
Thanks for reading.
Please share your experiences and difficulties with attempting to go sober!
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