The Value of Staying Sober

What’s the benefit of not drinking? How long have you got?

The benefits are legion. This won’t be a short article – but even so, no article could ever capture it all. Still, it’s worth providing an overview that considers the main areas where the benefits will come. Those areas could be broadly divided into the following:

• Physical fitness

• General health

• Emotional intelligence

• Mental health

• Motivation

• Career progress

And that’s certainly not everything. Doubtless much has been missed out. Maybe you’re thinking, “What about the money?”. Indeed, alcohol is expensive – particularly if you drink a lot of it.

But rather than talking extensively about it, let’s sum it up quickly with a case study.

Let’s take a typical reformed drinker – for argument’s sake, let’s call him Duncan. He stopped drinking ten years ago. Looking in the shop where he used to buy wine, he concluded that he’d be spending at least £8.78 on an average night. Allowing for the odd night of drinking in pubs (which he’s led to believe are very expensive these days), let’s round it up to £10 per day.

Factoring in things like inflation, and getting an AI to do all the actual calculations, he concluded that he would have spent approximately £40,077 on alcohol over the last 10 years.

Yes – he’s saved enough money to buy a brand-new Mercedes GLC. That’s with the Executive package, and he’d have enough money left over to take the family on holiday.

He doesn’t own a Mercedes GLC, which indicates his ability to manage money might have developed a bit later in his sobriety.

The point is that it’s easy to spend flash-car money on drinking. The value of not doing it is easy to add up in terms of cold, hard cash. But what about everything else?

The Physical Benefits of a Sober Lifestyle

“I feel better.”

That’s one of the big reasons why people don’t drink – it feels better.

It’s almost not necessary to add anything to that. But let’s get into exactly what “feeling better” means. It’s important to mention the positive cycle you get from feeling better.

When you stop putting a large amount of poison into your body (make no mistake – alcohol is a poison) you feel better. True, during the first few weeks the detoxification process may result in some discomfort, and in extreme cases this needs to be medically supervised. But in general, the absence of poison leads to an increase in energy.

How does this increase in energy get used? You end up being more active. This can vary from getting back into sport, gym trips or vigorous exercise, to doing more everyday activity like washing up, or not spending hours sitting down watching TV.

Weirdly, this process of being more active doesn’t make you feel tired – it does the exact opposite. It makes you feel more energetic, which leads to you doing more stuff. It’s a positive cycle.

Life is pretty simple – it’s always going in one of two directions: up or down. When we drink, it’s usually going down: less energy, less activity, even less energy; less positive feeling, more drinking, even less positive feeling – and so on.

When you stop drinking, you have the opportunity to change that – to reverse the direction: more energy, more activity, even more energy; feel happier, less desire to drink, feel even happier – long-term sobriety.

Sleep as Sobriety Motivation

Alcohol might send you to sleep (if you drink enough of it) but it doesn’t help you to sleep. In fact, it seriously disturbs your sleep – it affects the duration and quality of REM sleep, which is the important bit.

If you drink enough over a long enough period, you can change your sleep architecture, give yourself insomnia and increase the amount of daytime sleepiness you experience. All of which makes you reach for a drink to “help” you sleep – which makes matters worse. It’s a downward sleep cycle.

The surprising thing is that it happens at relatively low levels – just four drinks could reduce the quality of your deep sleep by over 40%. That’s a big impact.

So it stands to reason that stopping drinking should improve your sleep. You should find it easier to fall asleep, have less night-time waking, and get up in the morning more rested. And those benefits tend to compound – getting more sleep gives you more energy. More energy means you’re likely to be more active, which means you’re likely to sleep better. It’s another one of those positive cycles.

Getting Well with Addiction Recovery

Let’s return to our hypothetical reformed drinker, hypothetically called Duncan. As a result of his drinking (and the poor diet that went with it) Duncan had given himself gout. This is quite an impressive achievement.

