My Year Without Alcohol

Back in January, I joined the sober curious movement as I gave up alcohol for the year as a New Year’s Resolution. It was an amazing year and I learned so much about myself. Today I’m sharing my month-by-month experience and Brooke Conley joins me for moral support.



Show Notes/Links:



* SFP 128: Living Coffee ’til Cocktails [with Brooke Conley]* SFP 141: Q&A – Can you tell us more about your 2019 resolution?* Recommended book to give up drinking: Annie Grace’s The Naked Mind* Reach Brooke Conley on Instagram + Her website











Full Episode Transcript



Denaye:Hi, and welcome to episode 184. As some of you know, I gave up alcohol for my New Year’s resolution way back in January, and today I’m sharing a little bit about my year without alcohol. I hope you all are having a simple holiday season so far. I’ve had a few questions over the course of the year about how my year without alcohol is going and I’ve been pretty quiet on it. I felt like I wanted to let the year ride out and then give you a full recap, so this is it. Now, if you’re new to this story, you can rewind. We started talking about this in episode 128, simplefamilies.com/episode128 and in that episode, Living Coffee ’til Cocktails, I talked with Brooke Conley. Brooke is a member of the sober curious movement, and she’s a mom and she shared with me more about what her journey without alcohol has looked like. If you’re new to the sober curious movement, it’s basically a group of individuals who are choosing not to drink, not because of alcoholism, just because they have decided that alcohol doesn’t serve them well and doesn’t play a place in their life anymore. In episode 128, I talked with Brooke about how I was thinking about giving up alcohol, and I was in fact curious about what it was like, and then in episode 141, that’s simplefamilies.com/episode141, I talked more about my decision to give it up completely for the year 2019. It’s been an incredible year and I have learned so much about myself and I’ve invited Brooke back today. I’m going to share month by month what this journey looked like.



I’d suggest going back and listening to episodes 128 and 141 if you do want to get this full story, but here’s the quick and dirty. I decided that I wanted to give up alcohol because I was drinking less and less, really about 2 to 3 drinks a week last year around the holidays, and I still felt like it was too much. I felt like I wanted less. I didn’t really feel like it was taking a physical toll on my body, but it was really weighing on me mentally. Ultimately, I figured out that alcohol had become a part of my mental load. When it came to the evenings and the weekends, I was thinking about it.