Neither drunk nor dry: what it means to be “sober”

One day last year, Christine Mosley woke up with the kind of hangover that makes you question yourself. That day she decided she would never drink again.

A few days later, Ms. Mosley, 31, found herself with a cocktail in hand. For her at least, she says, “it’s really not that simple.”

More recently, Ms. Mosley, a corporate marketing manager in San Francisco, has tried to be not completely sober, but “sober.”Yeah”, by reducing your alcohol consumption and being more attentive to its effects on your mood and health.

“I want to emphasize the ‘-ish’ part: not being dry but increasing the number of dry days,” she said.

The term, sometimes also called “sober curious”, has become more widespread in the United States and elsewhere as the health risks of alcohol have become better understood. “Being sober” can mean drinking more conscientiously, drinking less, or avoiding alcohol altogether, but not other drugs. At parties, people often opt for non-alcoholic soft drinks and beers, and more and more people are using apps that help them track and reduce their alcohol consumption.

The idea has been popularized by faith-based podcasts like Soberish Uprising and social media accounts that advocate a sober lifestyle.

One is led by Katie Nessel, a stay-at-home mom of two in Seattle, who opened the account in 2022 after realizing she had started “really looking forward to that 5 p.m. drink.”

Ms. Nessel doesn’t try to avoid alcohol completely, nor does she think her more than 200,000 followers should need to. But she likes to post recipes for low-alcohol cocktails and links to studies on the health risks posed by alcohol.

“The hard truth is that total sobriety won’t accomplish anything for people who just want to cut back,” she said. “This all-or-nothing approach means most people will do nothing and continue drinking for a long time.”

Sober vs. sober

Growing scientific consensus suggests that no amount of alcohol is good for your health and that even small amounts can cause harm.

Abstinence is healthier than drinking a little, even though some doctors have touted the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption for years.

And for patients with serious alcohol use disorders, sobriety may be the only way to avoid cravings, said Barbara Wood, an addiction specialist in Rockville, Maryland. These consequences may include loss of employment, relationships, and interest in children or hobbies.

“If their reward system is so organized around the feeling of good that alcohol provides, it will be more difficult to control that urge to drink,” Dr. Wood said.

Even for some people who haven’t been diagnosed with an alcohol use disorder, sobriety simply works better. Among them is Dawn Murray, a high school librarian in St. Louis, who began drinking every day of the week during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ms Murray, 43, didn’t like the effects alcohol had on her. This worsened the symptoms of his autoimmune diseases and arthritis and affected his sleep. She would also wake up with increased anxiety from a hangover she called “hangziety,” which made her job more difficult.

For a time, Ms. Murray tried a sober lifestyle. She immersed herself in “quitting” books and podcasts, started weight training five days a week, and subscribed to Reframe, an app to help people reduce their alcohol consumption.

But when she drank, it made the symptoms of her illnesses even worse. One night last August, awakened by pain in her gut, she asked herself a question.

“Why am I still drinking? It’s poison,” she said. “I was exhausted. It just didn’t make sense anymore.”

She hasn’t had a drink since.

“Being sober” can help reduce harm

Public health officials have long advocated sobriety as the best antidote to the alcohol problem. But even as the harms of alcohol are better understood, some experts have come to believe that this approach may not work best for the millions of people who are not dependent on alcohol or who only have a or two symptoms of alcohol use disorder, such as difficulty limiting their alcohol consumption or occasional binge drinking.

To try to reach people who don’t want or need to quit, experts have increasingly taken a harm reduction approach, arguing that it’s better to reduce at least a little than not at all. .

“It’s good to think beyond the two states of drunk or forever sober,” said Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University.

Alcohol consumption has increased in recent years – and with it, alcohol-related illnesses and deaths. Between 1999 and 2020, alcohol-related deaths in the United States more than doubled, according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say even small changes can help.

Studies have recently found that people who reduce their alcohol intake or drink excessively experience lower blood pressure, improved liver function, and better quality of life less often. Heavy drinkers can reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease by moderating their alcohol consumption. A small study showed that anxiety symptoms also improved.

Dr. Humphreys compares the sober approach to the way many doctors approach weight loss: “A slight reduction is still a benefit, and it’s okay to aim for that goal, rather than the potentially demoralizing goal of ‘I have to achieve perfection right away.” ‘”

For some people, the harm reduction approach has worked well.

When Kayla Lyons first tried to change her own relationship with alcohol, she tried to become completely sober. At the time, her life was falling apart because of her drinking and the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin, she said.

At age 23, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous. The program helped her a lot, she said, and she even got the organization’s symbol tattooed on her forearm. But after two years, she decided to seek other approaches to healing.

“AA saved my life,” she said. “But I don’t think anything in life is binary.”

Since then, she has been hesitating between moderating her alcohol consumption and cutting off completely. Sometimes she microdose psilocybin, she said.

It worked for her. In 2023, Ms. Lyons also published an autobiographical guide to drinking less. She called it “sober.”