Reflecting on One Year of Sobriety (and its Downstream Effects)

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In September 2022 after reading Quit Like a Woman, I made the decision to quit drinking alcohol altogether. Now, I'm looking back at the last 15 months, the role alcohol plays in our GDP and personal finances, and all the unintended positive benefits I’ve stumbled upon since switching out my New Belgium Fat Tire for Athletic Brewing’s N/A IPA.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Transcript

Transcript

When I was a junior in college, I realized—through a combination of AP credit hours and my normal class load—that I would inadvertently graduate a semester early if I continued as I had been. Finding this revelation unacceptable and in no rush to enter the real world, I decided to add another minor: psychology. 

My psychology classes comprised, far and away, the most interesting things I learned in college, and it was in a 101-level class that a professor said something that always stuck with me: “If you’re trying to improve your health, start with sleep.” 

If memory serves (and who knows if it can; I spent many mornings hungover in early classes in college), the specific use case she was highlighting pertained to diet and exercise. “You shouldn’t sacrifice sleep to get up early and work out,” she explained, “Because if you’re not sleeping enough, the rest of it doesn’t matter.”

There was a domino effect quality to the sentiment: that one action sets off a chain of physiological events. While most people don’t think about sleep in the context of diet and exercise, her point was that it’s the foundation on which all other processes are built. Without it, much of the effort spent on the other components is wasted.

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Party Girls and Boys—in honor of the New Year, New Me resolutions, and the annual “Dry January” hints from your most responsible friends, today’s episode is a reflection on the last “dry” 16 months of my life. 

This anecdote about Psych 101 feels fitting for a few reasons: One, it’s a story from college, which—as you’ll hear shortly—has had a few important holdovers in my adult life, and two, it focuses on the importance of sleep. 

Sleep is, as most people who drink while using an Oura Ring know, one of the first things that alcohol begins to degrade. It’s estimated that after fewer than two drinks, your sleep quality is diminished by 9%. Having two drinks? Expect to sleep 24% less well. More than two? Your sleep will be roughly 39% less effective. 

This is because, according to the National Library of Medicine, quote, “alcohol acts as a sedative that interacts with several neurotransmitter systems important in the regulation of sleep.” End quote. I remember my friends and I used to joke that ingesting alcohol was literally drinking poison, but, a fun poison! 

And if you’re a fan of the Huberman Lab podcast, you may have caught Dr. Huberman’s viral episode about just how bad alcohol is for the human brain—something that felt like INCREDIBLE confirmation bias for me (when I heard it for the first time after being alcohol-free for several months), but would’ve been an egregious affront on my lifestyle only a year earlier. In case you missed it, he more or less debunks the idea that drinking in moderation is healthier than not drinking at all, but he does so in typical two-hour Huberman fashion that’ll have you questioning every drink you ever picked up. 

We’ll get into it after a quick break.

It’s at this point that you might be like, “Wait a second, I thought I was listening to a podcast about money. What does alcohol have to do with finances?” Fair enough. I’ll humor you! 

While my own decision to stop drinking wasn’t financially motivated, it probably could’ve been: According to a CNN piece from January 2020 (hell of a time to publish a piece about alcohol consumption trends, that’s for sure), a survey found that millennials spend an average of $300 per month on alcohol. I find these results dubiously high; they may have conducted the survey from a booth in a New York City pub.

But still, it’s interesting to extrapolate costs over a lifetime: Alcohol.org found the average New Yorker will spend $121,000 on alcohol over the course of their lives (while people in Birmingham, Alabama will spend the least; at around $58,000 over a lifetime).  

Moreover, we found some research that indicated one in two drunk people will shop while intoxicated, so it might be that you get a little loose and then pull up the ol’ lululemon app—we’ve all been there. In my experience, there’s a sort of trickle-down economics with drinking: 

You go out drinking and spend money on alcohol for yourself and others, and while drunk, you crack your phone screen ($200 to replace), order a bunch of food ($20 delivery fee), have to Uber home instead of driving ($30), wake up feeling like shit and skip your workout, incurring a cancelation fee ($20), and so on. I know I’m describing a pretty freewheeling weekend that’ll likely resonate more with my younger listeners than perhaps my older Rich Humans who have long left this lifestyle in the dust, but the fact of the matter is, the expense of boozin’ in my own life was rarely contained to the expense of alcohol itself. 

There’s even research that suggests drinking too much and spending too much are highly correlated phenomena, because they both deal with impulsivity and compulsivity. That is, people who struggle with one are more likely to struggle with the other. 

The CDC even studies the effects of alcohol on public health, and part of public health is the economy: It estimates that, as of 2010, excessive drinking costs the economy about $250 billion per year. This is, of course, the opposite way to look at the problem—not what individuals are spending on alcohol, but that a counterfactual economy where people don’t consume alcohol would be $250 billion bigger. 

Most of this cost (72%) comes in the form of decreased workplace productivity, a fact that will surprise nobody if they’ve ever been hungover at work, but healthcare expenses, criminal justice system expenses, and motor vehicle crashes together contribute the remaining 28%. 

