I Never Planned to Become Sober
I never planned to become sober.
I planned to take a few weeks off drinking.
There was no dramatic intervention. No morning when I woke up unable to remember what I had done the night before and decided enough was enough. I hadn’t lost my job, destroyed my marriage or wrapped my car around a tree.
Alcohol hadn’t ruined my life.
For large parts of it, alcohol had probably helped me.
That is precisely why this is a more complicated conversation than simply declaring that alcohol is bad and everyone should stop drinking it.
When I was a teenager, alcohol was one of the most effective social tools I had.
I wasn’t naturally the loudest person in the room. I could be confident, but I could also be reserved, particularly around people I didn’t know well. Alcohol removed some of that friction. It helped me loosen up, speak more freely and feel as though I fitted in.
From the age of 12, I was a rugby player. As I got older, I discovered that alcohol and rugby were 2 sides of the same coin. They were inseparable.
Drinking wasn’t merely something that happened around rugby. It was woven into the culture. Matches, clubhouses, drinking games, nights out and the expectation that everyone would participate were all part of belonging to the group.
Interestingly, after many matches I would have one pint in the clubhouse and quietly slope off home.
But on a proper night out, I could drink worrying amounts.
That sounds contradictory, but our relationship with alcohol is rarely as simple as whether we drink a lot or a little. Context matters. The people around us matter. What we believe the alcohol is doing for us matters.
In the clubhouse, one drink might be enough to show my face and be part of the ritual.
On a night out, alcohol offered something else.
Confidence. Abandonment. Belonging. Permission to stop monitoring myself quite so closely.
At that age, I didn’t think about any of this. I wasn’t analysing dopamine, inhibition, sleep or behaviour. I was doing what the people around me did and enjoying myself.
And I did enjoy myself.
There is no point rewriting my past to make my present-day decision appear more virtuous. Some of my funniest memories involved alcohol. Some of my strongest friendships were built during nights out. Drinking helped me participate in environments where I might otherwise have stayed closer to the edge.
It served a purpose.
The same was true during my early management career at Sainsbury’s.
There was a strong drinking culture among many of the managers. Social events weren’t quiet meals followed by an early night. They could become fourteen-hour drinking sessions filled with drinking games, ridiculous behaviour and the kind of shared stories people would still be laughing about at work weeks later.
Being willing to participate helped me become part of the group.
It showed that I wasn’t only the serious young manager who worked hard and wanted to progress. I could also be fun. I could let go. I could join in.
Did drinking help my career?
I think it probably did.
Not because anyone formally promoted people according to how many pints they could consume, but because careers are shaped by relationships as well as performance. People tend to trust those they know. They include people they enjoy spending time with. Shared experiences create familiarity, and familiarity often creates opportunity.
Alcohol gave me access to those experiences.
It helped me become known as a team player. Someone who worked hard but could also have a laugh. Someone who was part of the group rather than merely working alongside it.
Again, alcohol was doing a job.
It wasn’t yet something I used every evening. It wasn’t a substance I needed to get through the day. It was a social tool, and within those environments it was an effective one.
The problem is that the job alcohol performs can change without us noticing.
As I got older, the quantities I consumed generally reduced.
The frequency increased.
I was no longer regularly going out and drinking until I could barely stand. I was working longer hours, carrying more responsibility and building a life that looked increasingly successful from the outside.
Alcohol became less about going out and more about coming down.
A difficult day would end with a drink.
A particularly stressful week might involve several.
The drink marked a transition. Work was finished. I could relax. I had earned it.
That belief is deeply embedded in our culture.
We celebrate with alcohol.
We commiserate with alcohol.
We use it to connect, to relax, to switch off and to reward ourselves for surviving another difficult day.
For me, the shift was subtle.
I hadn’t gone from being someone with no relationship with alcohol to someone drinking alone every evening. The same substance that had once helped me socialise gradually became something I associated with relief.
The quantity looked less alarming than it had during my teenage years and early twenties.
The pattern was arguably more influential.
I was under significant pressure at work. My sleep became poor. I would wake during the night with thoughts racing through my head. I became more anxious, more mentally overloaded and slower to make decisions.
I blamed the job.
That was not an unreasonable conclusion. The job was stressful. The hours were excessive. The expectations were relentless, and for a long time I lived with the feeling that I was permanently on call.
But I failed to ask whether the thing I was using to recover from that pressure might also be contributing to how bad I felt the following day.
Alcohol appeared to help me unwind.
Then I slept badly.
Poor sleep made me more anxious and mentally sluggish.
That made work feel harder.
A harder day increased my desire for another drink when I got home.
The cycle didn’t look dramatic from the outside.
It looked normal.
That is what makes some patterns so difficult to recognise. They don’t announce themselves as problems. They blend into ordinary life.
