Hey there!
We know how we quit drinking (more details below), but we want to hear from you!
Our short (5 mins, max 23 questions), anonymous survey is intended to give us a sense of what’s helped people quit or cut back on drinking.
We would really appreciate your help letting us know what worked for you! Your responses will help us develop new ways to help other people quit or cut back on drinking.
Here is the link again :). Thanks so much for your help!!
And here, for those who are curious, is what worked for us:
First, we decided we needed to moderate our drinking. At that point, we were going through a decent amount of both vodka and wine between us in the course of a regular weekend. When we watched a documentary about rehab, we realized that we might be drinking a bit too much and needed to cool it.
We started building Drinker’s Helper then. Once it was built, we used it to track our drinking during that moderation phase. We carefully kept track and got our drinking down within recommended moderation limits. We also learned that our drinking mostly happened when we were happy, an insight we wouldn’t have gotten without this tracking. That meant we had to find new, sober ways of celebrating good things.
In the course of learning about how people quit or cut back on drinking, we read a few helpful books. The best was This Naked Mind, which started us thinking maybe we had to quit, not just cut back. It’s a powerful book we highly recommend. Others we liked included Sober for Good and The Sober Diaries.
The hangover, part “Nope.” We had one big drinking night where we stayed within our limits, but had a pretty terrible hangover the following day (turns out getting older does that). That was the turning point for us. We had already gotten tired of tracking all our drinks. We were also emotionally exhausted from anticipating the next drink all the time. But our months of moderation convinced us that maybe, just maybe, we should quit. So: we gave it a shot.
We’ve been totally drink-free for quite a few months now, and it’s been very rewarding. It was difficult at first (the urges were strong, and frequent), but now, we wouldn’t trade our clear-headed Monday mornings for any drunk Saturday night.
Thanks so much for your help, and as always, if you haven’t already, please do try out the app!