Still, it’s unfair to share those numbers without also sharing that America’s “beer, wine, and spirits” retailers create 2 million jobs in the US, and as of 2018, the alcohol industry was responsible for an estimated 1.65% of the economy, based on GDP. It’s estimated the total economic impact is roughly $363 billion annually, which—if you’re going to write off the $250 billion in losses—is still a roughly $100 billion net gain.

But…a gain for whom?

It’s funny to jump immediately to the numbers—the economy! GDP! Workplace productivity!—as though they can reliably tell us whether or not something is actually good for people; it’s a little dystopian to qualify a discussion about alcohol’s impact on humanity by focusing on workplace productivity, of all things. 

After all, a higher GDP is not synonymous with a happier, healthier country—the best thing for GDP would be for all of us to be constantly working and consuming, never sleeping, and exploiting one another wherever possible. Economic benefit is not necessarily the same thing as human benefit.

But I knew what was best for me.

Alcohol was one of the last holdovers in my life from my college days, a period of my life when it might not be accurate to say I was irresponsible, but rather, that I lacked responsibilities. Sure, I had to keep my scholarship and worry about internships, but for the most part, my concerns (relative to the things that I worry about now as I approach 30) were pretty minimal. The stakes didn’t feel very high.

Thus, this carefree period of my life was characterized by—as you probably surmised from my earlier comment about being hungover in class—a lot of drinking. I pregamed nearly every event I attended, and there wasn’t much I did socially without a drink in my hand. 

As I graduated into the “real world” (and suddenly had more money and was legally able to drink), the party continued. I remember one Friday morning at my first job (after a “National Tequila Day” celebration at a Mexican restaurant that had turned into an all-night affair) that I showed up around 11am, giant coffee in hand, and told my team that I “had a stomach thing.” 

“Weird,” one of them replied, “I didn’t realize that was a side effect of tequila.” I was lucky that I worked in a laid-back environment where this sort of occasional behavior didn’t get me into any real trouble—in fact, we often drank together at the office on Fridays. Drinking was part of the workplace culture, too. That meant it felt a little inescapable. 

Friday afternoon at work? Beers. Girls’ night on a Tuesday? Wine. Sunday brunch? You already know the mimosas are flowing. I was drinking more days than I wasn’t. 

But as my career progressed (and I went from working for someone else to working for myself), it became harder to ignore the downsides to drinking—even casually. I began wearing an Oura Ring in 2020 and would notice that my sleep after a glass or two of wine would get obliterated; my body temperature and heart rate elevated, my Heart Rate Variability and deep sleep in the basement. 

It would take days for my biodata to start returning normal results after a night of drinking, and the resultant anxiety (hangxiety, as it’s sometimes referred to) became harder to ignore. My brain would feel just slightly off-kilter the next morning, as if something was misfiring and I couldn’t quite connect the right wires. It would give me a general sense of unease that would stalk me around all day. 

Still, giving up alcohol entirely felt extreme, and like it would suggest to those around me that I had a problem. It’s not that I was chemically addicted to the substance, just that I’d find myself looking forward to the end of the day when I could uncork the bottle of red and melt into the couch, and I found that troubling. I didn’t like the way I looked forward to a drink at the end of the day as though it were an escape, but I also felt as though alcohol and fun were synonyms—how could I still cut loose and have a good time without booze, when that connection had been calcified over the last decade of my life?

The grappling went on for months, but as my career and life demanded more of me, I knew I wanted to feel like my best self all of the time.

We’ll be right back after a quick break.

In September 2022, I read Holly Whitaker’s controversial book Quit Like a Woman, which framed alcohol consumption as something that keeps women down. (And framing anything as a feminist issue immediately gets me interested, so check-and-mate, Holly.)

I say the book is controversial because anytime you’re talking about the right or wrong way to deal with something as deeply personal and layered as addiction, people are entitled to have equally personal and layered reactions. But I found the first half of the book to be really comforting, because—in not so many words—it said, You’re not weird for wanting to quit drinking. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that alcohol is, in many ways, making your life worse more than it’s making it better.

Her perspective on my biggest concern—the alcohol-fun connection—felt like liberation. She mentioned how people often feel they need alcohol to commemorate special events (that was true for me), that it was a celebratory choice. She reframed this: Wouldn’t you rather be fully present, fully alive and aware and engaged for the most important moments in your life? Isn’t it more fun to experience your life clearly without the distortion?

Reading Quit Like a Woman gave me the confidence to own the decision, which was supplemented by the popularized “sober-curious” movement. And while these trends might feel like just that—trends—it’s interesting how a cultural perception shift of a substance can permanently alter the social cachet around it.

Look no further than cigarettes for an example: Since the 1960s, the number of adult smokers has fallen by 68%, from 43% of all adults in 1965 to 14% in 2018. But alcohol has outmaneuvered smoking from a marketing standpoint: Someone who smokes is called “a smoker,” while someone who doesn’t…doesn’t really have a name. Sure, you could be a “nonsmoker,” but it’s more common to define yourself by the act of participating vs. the act of abstaining. People who drink aren’t often called “drinkers,” because “drinking” is the default state.

