How to stop drinking

Most articles about quitting drinking open with motivation. This one opens with a safety warning, because for some readers it's the only part that matters.

If you drink heavily every day, stopping suddenly can be medically serious. Alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and, in severe cases, a condition called delirium tremens, which can be life-threatening. It is one of the few withdrawals that can require medical supervision.

That warning applies to a minority of people reading this. If you're drinking more than you'd like at weekends, or a few glasses most evenings, and you're not physically dependent, the rest of this guide is written for you.

"Drinking less" is not a plan, because it has no failure condition and no success condition. It survives contact with a Friday for about twenty minutes.

Something specific and checkable works better: no alcohol at all, or no alcohol on weekdays, or a fixed number per week counted honestly. Whatever it is, you should be able to answer at any moment whether you're currently doing it. Ambiguity is where these attempts leak.

For a lot of people, complete abstinence is genuinely easier to hold than moderation, because there's no daily negotiation and no judgement call to make while already having a drink.

Alcohol tends to be woven into far more of a life than other habits — it's attached to social events, food, celebration, grief, stress, and simply the transition from work to evening.

That means the useful question is rarely "why do I drink" in the abstract. It's which specific situations in your actual week produce a drink almost automatically. Usually there are three or four, and they're mundane: the first hour home, Friday with particular people, a specific restaurant, a bad day.

Each one needs its own answer, because they're different problems. A stress trigger and a social trigger have almost nothing in common except the outcome.

This is the difference between quitting drinking and quitting most other things: the majority of slips happen in company, with other people actively offering, and with a social cost to refusing.

1. 1

   Decide your line in advance

   Have something short ready for when you're offered. "I'm not drinking tonight" or "I'm off it at the moment" both work. The point is not to be improvising under mild social pressure with everyone watching.

2. 2

   Have a drink in your hand

   Practically, holding something removes most of the attention. An empty hand at a party invites the offer repeatedly.

3. 3

   Arrange your own exit

   Being able to leave when you want, without depending on anyone else's evening, removes the hour where most decisions get reversed.

4. 4

   Pick your first few events carefully

   You don't have to test yourself at a wedding in week one. Sequencing the easy ones first is strategy, not avoidance.

Not drinking is invisible from the outside and mostly invisible from the inside too — the reward for a good week is the absence of a bad one, which is thin motivation at 9pm on a difficult evening.

Converting it into something countable helps more than it sounds like it should. A day counter that goes up. The money, which is usually a larger figure than people expect. The hours you'd have spent drinking or recovering. Sleep, which many people notice within the first couple of weeks.

An app is good at the specific moment a craving arrives at an hour when nobody's available. It is not a substitute for meetings, counselling, or a doctor, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

If alcohol is causing real damage in your life, the things with the strongest track record are structured support and professional treatment. Plenty of people use both alongside an app, and that combination works better than either alone.