I wasn’t pouring vodka into my coffee before work.
I wasn’t hiding bottles around the house.
I wasn’t missing meetings or becoming incapable of doing my job.
I was functioning.
More than functioning, I was succeeding.
But functioning is not the same as feeling good.
It is possible to keep performing while gradually accepting poorer sleep, lower energy, increased anxiety and a reduced capacity to think clearly as the unavoidable price of adulthood.
I did exactly that.
I didn’t decide to stop drinking because I had finally uncovered this cycle.
The decision was far less significant.
I decided to give myself a break.
That was it.
A few weeks without alcohol. A short reset after years of repeating broadly the same pattern. I wasn’t declaring myself sober. I wasn’t telling people that I would never drink again.
I wasn’t even particularly interested in never drinking again.
I simply wanted to see how I felt.
The first surprise was how quickly I began to notice differences.
My sleep improved.
My mood became more stable.
I felt less anxious.
I had more energy.
My thinking felt clearer.
Over time, my weight improved too. I was never dramatically overweight. At most, I was usually only a few kilos heavier than I wanted to be. But removing alcohol made it easier to control my weight and made healthier choices feel less like a constant negotiation.
The improvements were not theatrical.
I didn’t wake after two alcohol-free weeks feeling like an entirely different human being.
It was quieter than that.
I simply started feeling more like myself.
That made the decision strangely easy.
The question stopped being:
How long am I going to continue this break?
It became:
Why would I go back?
What would I be returning to?
Worse sleep?
More anxiety?
Additional calories?
Slower mornings?
A few hours of temporary relaxation followed by a day that felt slightly harder than it needed to?
Once I had experienced the comparison for long enough, drinking again no longer felt like returning to normal.
It felt like deliberately reintroducing something I had discovered I was better without.
A few weeks became a month.
A month became several months.
Several months became a year.
I am now more than two and a half years sober.
Even writing that word feels slightly strange.
“Sober” can sound as though it belongs to people with a far more dramatic story than mine. It can imply a battle, a rock bottom or a life rebuilt from the wreckage of addiction.
That isn’t my story.
I stopped drinking almost accidentally.
I took a break, paid attention to what happened and decided I preferred the outcome.
There has been pressure to drink again. Socially and within established relationships, your decision to stop can disrupt a pattern that other people had assumed would continue indefinitely.
People remember the version of you who drank with them.
They remember the nights out, the shared bottles, the rituals and the jokes. When you remove yourself from that arrangement, you are not only changing what is in your glass. You are changing part of the relationship.
That does not mean everyone who offers you a drink has sinister intentions. Often they simply want the old dynamic back. The familiar version of you made sense to them.
There is also a widespread fear that stopping drinking will make someone boring.
I understand it.
Alcohol is involved in so much of our social lives that removing it can feel like removing the event itself. People imagine standing awkwardly in a pub while everyone else gradually becomes louder and more animated.
Yet I know people who have never drunk and remain some of the most enjoyable people to spend time with.
I have also discovered that being the designated driver makes you remarkably popular. Everyone gets home safely, nobody needs to pay for a taxi and I wake up the following morning without trying to reconstruct the final two hours of the night.
The social benefits of alcohol were real for me.
So are the benefits of no longer drinking it.
Both things can be true.
That is why I am not interested in writing essays telling everyone else what to do.
Some people drink occasionally, enjoy it and experience no obvious desire to increase the amount or frequency. Others recognise that alcohol occupies far more space in their lives than they would like to admit.
I am not qualified to diagnose either group.
Nor am I interested in becoming a sobriety coach.
There are people with much deeper professional knowledge and far more direct experience of addiction and recovery than me.
My work is about attention, agency, sleep, decision-making, performance and presence.
After two and a half years without alcohol, it would be dishonest to pretend alcohol has no relationship with any of those things.
I cannot spend years questioning the forces that shape human behaviour and then ignore one simply because it is socially acceptable.
I cannot write about sleep while refusing to discuss something that affected mine.
I cannot write about anxiety and mental clarity without acknowledging the loop I experienced.
I cannot write about agency while pretending every decision we make is fully conscious and unaffected by habit, chemistry, culture or social expectation.
Alcohol did not ruin my life.
At different stages, it gave me confidence, belonging, social capital and temporary relief.
Then I stopped drinking it and discovered that many of the things I believed it was giving me were no longer things I needed.
That is the part I keep returning to.
I never planned to become sober.
I planned to take a short break.
The break gave me enough distance to see the pattern.
Once I could see it, going back would have required me to ignore what I had learned.
And that, more than anything, is why I still do not drink.
Not because I believe everyone else should follow me.
Not because alcohol is evil.
Not because my life was collapsing.
Because I ran an experiment.
I paid attention to the result.
And the result made the decision for me.
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