Gout used to be the disease of kings. Previously, it was only the rich who could afford a diet bad enough to cause a problem of excess like gout. Duncan had managed to give himself the problem by his mid-thirties – not bad going.

The problem is, gout hurts. It causes a build-up of needle-shaped crystals in the joints, which is painful – even if you are a big, brave boy. Gout was one of the final straws that motivated Duncan to stop drinking.

Gout is so heavily related to alcohol consumption that you can cause flare-ups in people who have well-controlled gout with not much more than a few glasses of wine. And it’s not alone – many physical problems are so heavily associated with drinking that people find them disappearing when they stop.

Alcohol has many impacts on your cardiovascular system, such as increased inflammation and damage to the heart. In addition, it causes several nasty-sounding things like oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and programmed cell death. Over the long term, this leads to heart attacks, strokes and vascular dementia.

Aside from the benefit of not having a heart attack, stopping drinking improves the flow of blood around your body – which you might well notice in one of two ways. Your fitness will improve, because your ability to move is tied up with your ability to pump oxygen around your body.

And your sex life might improve too. One of the things the drugs industry likes to ignore while selling you Viagra is that erectile dysfunction is a predictor of heart disease. After all, it’s about getting the blood flowing. Once you stop drinking and your body starts to repair itself, the blood flow to your sex organs will improve – and that goes for both men and women.

The average glass of booze has about the same amount of calories as a small pot of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream – and even if you really like ice cream, you’re unlikely to eat six pots of the stuff. However, six drinks was just a Tuesday for some of us. Stopping drinking is going to reduce your calorie intake, which is likely to reduce your weight.

There is also a lot of sugar in many alcoholic drinks, which is bad news for diabetes and other metabolic problems. Not to mention that alcohol prevents the absorption of some vitamins, which has a knock-on effect for your health – particularly your immune system. Feel better, lose weight, improve your sex life and get fewer colds – what’s not to like?

The Emotional Life After Alcohol

Many people drink to avoid or suppress emotions – which doesn’t work. You don’t get rid of them; you might push them down for a bit, but inevitably they come back – and they always come back stronger.

When we stop drinking, we are forced to confront our emotions which, while sometimes difficult, is ultimately the only way to happily coexist with them. While this is not an article about therapy, the ability to face – and ultimately work through – difficult emotions is an important part of psychological health.

The day-to-day result of standing in front of your emotions rather than hiding from them is an increased ability to regulate them. Making clear choices rather than reacting to emotional responses helps you to control your behaviour and keep negative emotions in check.

There are ways to increase your self-regulation, but many people find it develops as a natural part of sobriety. It does this in several ways: stopping drinking often reduces the chaos in life, which gives you stability; when you can’t just reach for the bottle, you are forced to develop a more flexible approach; and finally, sobriety teaches persistence. All of these increase your emotional self-regulation, which in turn makes sobriety easier.

There is also an interesting neurological aspect to these changes. There are two parts of your brain that are affected by drinking – the prefrontal cortex and the motivational core (the amygdala, nucleus accumbens and striatum). These areas talk to each other to decide the correct course of action: your motivational core says it wants a drink, and the prefrontal cortex assesses the long-term consequences of having it. But the more we drink, the weaker this connection gets – and eventually, we can drink without even briefly contemplating that the drink will get us fired or divorced.

In a neurologically measurable way, drinking reduces your self-control. But the good news is that this connection gets strengthened when you stop drinking. The really good news is that it doesn’t just go back to the strength it was before – it gets stronger. In essence, by getting sober, you have increased your self-control. Cool, right?

Psychological Benefits of Alcohol-Free Living

Mental health and alcohol have a two-way relationship: most mental health problems come with a higher risk of developing a problem with drink, but drinking also increases your odds of developing a mental health problem.

That mental health conditions increase the likelihood of alcohol use problems is well known when it comes to issues like post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is less well known that anxiety and bipolar disorder are associated with similar levels of drinking problems.

