Doing Dry January? Why you need a drink this weekend
Halfway into the annual challenge, Charlotte Lytton discovers how a ‘cheat day’ could keep you going
If you’re one of the estimated 7.9m UK adults currently going dry for January, it will have been more than two weeks since you sipped a postwork G&T, or enjoyed a glass of red with your Sunday roast. And at the near-halfway point of the month, you’d be forgiven for feeling your resolve beginning to wane this weekend. While it might not be May weather outside, all the talk of BYOB parties and champagne corks popping in Downing Street – or just the relentlessness of this week’s news cycle – might well have put you in the mood to open a bottle.
But should your determination take a nosedive, there’s no need to squander your success to date. Instead, could allowing yourself a “cheat day” be the answer to making it to the end of the month? Rather than seeing any trip-up as a “failure”, should you just allow yourself a drinking “pass”?
Prof Katy Milkman, author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, suggests that we shouldn’t let the odd slip deter us. We should allow ourselves a finite number of “get out of jail free cards,” she says, meaning you can “continue pushing towards your goal rather than assuming you’ve already failed and giving up.”
For those who sign up to the official Dry January programme, created by charity Alcohol Change UK in 2012, success rates at staying the course can reach 80 per cent. Research from the University of Sussex has found that for those who quit booze in January, 70 per cent were still drinking less six months later. But as the thinking goes that it takes 21 days to form a habit, this weekend is that purgatorial point where alcohol-free living has not yet set to autopilot.
Studies show that the greatest chance of maintaining a good habit hinges on repetition, cues and rewards. The goal is to shift that habit to a state where conscious motivation is not required to make the healthy choice, says Dr Benjamin Gardner, senior lecturer in psychology at King’s College London.
Prof Milkman says “it’s better to strive for a tough goal but give yourself up to two emergencies [cheat days] than to strive for a tough goal with no wiggle room”. She suggests that an easier goal might work in the longterm, such as aiming for five nondrinking days a week. “People do better with a goal that gives them emergency padding,” she adds.
As with all behavioural changes that require doing less of what you like, cravings can see us come a cropper. (As Dru Jaeger, co-founder of online community Soberistas, says: “it’s important not to turn cheat days into binges.”) Yet a new school of thought, known as “urge surfing’”, proposes that these cravings can be used to your advantage; that accepting a hankering, rather than trying to suppress it, allows it to be more easily controlled.
A study at Drexel University in Philadelphia tasked participants with carrying around a transparent box of chocolates for two days: one group was told to ignore their cravings; the other to accept them. In the first cohort, nine per cent of people caved; none of those told to acknowledge their desires did. Further research has found that those who practiced acceptance strategies for weight loss, as opposed to banning foods, were twice as likely to maintain a 10 per cent reduction in size three years later.
For anyone unable to acknowledge urges without indulging (and overindulging) them, Dr Gardner says “it’s important to recognise that we’re often driven by our environment.”
That includes our behaviour immediately before a habit, for example if a wedge of cheese is always followed by a drop of claret. He suggests asking yourself what that is – his own being putting his children to bed, at which point he tends to reach for a glass of wine. “Recognising what those triggers are can help you better avoid them, or manage the way you respond,” he adds.
There is also the matter of establishing what goal it served. “Maybe you were bored in the evenings, and that led you to develop a habit of drinking. The problem is, if you try to stop yourself… you’re [still] going to feel bored,” Dr Gardner says. He opts for “habit substitution”: rather than removing your vice, making you all the more aware of the hole it has left behind, “the best thing to do is replace the thing you’ve deprived yourself of with something else.
“The questions everyone needs to ask themselves are: why are you doing it in the first place, and what else might you do to achieve whatever it was that the drinking was helping you with?”
Dr Gardner warns that cheat days can be risky, as “when you start improvising rules… you might end up convincing yourself that it’s fine to deviate even more, so they collapse.”
Rules-within-rules may work, he suggests. “If you can set the rule of: I can only drink once a week, and you stick to that, and that is less than what you typically drink, that will be fine.”
Dr Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK, sees less room for manoeuvre. We are in the midst of a “slow crisis”, he says, with alcoholrelated deaths reaching a 20-year high in England and Wales last year and “heavier drinkers drinking more” during the pandemic.
One glimmer of hope is that some 80 per cent of official Dry January participants were still on track with the programme by January 10 this year – around 10 per cent higher than is typical at this stage – something he thinks Covid has spurred on, as “a lot of people are waking up” to confronting their alcohol habits.
If you do fall off the wagon, Prof Milkman urges you not to write off the entire enterprise. “Trying to build flexible habits actually sets you up for more success than attempting to be too rigid… It’s really hard to be perfect.”
‘This weekend is that purgatorial point where alcohol-free living has not yet set to autopilot’