The rise of the sober curious
Dry July is the perfect time for the rising number of ‘‘sober curious’’ people to dip their toe into an often stigmatised lifestyle where the world doesn’t revolve around alcohol. Greer Berry talks to those in the know about alcohol culture and the potent
Talking to people about their drinking is like talking to people about their driving. ‘‘They automatically shut you down and they say: ‘I don’t want to talk about this’, because it’s deeply personal.’’
I’m talking with Massey University’s Dr Andy Towers at a busy cafe and his words stop me in my tracks.
‘‘At some point if you say: ‘I’m really concerned’, you’re effectively saying: ‘You’re doing it wrong’.’’
And there it is.
Towers is senior lecturer at the School of Public Health in Palmerston North, with a research interest in alcohol consumption across the lifespan.
It’s a topic he is extremely passionate about. He talks in soundbites that make for a journalist’s dream and it’s clear he longs for a day where the facts about alcohol are shared among the masses, rather than salacious headlines about how alcohol has some type of misguided health benefit.
The reality is we are drinking wrong because so many of the ‘‘facts’’ are wrong.
Despite Towers’ frequent urge to bash his head against a brick wall when it comes to the misinformation, he persists.
There’s a tension between what researchers know to be fact, he says, and commonly repeated myths such as a couple of red wines a day help cardiovascular health. Spoiler alert: that’s not the case.
His team’s – and we’re talking about a group of international researchers, including the World Health Organisation – approach is not that they’re trying to tell people to stop drinking or to do anything different.
‘‘We’re just saying we’re drinking in a void of knowledge,’’ he says.
‘‘We didn’t know how much we were drinking in comparison to other countries, but now we know. We know the outcomes and the issues.’’
Compared with nine other countries in the research, Towers says Kiwis are more likely to
drink more days of the week and when we drink, we’re more likely to drink more.
One of the biggest problems with alcohol research is that this is only on reported levels of drink, which is an inefficient art in itself.
‘‘This is one of the sticking points. If you’ve ever tried to pour a standard drink, I can’t get it. When they started coming out with wine glasses with a standard pour line, people would say: ‘Top it up’. But that’s a standard drink,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s really really hard to clarify how much someone is drinking based on self-report because no-one really understands what a standard drink is.
‘‘The issue is we’ve got a massive range of types of drinks, but what we have in health land is a standard drink, but a standard drink doesn’t necessarily translate. A bottle of beer might be 1.2 standard drinks, a glass of wine 1.8, so it doesn’t translate to what you’re actually drinking.’’
Another issue is the ‘‘stupid terms’’, says Towers – risky drinking, standard drinks, hazardous drinking. ‘‘Hazardous drinking includes binge drinking, but has [also included] drinking at a lower level that is frequent enough and of enough amount per occasion where you’re not necessarily binging, but you’re having enough that on a weekly basis, you actually put your health at risk.’’
That limit, for those who want to keep count, can be as little as four or five days a week, maybe two to three drinks a session. That’s hazardous drinking.
‘‘That is so many people. For decades we’ve had this idea about moderate drinking, like moderate drinking is fine, just don’t binge drink ... but moderate drinking is a term used by the alcohol industry. They use the term because it sounds good, but it’s not actually healthy.’’
I say I start to feel manipulated.
‘‘It’s because you are,’’ he replies.
‘‘Is alcohol good for anything then?’’ I ask. ‘‘It’s good for hand washing,’’ replies Towers, before explaining that at the simplest level, alcohol kills cells.
But something must be getting through, though, as statistics show, broadly speaking, fewer people are drinking alcohol. Among those are the sober curious.
The sober curious movement is defined by those who have chosen to actively change their drinking habits and now drink very little or not at all, and are open about their experiences and claim the label with pride.
Towers says it’s a relatively new thing for people to identify as being sober curious, but it follows a trend that is being reflected internationally.
Ideas such as Dry July, which sees people pledge to stay off alcohol for a month to raise money for charity, are rising in popularity, almost as a socially acceptable way for people to abstain without the stigma or pressure from others.
‘‘I don’t like the idea of prohibition, but I like that the debate is raised. I think what we need to say is if you want to have a few drinks, that’s OK, but it’s when those few drinks turn in to more. It’s a bit like any drug. At the point where you’re using it as a coping mechanism for stress that’s the point you need to say: ‘I have an issue.’’’
Hiding away in the corner of the internet is a community called Living Sober.
Run in partnership with the Health Promotion Agency and the New Zealand Drug Foundation, Living Sober has more than 8000 members – people who are at all stages of evaluating their relationship with alcohol.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest traffic and sign ups to the site occur on New Year’s Day.
NZ Drug Foundation programmes manager Nathan Brown says people use the ‘new year, new me’ approach to revisit aspects of their lives, including alcohol.
‘‘[There’s] a big surge in traffic every year. That lasts for all of January then it trails off in February. You wouldn’t believe it to be as changeable as that, but it really is.
The site, which has been running since 2014, has a unique, close-knit ecosystem of anonymity.
‘‘More and more people are becoming curious about their drinking and so we want to make sure that people are aware that Living Sober is around, to come to have those kind of discussions and you don’t have to decide that you’re going to be sober yet to participate.’’
Interestingly, the number of men accessing the site has had a sharp increase over the years, a phenomenon Brown expects to continue.
He credits the development in online technology and smart phones as an avenue for people to access a new kind of support that wasn’t available before.
‘‘They’ve had the questions in this grey area. They’ve now got places they can go online and meet and discuss those thoughts with other people, and that can help crystallise themselves in the action or help them to change their behaviour.’’
Brown says research has shown a big drop in young people drinking, since about 2000.
And although there is no solid research about the reasoning behind this, he says it correlates with a period where phone technology and social media came on to the scene.
These developments in communication may have changed the way people interacted and therefore changed their drinking habits, Brown says.
Living Sober is also managed by journalist and recovery advocate Lotta Dann, who Brown credits with putting a much-needed face to life without alcohol. ‘‘It’s really important in terms of showing people what it looks like to not be holding it with shame. People can then realise that: ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like to do to be sober, to be that person, and to do it proudly’,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s hugely valuable.’’
Towers agrees about the need for more sober examples and says it is easy to find someone to talk about their drinking, but it was extraordinarily difficult to find someone who is thinking: ‘‘I would like to give up.’’
‘‘When people are already concerned about their drinking, what they would like to see on TV and in the media is people out there saying: ‘You know what? I’m done with drinking. I gave up and my life is great’. We don’t have that, it’s not visible.
‘‘We have a lot of people saying: ‘Drinking’s great’, a lot of advertising about drinking, but at no point do we have the opposite, people saying: ‘You know what, hand’s up, I used this to get off my drinking’…
‘‘There’s no modelling of it.
‘‘We’ve got this weird idea of alcohol being sacrosanct, but we should be able to talk about alcohol and if that makes you feel uncomfortable then something’s wrong.’’