Dry January, Sober Semester and taking a break from alcohol can improve your health

Bye-bye, rum-spiked egg nog. Au revoir, Champagne.

As you tear down the tinsel, snuff out the candles and reorganize your home for the new year, you might also consider decluttering your diet. Specifically? The liquid part of it.

Welcome to Dry January.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: a reprieve from alcohol, presumably after a holiday season loaded with libations. Dry January requires some effort on your part, but it comes with a patina of virtue.

Think of it this way: Sober is the new vegan.

Since 2014, the United Kingdom has promoted Dry January as a public health campaign. Those who accept the Dry January challenge can expect better overall health, as well as healthier drinking behavior for the future, according to a study in 2018 by the University of Sussex.

In 2019, the government of France squelched efforts to promote Dry January: President Emanuel Macron gave it a firm “Non” in an economy and culture in which winemaking plays an important role.

Booze is everywhere

Like so many things that are good for us, a Dry January challenge is not always easy.

After all, we live in a society that glamorizes alcohol, views drinking as a rite of passage and as a sign of sophistication and maturity, and incorporates alcohol into any celebration, great or small. Happy hour, prix-fixe dinners, yoga class, book clubs: Everything seems to involve alcohol.

Joy Manning has been there.

“There is peer pressure, but it’s not like an after-school special,” Manning said. “Usually it’s unconscious.”

Manning is a food writer and editor of Edible Philly magazine. She runs the website betterwithoutbooze.com and its accompanying Instagram account.

“My field is very boozy,” she said. “But it’s everywhere, not just in the food world.”

As a sober-curious person, Manning tried a few Dry Januarys before she gave up alcohol permanently in 2017. Along the way, she noticed how alcohol consumption is the default choice in any number of social settings.

“It is systematically normalized, everywhere you go,” Manning said. “My husband’s work raffled a ‘basket of cheer,’ with wine, for charity. The default hostess gift is a bottle of wine. Every TV show you see, they’re drinking wine as a prop. Book clubs are synonymous with wine. There are T-shirts. And moms are particularly targeted.”

How can a sober-curious person mix and mingle in a world filled with a craft brewery on every block and a bottle of red on every table?

Go easy on yourself

Yoga instructor Mary Ansell of Open Heart Yoga in New Jersey advises treating Dry January like any other form of self-improvement: by focusing on the positive and not being hard on yourself.

“Set an intention for the new year, which is not as definitive as a resolution,” Ansell suggested. “With resolutions, there’s no room for error, and if you make a mistake, you may just quit instead of continuing to modify your behavior.”

“Most healing comes from inside you,” Ansell said. “Stay confident that you know it. Picture a plan of action, and stay curious about your actions. Think of it as living healthier, rather than as Dry January.”

“There’s a wrong way to do Dry January,” Manning advised. “The wrong way is to say, ‘I’m not drinking in January’ and you basically just hide. You miss whatever happy hour you used to go to and every social event. That teaches you nothing.

”Do what you normally do, just do it without alcohol,” she said. “The biggest misconception is that you need alcohol to have fun. Order a club soda with lime and have fun.”

Newer alcohol-free options include Seedlip, an alcohol-free distilled spirit from England that reminds Manning of gin.

“Restaurants are still not super great about Dry January, and a lot of mocktails are just juice,” she said. “But kombucha is having a big moment, and some are on draft. There are new craft beers without alcohol that are every bit as delicious as an IPA. And Seedlip is a garden spirit that’s great, served with tonic water and lime.” (Kombucha does contain a small percentage of alcohol, typically less than .05%.)

Enrolling in sobriety

Dry January has a younger sibling: Sober Semester, in which students abstain for half the school year.

College is a place where young people frequently get their first experiences with alcohol use and abuse. At Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, health officials choose their words carefully so as not to alienate partygoers.

“If you tell students to stop drinking alcohol, it pretty much ends the conversation right there,” said Scott Woodside, director of the Wellness Center at Rowan. “Dry January is not language we’ve used in the past, but certainly we’ve run programs like that.

”We advise students to consider reducing alcohol use, as elimination gets a little pushback,” Woodside said. “In general, we’d start with questions like, ‘Could you be getting more sleep?’ and then back into the alcohol talk as a way to go about that.”

According to Allie Pearce, who oversees the Healthy Campus Initiatives at Rowan, students sometimes think “the only consequence of drinking is a hangover.”

“We tie it into our sex assault programming, because the No. 1 date rape drug is alcohol,” Pearce said.

Time management can be affected by alcohol use.

“How are we spending our time?” Pearce said. “We have a stress and anxiety support group run by undergraduates, and that topic comes up a lot.”

To support a sober lifestyle, “Rowan Afterhours” programming provides students with late-night, alcohol-free parties, concerts and comedy nights.

‘It’s not a punishment’

Maintaining joie de vivre is key to an alcohol-free lifestyle, as is the proper perspective, Manning said.

“It’s not a punishment,” Manning said. “We tend to think you’re only allowed to stop if you hit rock bottom. That is false.”

Manning views living alcohol-free as a “wellness upgrade.”

“You’ll have more energy. Your skin will look much better,” she said. “You’ll save money, and you’ll lose weight.

“I’m only angry at myself for not figuring that out sooner,” she said.

The University of Sussex study backs up Manning’s assertions.

“The simple act of taking a month off alcohol helps people drink less in the long term: By August, people are reporting one extra dry day per week,” psychologist Richard de Visser said in the study by the University of Sussex. ”There are also considerable immediate benefits: Nine in 10 people save money, seven in 10 sleep better and three in five lose weight.”

“Interestingly,” de Visser continued, “these changes in alcohol consumption have also been seen in the participants who didn’t manage to stay alcohol-free for the whole month, although they are a bit smaller.”

Read more at usatoday.com