Earlier this year, I took six weeks off drinking following a particularly wet January spent attending a friend’s wedding and visiting family in Australia. I mentally framed the period as an experiment, and while I felt frustrated when I couldn’t celebrate the end of my Dutch language exams with a glass of champagne, and was annoyed to find peer pressure persists well into adulthood, where for some the only acceptable reasons for not drinking are pregnancy or illness, it was a success. I felt a mental clarity I didn’t know was possible. Slept like an angel. Was blissfully free of ennui and existential dread. Pleased to discover I was capable of attending margarita-fueled dinners while nursing a 0% beer and that the sacred ritual of long lunches is still on offer even when it doesn’t involve wine. Who knew?
A lot of people, as it turns out. As many as 28% of young adults in the UK do not drink, and many celebrities championing an alcohol-free life. Bella Hadid went one step further, launching her own non-alcoholic, ‘functional’ drinks label, Kin Euphorics. Even the omnipresent British pub culture is bending to the trend. A recent report shows that almost a third of all pub visits in the UK are now alcohol-free, with low and no-alcohol sales up 23% during 2023 and more than double since the start of the pandemic, according to the British Beer And Pub Association. Sales of Guinness 0% have increased 150 per cent in a year. Upmarket watering holes are also embracing the movement, with non-alcoholic cocktail lists at places like Heads + Tails and 34 Mayfair proving that temperance doesn’t have to mean tacky, sugary drinks and paper parasols.
“Interestingly, I had no intention of quitting and I wouldn’t have even considered myself ‘sober curious’,” says Art Garments founder, Grace Corby, about her unexpected decision to go sober in November 2020. “I had been a heavyweight social drinker since the age of 16. My 20s are truthfully much of a blur, and I was gradually descending into daily drinking that left me antsy if I had to go without. I had tried a few weeks without it and was surprised at how clear-headed I felt, so I was really just wanting to control my habits and cut back.”
The day she finished reading Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind was the day she quit for good. “The book unpicks the unconscious reasons we drink: because we think it’s
social, it makes us bubblier, relaxes us, and tastes good with food,” she says. “I held all of those beliefs until this book challenged them and I’m so grateful to have read it.”
Anyone who has spent an entire day horizontal with a parched mouth and pounding headache, endured the multi-day existential hangovers that greet you on the other side of 30, or literally wasted hours of their life being wasted, understands drinking is a major time leech. For Grace, regaining those lost hours has been the most revelatory part of quitting. “Life is long!” she exclaims. “The time-slippage I experienced during my formative years is so severe. Years bleeding one into the other, amazing gigs and milestones forgotten, 400 Sundays spent vomiting. The last four years of sobriety have been interminable, in only good ways!”
Reflecting on her past, she reveals the mixed emotions she feels about her younger years. “Sometimes I feel ‘worldly’ and ‘vibrant’ to have experienced all my partying, and sometimes I feel deep regret,” she says. “Not that I did anything I find too shameful, but I wonder if I squandered my potential and set myself back because I was so in love with drinking and having ‘a good time.’ I won’t waste time regretting anything, but I do find it interesting that I can hold those totally opposite feelings together, volleying between them. I think it speaks to still-ingrained beliefs about the inherent ‘funness’ of booze that all my de-conditioning work has not shaken for me.”
Alcohol is a carcinogenic neurotoxin that has been linked to liver disease, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, stroke, dementia, anxiety, and depression. It impacts our memory, mental health and our moods. Bloats us, prematurely ages us, robs us of our sleep. Despite this, and unlike with any other addictive substance, it’s a completely normalised fixture in society. Alcohol, we’re told time and again, is the life of the party. Our elixir of choice to soothe, socialise, celebrate. It’s understandable that quitting comes with challenges. “It can be lonely and make social occasions a little duller,” Grace says. “I often go home from social events around 10-11pm, sometimes later if I’m loving the conversation. I definitely get more bored socially and would often rather be home reading a novel.”