But it works the other way round too – many scientists have studied the link between mental health and drinking and concluded that there is a causal relationship between drinking and some psychological issues. Sadly, it is not often discussed how stopping drinking can improve your mental health.

Clearly, this article doesn’t constitute medical advice, but the link between alcohol and serotonin is something we should all understand better. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps with things like mood, sleep, appetite and overall wellbeing. Imbalances in it can cause depression and anxiety, and it’s the chemical that antidepressants target with the aim of improving mental health.

Alcohol initially increases levels of serotonin, which is why people feel euphoric when they first drink. However, that blast of serotonin is outside the brain's ideal balance, so it counters it by reducing the levels of serotonin. That’s why the next morning you feel the opposite of euphoric. In a way, you’ve borrowed the positive feelings – you have to pay them back the next day with negative ones. And there’s always interest to be paid.

To put it simply, long-term alcohol use screws up serotonin – depleting it, interfering with its production and transport, as well as blocking signalling pathways in the brain. Not good. You take out a payday loan every day in the desperate hope of grabbing a bit of wellbeing – but the interest is compounding, and now the debt is bigger than the new loans can ever be.

The Journal of the American Medical Association put it starkly: “Alcohol can not only lead to depressive symptoms but also worsen depressive symptoms in people who already experience them or in those who may be genetically vulnerable to depressive disorders.”

Given that we all know about antidepressants, we should start to realise that alcohol is a pro-depressant – which is probably why you feel better when you stop drinking it. There may well be other things that you need to do to improve your mental health after you’ve stopped drinking, but there’s no doubt that getting sober is one of the best things you can do for your psychological wellbeing.

Sober as Inspiration

This might be a controversial opinion, but being sober is not a reason to do something.

In fact, being sober isn’t a big thing – you’re supposed to be sober. That’s normal life. We shouldn’t rejoice in the fact that we wake up clear-headed – that’s what’s supposed to happen. We shouldn’t celebrate being able to remember what we did last night – that’s what’s supposed to happen. We shouldn’t smile because the low-level sense of shame has disappeared – that’s normal life

But we do.

We enjoy being sober – it becomes a form of inspiration. It becomes the reason we do things; it becomes fuel, motivation. It probably shouldn’t, but it does.

We do things that we don’t enjoy because we know it will help us stay sober. No one really enjoys exercise – it’s an effort and it’s uncomfortable (and sometimes flat-out painful). But we do it because we know it helps us stay sober. We know that it improves our mood, helps us sleep and makes us feel more connected to our bodies and our lives. We don’t want to do it, but we know it will contribute to our sobriety – so it gets done.

But more than that, sometimes we do things because we are sober. The most obvious example of this is writing a book. Many of the people who’ve appeared on Flat-Pack Sober have felt compelled to write to share the joy of being sober.

In part, they are only capable of writing it because they got sober – but on another level, they only have the courage to do it because they’re sober. It’s not so much about the time, focus and energy that stopping drinking gives you – it’s as much about the shift in mindset: I’m doing it because I’m sober.

Getting Ahead by Getting Sober

The first ever episode of Flat-Pack Sober was with Nicholas Ingel. He went from sitting on a dingy sofa wanting to kill himself to business success and a gold medal in powerlifting. Sobriety led to success. No doubt, he worked hard for it – but sobriety was the foundation on which he built that success.

This is a pattern that is repeated in episode after episode. I have no idea which episode we’ve just released, but I’d bet you gold for grass that the same pattern will be there. Sobriety breeds success – and it does so because of the benefits of living a sober lifestyle.

If we tried to describe the benefits of sobriety in 32 words, we’d probably settle for:

• No more wasting your money

• Feel much, much better

• Sleep like you have a clear conscience

• Fewer health problems

• Greater self-control

• Mental stability and peace

• A reason to get out of bed

And when you’ve woken up from that great night’s sleep, it’s worth reminding yourself of those benefits. Maybe you can share them with someone else in need – or maybe they’ll just make you smile. Either way, that’s going to make the world a slightly better place to be.