It’s an assumption that if you smoke cigarettes, you’ll become addicted to them. It’s possible to be a “social smoker,” in the sense that you may only smoke cigarettes in certain contexts, but it’s well-understood that cigarettes are addictive and smoking them regularly is likely to create a chemical dependency.

The alcohol industry’s masterful avoidance of this dark spot should be studied in MBA programs: Someone who’s addicted to alcohol is an alcoholic. This is the trick: It’s not the alcohol—the addictive substance—that’s the problem, it’s your “inability to drink responsibly.” The “alcoholic” framework blames the person, not the drug. 

The average ad for alcohol shows hot, young, sweaty bodies writhing around in a neon-lit club, having a great time—looking sexy and fun and fabulous. How does every ad for alcohol end? With someone whispering, “drink responsibly.” 

Compare that to some of the graphic warning labels used on boxes of cigarettes; compare it to the litany of laws and regulations prohibiting tobacco companies from advertising in the same ways. Cigarettes aren’t illegal, but you probably don’t associate them with a good time the same way you do with alcohol—and that’s not an accident.

Seven or more drinks per week for women (so, one per day) is considered “excessive” in most  research about the topic; that is, enough to cause health problems. I never considered myself a “heavy drinker” from my one or two glasses of wine each night, but by most standards, that’s heavy drinking. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, my habits qualified me as a heavy drinker. 

That said, alcohol was a ritual for me in the same way coffee is a ritual. I missed the act of having a drink at the end of the day, so I started drinking alcohol-free beverages, like Athletic Brewing non-alcoholic beer. Weddings were also a challenging place to be sober since free alcohol was flowing, but the bartenders are usually happy to make a mocktail, and I’ve absolutely loved not going to the airport on Sunday mornings with a headache.

As for my plans for the future…

I stopped drinking in September 2022. I figured I’d last a few months, but then I started experiencing a different kind of trickle-down economics. 

Much like my Psych 101 teacher’s comments about physiological domino effects, Whitaker’s experience in Quit Like a Woman highlighted this, too: She was addicted to alcohol and drugs, suffering with disordered eating, and had financially destructive habits—a real maelstrom of maladies—and she self-reported that so much of her ruinous behavior seemed to stem from the drinking itself. Once she quit drinking, she found it much easier to face the other issues.

I want to be very careful in using this example, because addiction is a deadly serious struggle that impacts tens of millions of people in different ways—but Whitaker’s recounting of the way the alcohol seemed to set off a domino effect that created other issues in her life resonated with me. 

Removing it entirely from my life had a sort of clarifying effect that allowed me to see where other things were running amok. For starters, the quality and consistency of my sleep improved markedly. Alcohol’s effect on my sleep could’ve been a confounding variable in my experience, but I noticed an almost-immediate decrease in my experience of low-level, baseline anxiety. There were parts of my day—hell, parts of my week—that felt reclaimed. The neurological fuzziness and sense of being slightly “off” for a few mornings each week went away. 

At the beginning of this year, we did an episode about a fantastic-but-ridiculously-long annual review process that I did at the end of 2022 (we’ll link it in the show notes), and it’s almost as though removing alcohol called more attention to my other questionable health choices. I started eating better, drinking more water, exercising more consistently, and had an easier time identifying routines that helped me feel more like myself. And while it might be dangerous to draw a direct line between cutting out alcohol and professional success, it’s true that this has been the most professionally successful year of my life—though I’m hesitant to make this a focus, because I think the message that one should stop drinking so they can check more prototypically ambitious boxes might be replacing one ultimately life-diminishing habit with another. 

Still, it might be an interesting experiment: Take two groups of people who are trying to earn more and spend less. Give one group a budget, and give the other group prohibition: an inability to drink alcohol. Which would have better financial consequences? I don’t know; I think I’d put my money on team booze-free over team budget.

I’m wary of generalizing too much in this episode, because I know not everyone has the same relationship with substances that I do: Some people don’t feel hangxiety, or they don’t drink often enough that removing the substance would materially impact their lives. Some people don’t like feeling drunk, or don’t associate booze with the happy-go-lucky carefree times in their life enough to overdo it. 

But I did. Boy, did I!

There’s a broader lesson here, I think, about the power of identifying root causes. 

Is your performance at work slipping because you’re not interested in your job, or because you aren’t sleeping well enough for your brain to get fully engaged? You might be focusing your energy on fixing the job, when the real issue is the coffee you’re drinking at 5pm. 

Are you spending money on stuff you don’t need for a dopamine hit because you’re an irresponsible POS, or because you’re chronically dehydrated and haven’t eaten a vegetable or exercised in a month, and your dopamine levels are in the toilet and grasping at straws? You might think you need to make a better budget, when what you really need is to go for a walk.

Alcohol just so happens to be an incredibly prevalent example of a problematic root cause because of its effects on the brain and widespread normalization and use. But your root cause might be something totally different.

Maybe my Psych 101 teacher was right. Maybe we all just need more sleep. 

That’s all for this week. I’ll see you next week—same time, same place—on the Money with Katie Show. 

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer. Additional fact-checking comes from Kate Brandt.