While Grace misses “the occasional night of abandon” and “the warm, buzzy, chatty feeling after two glasses of wine at dinner,” she’d never trade it for what she’s gained on the other side of alcohol. “I’d prefer my baseline to be stable and capable, rather than experience moments of induced euphoria and have to pay the price throughout each week, off-keel,” she says. “I’m really grateful to feel ‘present’ in my own life. Physically, I feel amazing, I have so much mental clarity, more energy, more motivation, more resilience. I often talk of the ‘space’ between something bad happening and reacting to it. I used to be so reactive, I couldn’t control my emotions.
My previous life was one of overwhelm, tears, lethargy, and frequent bouts of depression. Drinking was poisoning me.”
For her, moderation is futile. “I make a point of remembering how bad my mental health used to be, so whenever I get the slightest inkling to ‘just have a glass,’ I shut the door on it straight away. It is truly not worth it to try and moderate. Alcohol is addictive and moreish; it is chemically difficult to moderate,” she says.
In our booze-obsessed society (or at least the one I exist in), it’s rare to meet someone who has quit alcohol yet rarer still to meet someone who has never touched it in the first place. Especially when this choice isn’t rooted in religious duty or a reaction to family history, rather a confident and self-made one. For Amsterdam-based art director and stylist, Anu Odugbesan, the choice not to drink was pure intuition, free from any external influence. Born in the UK, she was raised in a traditional Nigerian household where respect and morals were strong pillars of her childhood, and while her mother was strict, Odugbesan credits her otherwise liberal and balanced approach to parenting. “Drinking was never seen as taboo or prohibited,” she says. “I remember on occasional Saturday evenings after dinner my mother would sit and read a book with a glass of red wine or Baileys with ice, but she always drank in moderation, and when she was practising Lent, she would abstain from any alcohol. I just never felt gravitated towards it or felt inclined to have it. If I wanted it, I could have had it, but I just chose not to. The decision was very instinctive.”
Despite the occasional thought that a drink might make social situations easier, Anu remains steadfast in her choice. “There are definitely social events where I think, Hmm, if I had a drink maybe it wouldn’t be so daunting,” she says. “That initial awkwardness when meeting new people would be less intimidating. But I like the challenge; I like not being dependent or reliant on something to influence my mood. I also think it’s interesting that people are so surprised that I don’t drink. When I explain it’s simply because I choose not to, they seem even more surprised or somewhat impressed.”
I’m impressed despite myself. If I cast my mind back to my own foray into drinking, it was very much a result of extrinsic influences and something I unquestioningly entered into. I was dutifully playing the part of a teenager growing up in coastal Australia. Clandestine bottles of cheap champagne at beach parties, nips of vodka pinched from the pantry, a six-pack of cruisers snuck into music festivals. I was taking the well-trodden path into adolescence—a result of social conditioning (particularly the glamorisation of drinking in shows like The O.C. and Skins), peer pressure, and what felt like my birthright to rebel against authority.
Did Anu not feel this same pressure to conform? “All my friends were drinkers, and they would always ask me to join in, but I didn’t feel the need or pressure,” she says. “During my teenage years, most weekends my friends and I would go to raves or parties. I grew up listening to a lot of music—like funky house, grime, and hip hop—and I soon realised that in order for me to really enjoy myself when going to a gig or a club, the music had to be good. As long as the line-up was decent, I could really vibe, dance and let loose. I didn’t feel the need to have alcohol to keep me going or feel alive.”
Prior to my sober stint earlier this year, the last significant (by my definition) one I took was five years ago, following laparoscopy surgery. The procedure only called for two weeks off alcohol, but I figured it was probably the best excuse for a reset I had, so selected the arbitrary timeframe of six weeks to abstain. I was joined by one of my best friends and favourite ‘drinking buddy’ at the time, and as our WhatsApp paper trail attests, it was an odyssey through mixed feelings and emotions. Initially, we were firing off texts to the tune of, ‘This is so boooring’ and ‘Why did we do this to ourselves?’ but as the weeks passed and the benefits slowly revealed themselves to us—not least the cumulative effect restorative sleep has on your mood and mental faculties—we were positively ecstatic. Euphoric. Enraptured with this new way of life. ‘Fuck, I feel gooood’ became our daily refrain. A mantra we’d ping back and forth as we floated out of bed sans alarm clock at the saintly hour of 6:30am.
