Just a week or so left of my dry February. Slowly learning that there are much better options than wine when I’m tired and in need of rest and relaxation. I don’t see any reason not to try for dry March as well - 100 days of no alcohol should be a good reset period, right?
Depends on what you are trying to "reset."
There's pretty good research that says that if you had an addiction to alcohol, you really won't "reset" anything in your brain until the 2 year mark.
I know for me I felt a substantial change around 2 years. I wrote about it not too long ago, how before that I felt like someone who had quit drinking. After that I feel like someone who is a non drinker.
If your previous level of drinking was generally very mild and you just felt like you were starting to get into habits you didn't want, then yeah, 100 days is a great stretch.
But if you had a sustained level of habit that was more than you wanted to be drinking, then 100 days is a great start, but don't expect that if you start drinking again that it will be easy to sustain it at a substantially lower level than you did before.
That doesn't mean I'm saying you should be sober for at least 2 years, not at all. Just that you should really think about what your relationship with alcohol used to look like, what you want your relationship with alcohol to look like in the future, and what steps you may need to take to ensure that that future actually happens.
I just don't want you to make the same mistake that virtually everyone makes, which is to be sober for a good few months, be really happy with the impact, then go back to drinking assuming that they've now "reset" their system (they haven't), and then they end up exactly where they were before they ever tried quitting, and now trying to quit again is so much harder.
It's like the cliche of the smoker who quits, is SO HAPPY to have quit, takes a puff of someone's cigarette one day, hacks and coughs and thinks "I hate this! I'm cured!" Thinks they are now free of their addiction, so drops their guard, but then within two weeks is back to smoking a pack a day.
What I liked about Annie Grace was that she was all about determining what role you want alcohol to play in your life.
I decided to never drink again. I saw no benefit to drinking. DH decided to drink very moderately. But we had very different drinking patterns.
I was a daily habit, after work stress drinker who usually didn't drink a lot for any one sitting. DH was a less frequent drinker but once he had 3 drinks would, like, fall off a fucking cliff, lose all inhibition, get absolutely trashed and become a sloppy asshole.
So for him, he has no urge to drink at home after work. He's also perfectly happy not getting drunk when he goes out and only having two drinks once a week. He's been doing that for a few years.
But he never had an addiction, what he has is just a really, really bad reaction to getting drunk. The level of disinhibition he gets is fucking insane. So moderating for him is easy.
Moderating on any given day for me is easy, what wasn't easy was not drinking at all on any given day. I just never ever want to go back to that feeling of wrestling with whether or not I'm going to have a drink that day.
I love too much being free of the evening desire for a glass of wine. It's just gone and I never want it back.
So reflect on what you want your future relationship with alcohol to look like, because unfortunately taking a break doesn't actually eliminate whatever drove you to drink before.
If you stop for 100 days and go back, you will likely go back very quickly to whatever your pattern was before unless you go back with an active plan.
Unfortunately, the mythical "reset" doesn't exist.
