If You Did Dry January, Read This Before You Jump Back Into Drinking
Giacomo Gambineri
This article is part of Dry January, Straight Up, your no-BS guide to cutting out alcohol for 31 days—or longer. SELF will be publishing new articles for this series throughout January. Read more here.
Dry January can turn some folks into sobriety evangelists: They dropped the booze and found their skin brighter, their energy boundless, their focus sharper, or some other life-changing effect that inspires them to quit drinking forever. (Good for them!) But it’s also possible for an alc-free month to be less…revelation-ary. Perhaps you felt a little clearer-headed or slept more deeply—just not enough to swear off dirty martinis for life. Or for whatever other valid reason, you’re planning on drinking alcohol again after taking a break in January. Just know that much like cutting the hard stuff out, reintroducing it can be an adjustment.
That dry-to-wet transition will be most noticeable if you’re someone who would typically down at least one or two drinks a day (or the equivalent number in a week) because you likely had developed a good deal of tolerance previously, Henry Kranzler, MD, director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, tells SELF. A boozeless month will have knocked that tolerance down, so drinking again after Dry January hits a lot harder—especially if you go right back to your normal quantity. It’s the same reason going dry likely affected you more in the first place if you were a frequent versus occasional drinker: The pendulum swing is greater in both directions.
But even if you weren’t drinking heavily beforehand and don’t plan to do so now, you may find that any amount of alcohol affects you differently after a monthlong break from it. And any positive changes you experienced from stopping drinking are bound to fizzle once you pick it back up again, especially if you go harder on the alc than you did before—which is a common temptation. Below, experts share what you should know about drinking again after a break, and how to smoothly reincorporate alcohol into your life, if you choose to do so.
Be aware that you might overdo it when you first start drinking again…
Returning to alcohol after restricting yourself from the stuff could lead you to drink even more than you were before. In studies conducted with lab animals, this is called the “alcohol deprivation effect,” Dr. Kranzler says: When they’re given daily access to alcohol for a long time in their feed and then abruptly denied it for a brief period before regaining access again, they tend to up their intake beyond what they were initially consuming, at least temporarily. This exact mechanism hasn’t been shown in people (largely because of ethical reasons around supplying and restricting booze), but it’s been posed as a model of how we might behave when it comes to alcohol dependence.
The reason why we might chase the opposite extreme after a dry spell isn’t totally clear, but it’s often compared to the tendency to binge-eat after doing a restrictive diet, Sarah Wakeman, MD, medical director for the Mass General Hospital Substance Use Disorder Initiative, tells SELF. “If you feel like you’ve been deprived, there is a natural instinct to push back or even celebrate what you’ve achieved,” she says. That can quickly devolve into all-or-nothing thinking, she explains, or the idea that if you’re no longer dry, you might as well get plastered. But of course, such overcompensating can undo any benefit of what you just did, which is why Dr. Wakeman advises being mindful of this inclination and making a point to reintroduce alcohol gradually (say, having one or two drinks on the first few occasions).
…And alcohol is likely to affect you more than it did before.
On top of potentially being tempted to drink even more than you did pre-January, you might also be more susceptible to alcohol’s effects after a dry spell. Here’s why: When you regularly bathe your cells in alcohol, they adapt to the effects of the substance—but once you press pause, “those neurochemical changes begin to reverse,” Dr. Kranzler explains. Your tolerance, then, regresses back toward whatever it was when you first started drinking, he says.
Again, that shift will be most pronounced in folks who drank regularly enough to develop a significant tolerance to begin with, versus people who only sipped on occasion. But Dr. Wakeman emphasizes that nearly everyone will have some change in their tolerance if they completely cut out alc for a month. So “if you don’t take that into account and you immediately go back to drinking as much as you ordinarily would, you could find yourself more intoxicated than you expected,” Dr. Kranzler says. Cue: blacking out on February 1 (and waking up with a raging hangover on February 2).
By being aware of this potential change, however, you can reframe it as a positive, Dr. Wakeman says. Maybe you used to need three or four drinks to really feel something, and that was adding up to 15 or 20 drinks a week—which is well above the level deemed moderate (and lower risk) by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (that is, one drink a day for people assigned female at birth and up to two drinks a day for people assigned male). Now, post–Dry January, you might get the same effect from, say, one or two drinks in a sitting, which would be a win for both your health and your wallet.
It’s best to use Dry January as a reset and an opportunity to guide your drinking habits going forward.
Two things can be true: No amount of alcohol is good for your mind and body—or, as Dr. Wakeman puts it, “you should never start drinking for your health.” And also, you might want alcohol to play some role in your life once you finish Dry January. “There are lots of things we do that we don’t do explicitly because they make our health better,” Dr. Wakeman points out.
But at the same time, you don’t want to negate the benefits of the dry month you successfully observed. While there’s research to suggest that even a single month off from drinking can bring meaningful improvements to your health, like giving your liver a chance to repair itself and lowering your blood pressure, you’ll toss all that out the window if you wind up drinking more after Dry January ends than you were before.
It’s important to know that one month of eliminating alcohol, in and of itself, “isn’t going to fix anything permanently,” Elizabeth Kovacs, PhD, director of the alcohol research program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, tells SELF. “What would be more beneficial is drastically cutting down from, say, 14 drinks a week to maybe three [per week] for the rest of your life,” she says. In other words, being a moderate drinker forever is better than doing a fully dry month each year only to get sloshed in the weeks or months to follow.
So even if Dry January didn’t change your life so dramatically that you decided to cut out alcohol, consider what it might have shown you about your relationship with booze that could help you strike a balance going forward. Maybe the takeaway was that you’re actually drinking lightly enough that you’re not having any negative consequences from it—and you’re going to reinstate your “damp” way of life in February and beyond, Dr. Wakeman says. Or perhaps you identified social settings in which you had really just been drinking because you always have or because others were, and you didn’t actually need any alcohol to have fun, Dr. Kovacs says. And maybe you can skip the hard stuff in those scenarios going forward, without it feeling like any kind of a loss.
The point is to tune in and be a little more mindful about when, why, and in what circumstances you’re drinking as you restart—versus just instinctively jumping back in where you left off or rebounding toward even heavier tippling. (Dr. Kovacs also recommends not partaking on an empty stomach and alternating hard drinks with water or nonalcoholic beverages to avoid getting accidentally drunk on your first days back.) This way, you’ll hold onto the momentum you’ve gained—and choose to imbibe with as much intention and clarity as you put toward bypassing the booze last month.
Related:
Get more of SELF's great service journalism delivered right to your inbox.
Originally Appeared on Self