When you feel this good, you want everyone around you to feel good, too. Enter my evangelical stage. ‘Drinking again, are we?’, I’d comment if my parents opened a bottle of red wine with dinner. It was an act I would have found as regular as brushing my teeth two weeks prior, and which would again become common practice in the months following. Yet here I was acting as if I were the first person to ever take a break from alcohol. In my defence: only through doing so was I able to clearly see how much incidental drinking featured in my life and how good I felt as a result of hitting the pause button. Before, I’d only ever viewed drinking in binary terms: alcoholics vs everyone else. I’d seen one acquaintance give up drinking out of medical necessity (cirrhosis of the liver) and another due to alcoholism. I was scared of both scenarios, because that would mean I’d have a “problem” that would exclude me from drinking, which was my preferred mode of socialising at the time. I’d admonish myself if I ever took it too far—said something cringe, got sloppy drunk, or blacked out and had to spend the next morning patching hazy memories together into a mosaic of regret—but I’d only ever made promises to myself to moderate in future, it really never occurred to give it up entirely. (Or even pass on a glass of red wine with dinner when my default mode was to just passively indulge). It was the first time I really questioned what my life could be like without alcohol in it. My first brush with what we’d now define as ‘sober curiosity’.
UK writer Ruby Warrington sparked the ‘sober curious’ movement in 2018 with the release of her book, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol. In it, she addresses individuals who might not identify as alcoholics in the traditional AA sense but who suspect they are ‘probably, kind of, just a little bit
addicted’—essentially, anyone who regularly drinks. The book examines the biological, social, and psychological reasons behind why we drink and highlights the paradoxes inherent in doing so, such as drinking to feel more confident only to wake up in a sea of self-doubt, drinking to be ‘cool’ when we’re actually just conforming, and drinking to feel sexy when it “numbs our senses and makes us look like shit.”
Ruby encourages readers to adopt a “questioning mindset to every drinking situation, rather than simply going along with the dominant drinking culture.” To critically appraise the mindless ways in which drinking is expected of us, regardless of whether our behaviour seems overtly “problematic” or not.
The UK-based Club Soda also sheds light on the grey areas of alcohol dependency. “Collectively, we’ve inherited this story about alcohol that the only way to change your drinking is if you’ve hit rock bottom,” co-founder and director, Dru Jaeger, said in an interview with The New York Times. Club Soda offers online and in-person social events without alcohol, as well as free and paid programs to help members manage their drinking habits. Notably, around half of Club Soda’s roughly 100,000 members aim to moderate their drinking rather than become entirely sober.
The culture of heavy social drinking seems to have largely dried up with millennials. Most of my Gen-Z friends didn’t share my boozy initiation into adolescence, and to be fair, I probably wouldn’t have either if there had been the same ever-present threat of drunken videos emerging on social media the next day. According to a 2022 survey from Drinkaware, 26% of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now “fully teetotal.” And those who drink were found to be drinking less frequently: 39% drank alcohol less often than weekly compared to 33% in 2019. Beyond concerns about their digital footprint, years of public health campaigns have succeeded in raising awareness about the dangers of drinking. Specifically, The World Health Organisation’s recent report states that there’s no safe level of alcohol consumption, despite the long-held myth that a glass of red is good for our health. The pandemic also played a role, as lockdowns and social distancing shifted focus to personal health and well-being, and reduced opportunities to socialise with friends meant drinking lost its sheen.
“People are realising how incongruent alcohol is with general well-being,” Grace believes. “In Australia we have an unquestioning heavy-drinking culture, but also a focus on wellness and health, and I think people are starting to see they don’t go well
together. Maybe we’re also looking at the grown-ups in our lives and saying, ‘Do we really want to be battling with that as I become a parent and enter middle age?’ I asked that and I answered no.”