Advice | Aiming for a ‘dry’ no-booze January? Great, but even a ‘damp’ one can help

Considering making this January dry? You wouldn’t be alone. It’s a pretty popular move at the start of a new year.

This year, though, we’re betting a lot of sober-curious people are going to be opting for a “damp” month instead of fully dry, thanks to the “Dry(ish) January Challenge” — a new initiative that encourages people to try out a month of moderate drinking instead of abstinence.

The Dry(ish) challenge is being offered by Sunnyside, a mindful drinking app that’s designed to help people change their relationship with alcohol, as opposed to giving it up altogether. It’s worth noting, however, that when you sign up for the challenge, one option is to start your journey with a conventional month off alcohol.

The Sunnyside program is flexible and offers several personalized paths forward, depending on whether your goal is saving money, losing weight, sleeping better, feeling less reliant on alcohol in social situations or never feeling the pain of a hangover again.

Which is better though? A dry January? Or a damp one?

“I think it really depends on the person,” said James MacKillop, Peter Boris Chair in Addictions Research at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and McMaster University. “Some people find it helpful to think in black and white terms and, so, simply declaring January dry can be an easier decision to make and stick with because some people find that, once they start, it’s a slippery slope to control the behaviour.”

MacKillop says a month off drinking can help people gain perspective, break habits and change the inertia around unhealthy behaviours. It can also help the body recalibrate and go back to a lower “set point” of alcohol tolerance.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to changing drinking patterns. The Dry(ish) challenge suggests, as a benefit of using the Sunnyside tool, that people who are going it alone with abstinence might feel badly if they slip and that few people approach Dry January with any clear plan for what will happen in February.

“From a treatment perspective, we try abstinence and then, if abstinence isn’t achievable by that person, we would then try to reduce consumption,” said Kevin Shield, a scientist with the Collaborating Centre in Addiction and Mental Health at CAMH (the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), and assistant professor in the epidemiology division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “And for the general public, if somebody is concerned they might be consuming more than the low-risk drinking guidelines, if they want to abstain that’s great. If they want to reduce that’s great, too.

“Either way, you will experience health benefits.”

Both MacKillop and Shield say the message is “less is always better” whether it’s taking a month off or simply reducing consumption. It’s hard, though, to know if you’re effectively reducing your consumption if you don’t know how much you drink in the first place.

“If you’re more aware of your alcohol consumption it’s always better, so tracking is a helpful tool,” said Shield, who notes that many people don’t have a totally clear idea of how much they drink.

“If you’re wanting to reduce, tracking allows you to have a benchmark. In science, we have a saying that, ‘If you want to change something, you first must measure it.’”

Before the mindful drinking apps came along (there are many), people tracked their drinking with pen and paper. And using a diary is still a perfectly effective tool, if you can recall how many you had the night before. That might be an advantage to an app with a tracker (nearly all of them have one), since it’s almost certainly easier to click an app when you order a drink than pull out a diary.

That doesn’t mean people will faithfully put their information in an app, either. Since mindful drinking apps are new, we don’t have a perfectly firm grasp on what works in an app and what doesn’t.

“I think it’s tricky, because the trackers have to be really user-friendly and they have to be really unintrusive for people to really stick with them,” said MacKillop. “And one of the problems keeping track of alcohol is that it comes in so many different formats and beverage sizes and concentrations, so I think the devil’s in the details.”

The low-risk drinking guidelines advise no more than 10 standard drinks per week for women and 15 for men, but it’s easy to get confused about what a standard drink is: five ounces of 12 per cent wine; 12 ounces of five per cent beer; 1.5 ounces of 40 per cent alcohol. That means a lot of two-ounce cocktails in bars are more than a standard pour. So is a strong beer or a supersized “holiday pour” of wine.

Shield said that, on average, the drinks we actually consume in our lived lives are nearly one-and-a-half times as big as a “standard drink.” So that’s definitely something to be mindful of — app or no app.

“Abstinence is not always achievable and it’s not always the goal,” said Shield. “But most people will feel better just going from three drinks down to two and experience positive health benefits.

“So if you decide that your dry January looks like a reduction in alcohol consumption by one drink a day, then great.”

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