Can You Be Soberish and Have a Drinking Problem?
Every time I walk my daughter to school, there’s one woman whose enthusiastic “hi” sends lightning bolts of dread down my spine. There’s a photo of us together at a happy hour in late spring. In it, we may look like best friends, but I have no clue what her name is. That same evening, I lost my work phone. I know I had at least four drinks, but the event was at an open bar and I wasn’t counting, so it could very well have been double. I wasn’t driving. I didn’t black out. Nothing bad happened, but the evening was messy, and I woke up bleary with a tray of half-eaten happy hour nachos on the pillow next to me.
There is no denying that my 20s were often fueled by cheap wine and poor decisions. As I left that decade behind, I embraced moderation. I’m 39 now, the mom to a 7-year-old, and someone who regularly goes weeks without drinking. I never open a bottle of wine alone, and on most moms’ nights out, you can find me nursing a single margarita. But there are a few times a year where the “old” me comes out. It makes me wonder: Is my periodic abstaining balancing things out, or am I still struggling with questionable drinking tendencies?
I’m not alone. “I recently got cut off by a bartender,” confesses Jane, 45. A married mom of two, she went to happy hour and stayed when her friends left. “I wasn’t going to drive home; my husband was watching the kids, and I just wanted to relax. But getting cut off was humiliating.”
Like me, Jane barely drinks. She was cut off after ordering a fifth glass of Sancerre; while her recollections of why the bartender might have done this are murky, she thinks it’s because of the speed in which she consumed the drinks. While she had nursed one drink during happy hour, the subsequent four were all ordered within the span of an hour, because Jane had told her husband she would be home by 10.
It’s no secret that many people have recently reckoned with their relationship with alcohol. The pandemic dramatically changed drinking habits; one survey of over 6,000 United States adults conducted in late spring 2021 found that 17 percent of respondents met the criteria for “heavy drinking,” defined for women as drinking four or more drinks at least twice in one week. Another study found that over the past several years, there’s been a 41 percent increase in heavy drinking days among women. But if the pandemic increased some people’s drinking habits, getting back to so-called normal life has inspired many to embrace growing trends around part-time sobriety.
On and Off the Wagon
In the past, people have talked about alcohol consumption in clear-cut terms—as in, you either have a handle on it or you don’t. And if you fell into the latter, complete sobriety was really the only answer. But newer trends centering around part-time sobriety are creating a gray area.
It was only a decade ago that the concept of dry January was introduced to the culture. It was originally coined in 2013 by a UK charity called Alcohol Change, whose mission was to encourage people to think about how they consume alcohol. From there, it spread like wildfire, with people all over giving up booze for the month in the name of health and wellness. In fact, in 2022, nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults said they planned to participate, according to a Morning Consult poll.
Out of these booze-free blips, a slew of other new labels have entered the vernacular. Sober curious, Cali sober, mindful drinking, soberish are all used to describe varying degrees of alcohol abstinence, with none of them being associated with a formal diagnosis of substance abuse. Sobriety is the answer to a serious problem, but being soberish is an intentional wellness practice. Like being mostly vegan or using clean beauty products, it’s something you can pat yourself on the back for—you’re in control, you’re making good choices.
As sober curiosity has flourished, so have new avenues to explore the concept. Take for example, Brooke Scheller, a doctor of clinical nutrition, who recently pivoted her practice to focus on the intersection of nutrition and alcohol use. This shift was inspired by feeling like her own drinking had put her on a well-being roller coaster. She began applying her nutrition expertise into how alcohol affects gut health and mood. “Part of it is how many drinks we’re consuming in a week, but even one night of binge drinking can deplete nutrients and create mood imbalances,” she says.
Binge drinking is defined by the Center for Disease Control as drinking four or more drinks on one occasion for women. And keep in mind that the CDC defines a “drink” as five ounces of wine—it’s not uncommon for a restaurant pour to be six ounces, and at-home pours can be even larger. As Scheller began talking about her own sober curious journey on Instagram, she found many women who felt the same way. These weren’t women who “needed” to drink, but rather women who recognized their drinking behavior didn’t feel quite right and wanted to do something about it. “I think, for many, it feels extreme to walk into an AA room,” Scheller says.
Gillian Tietz, host of the Sober Powered podcast and creator of a membership group called Living a Sober Powered Life, agrees. Tietz chased moderation for years. “I was so desperate to figure out, how can I just drink less? That’s all I wanted to do, and I kept bargaining: Oh, I’ll only drink on special occasions or I won’t drink on this day.” Tietz would do 30-, 60-, 90- day sober stretches only to binge afterward. Now she explores the science of addiction on her podcast and has created a community for others struggling with the role of alcohol in their lives. Her group, along with Scheller’s and scores of others, has created communities that thrive in gray area between happy hours and AA. While the first step of AA is admitting powerlessness over alcohol, Tietz says the approach in sober curious groups gives power back to individuals.
A Hiding Place for Problematic Drinking
There’s nothing wrong with giving your liver a break, but the concept of being soberish may also make it easier for people to hide from their problematic drinking habits, says Marc Turner, interim chief executive and president of The Gateway Foundation, a nonprofit substance-use-disorder treatment provider with facilities across Illinois.”There are a lot of misconceptions about alcohol use disorder. Because of the things we’ve been told or what we’ve seen in the media, we believe that people who have this disease are not able to function in this world. And that’s not the case.”
Turner adds that many people create a checklist in their brain—they haven’t gotten a DUI, they haven’t missed work, they can skip drinking for days or even weeks at a time. They use these things to determine that they don’t have a problem, and that may not be true. What’s more, sometimes this soberish label leads to even more binge-drinking behavior. “We see a lot of folks who try dry January and say, ‘Well, I quit for 31 days; I must be fine.’ But then we ask, ‘What did February look like?’ Alcohol-use disorder is a progressive disease, and it’s not uncommon for people to double down after a break.” Sure, drinking nonstop is an issue—but so is any behavior around alcohol that feels out of control (even if it’s only semi-regular).
Seeing Soberish for What It Is
This doesn’t mean that the rise of soberish culture is all bad. In many ways, it gives those who may be too nervous to fully explore their relationship with alcohol a safe way to do it. Matthew Ruble, MD, the chief medical officer of Discovery Behavioral Health, a substance abuse treatment center, says that these informal sober curious groups can be a great way to begin to assess how drinking plays a role in your life.
“I’m all in favor of looking inward and exploring,” says Ruble. But he cautions that, for some people, informal online groups, courses, or sober challenges may not be giving the full support needed to examine their relationship with alcohol. “Alcohol acts as a depressant to the central nervous system. And as it leaves your system, you might experience depression, anxiety, insomnia,” notes Ruble. He adds that a professional trained in substance-use disorders will know how to handle that in ways that support groups may not be equipped to. Instead, a both/and approach may better serve someone looking to determine whether or not their behavior around alcohol is problematic. Take breaks from alcohol, seek out sober curious support groups, and talk to someone trained in substance abuse for guidance.
As I unpacked these conversations, I realized a few things. First: Whether sober, soberish, or counting down the minutes until happy hour, less judgment and more open discussion about alcohol and its role in how you feel and how you show up in your life is most likely a good thing. So, too, is ditching any artificial checklists that arbitrarily place drinking behaviors into “good” or “bad” columns. As true as this is, so is the fact that the ability to be soberish cannot be a litmus test to divide problematic drinkers from non-problematic drinkers who had a messy evening.
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