I knew I was drinking too much about ten years ago. I would take advantage of every excuse to have a drink because it was easy.
I did a lot of work travel back then. Most people working on travel expenses know the familiar routine of having a drink on the company dime. Better still are events where booze is included and no one is counting. I must have been drinking thousands of pounds of booze a month on someone else’s dime, and I’m sure it tasted better for it.
Evenings and weekends at home would usually involve a bottle of Malbec followed by a whiskey or a gin and tonic or two.
The small voice in the back of my head that said “you have drunk alcohol almost every night for the past ten years” got louder and louder but never managed to break out of the little prison cell I’d created for him in my brain. The small voice rarely convinced me to have a night off, and I resisted its calls to count up my weekly units. I had convinced myself that, because I wasn’t drinking during the daytime and because I was never drunk around the kids that all was well. The bills were paid, the kids were fed, clothed, happy and doing well at school so there couldn’t be a problem, right?
In December 2020 a family member, Tom, challenged me to take a month off booze with him in January. He wanted some time off drinking and said that companionship would help, so I agreed. 31 days without alcohol went by in a heartbeat - helped, I’m sure, by wanting to not be the one that lost the game. The evening of 1st February was met with red wine to celebrate my achievement, and the rest of the year continued much as the last one had ended, with an excessive intake of alcohol most nights.
Fast forward to December 2021 and Tom suggested we try for a month off again in 2022. This time he suggested a “first-to-blink” challenge. We stopped drinking on 1st January, but the first one to give up and have a drink had to cough up £100 to the other one. January 2021 was a piece of cake, so I agreed to the new terms. We both easily made it to 14th April at my sister’s birthday party and agreed to call it quits for a night. We got duly hammered, but when it came to restart we’d both lost the impetus and old habits resumed. It seemed that I didn’t have an issue with long periods of no boozing as long as something was driving me. Individual nights off somehow seemed harder to achieve though.
We repeated the game of first-to-blink in 2023, and this time I triumphed because Tom’s wife posted a photo of him on Facebook, cocktail in hand, on a beach in Zakynthos in mid-May.
By the end of 2023 I knew something had to change. My physical energy was dropping, and I had a slight, but permanent, sense of doom that I couldn’t shake off. Tom and I agreed to “the Challenge” again, only this time for £200 so Tom could win his money back. I felt like I should keep track of the sober period better than before so I downloaded the Try Dry® app onto my phone.
I decided to log each dry day on the Try Dry® app in the morning when I woke up. I didn’t know why I chose to do this but it meant that if I caved and had a drink I would have to delete my achievement myself. I also got a little endorphic buzz that would motivate me every time I achieved a badge in the app. Before I knew it my 2023 record of sobriety had come and gone. In June, for the first time ever, I spent my birthday sober. January had merged into Sober Spring quite easily, marked by trophies in the app. My badges for Day Streaks started piling up, I was cruising through the app’s Missions and my accumulated cash savings were becoming eye-watering.
Sometime around early September 2024 Tom fessed up to me that he had had a drink at his mother-in-law’s birthday party about a month before. He handed over £200 and joked that I should leave it behind the bar for when we went to the pub next. I looked at the empty shelf where my booze used to live – if there had been anything there I may well have drunk it – but instead I just got on with my week. I had just got my 40 week Reducer badge in Try Dry® and something told me to hang on. I was so close to getting my 52 week badge, plus my 1 year Streak badge, and I wasn’t far off my £5k Money Bags badge. The rest of the year was easier after that. Then continuing into 2025 just felt… normal.
There were times when I nearly gave in. It was hard to resist, especially with the peer pressure from a drinking culture at work, but consuming as much booze as possible on someone else’s dime was the old game. I had to commit to the new one, and I did.
I’m still sober now. My energy is back, I’ve got more focus at work, I am engaging in more things in every aspect of my life, and I’ve even been competing in Enduro mountain bike races this year.
I’m looking at my Try Dry® app as I write this. 10,000 units saved. £11,400 saved. 650,000 calories saved. But most importantly and the biggest motivator for me, 731 days current dry streak. If I have a drink then this resets to zero. I can’t let that happen. Tomorrow is a new high score.
Name has been changed for privacy reasons*
