WHAT CHANGES BETWEEN 30 AND 90 DAYS WITHOUT ALCOHOL?

By the time I started my 90-day break, I already knew I could do a month without alcohol.

I'd done it several times.

So the first 30 days weren't really the unknown part for me. The unknown bit was what happened if I carried on.

Some of the biggest changes I remember did not come in the first couple of weeks. They came much later, when the novelty of doing a challenge had worn off and I had simply spent more ordinary life without alcohol sitting in the middle of it.

One of those changes was quite uncomfortable.

It involved friendship.

For years I had spent night after night in the pub with the same people. My best mate was part of that world. There were regulars I saw constantly. At the time, that felt like my social life.

Then I stopped going.

And they weren't ringing me.

They weren't asking where I was. They weren't asking whether I was coming down for a drink. They weren't checking how I was getting on.

Over time I had to admit something I hadn't really wanted to see.

Those people were just simply people I saw each night in a pub.

That doesn't mean they were bad people. It doesn't mean none of those relationships mattered.

But I had confused seeing somebody every night with being genuinely connected to them.

At the same time, I had joined the One Year No Beer community.

People there were reaching out to me.

How are you doing?

How are you getting on?

Are you all right?

Keep going.

Some of them had known me for a fraction of the time, yet they were showing an interest in me as a person and in whether I was okay.

That was a real shift.

I began to understand that alcohol hadn't only filled my evenings. It had helped organise a lot of my life around it.

Where I went.

Who I saw.

What I looked forward to.

What I thought friendship looked like.

I don't think I could have seen all of that in the same way after a week or two. I needed some distance from the old routine.

THE LATER PART FELT DIFFERENT

I normally place another big shift somewhere around Days 74 to 80.

I'm careful about saying that because I don't want somebody reading this and thinking Day 76 is supposed to be magical. It wasn't.

That's simply roughly where I remember my own experience starting to feel different.

I've described it before as the world beginning to look in colour rather than black and white.

I was running. Going to the gym. Eating better. I had money for things other than alcohol. My relationship with my daughter was improving. I was beginning to look at myself differently.

More importantly, the thought around alcohol was changing.

Earlier in the 90 days, there was still an element of:

I'm not allowed a drink.

Later, it was becoming:

I don't need one.

Those sentences sound similar, but they felt completely different to me.

One is restriction.

The other is choice.

That's the part I hadn't found in all those earlier month-long breaks.

Thirty days had shown me several times that I could stop.

The longer break started showing me what ordinary life might look like if alcohol stayed out of it.

IT WASN'T THAT EVERYTHING SUDDENLY BECAME BRILLIANT

I still had work.

I still had worries.

I could still be bored.

There were things in my life that alcohol had covered up or helped me avoid that didn't suddenly disappear because I'd stopped drinking.

But that was useful as well.

I could start seeing what belonged to alcohol and what didn't.

I could also start gathering real evidence against all the things I had assumed before I began.

Would I be bored?

Would I lose my social life?

Would I still enjoy myself?

Could I relax?

Would I be miserable?

Would I spend the whole 90 days desperate for a drink?

You can sit and argue those questions with yourself for years.

At some point, the only useful way to answer them is to live without alcohol for long enough to see what actually happens.

That's what Days 31 to 90 gave me.

More ordinary life.

More weekends.

More difficult afternoons.

More conversations.

More opportunities to keep my own word.

More time for the initial excitement or novelty of stopping to disappear.

Eventually I wasn't really living a challenge anymore.

I was just living.

And somewhere in that, the life I thought alcohol made possible started becoming less attractive than the one I was beginning to build without it.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK FOR BETWEEN 30 AND 90 DAYS?

I wouldn't tell somebody to copy my 90 days.

Your evidence might be completely different.

I'd just pay attention.

Who are you spending time with?

How much space is alcohol taking up in your thoughts now?

What are your mornings like?

What have you started doing that you weren't doing before?

What do you still miss?

Which situations still feel difficult?

Are there things you thought you needed alcohol for that no longer seem quite so important?

Are you beginning to trust your own word again?

And perhaps the biggest question:

What do you actually want now?

Ninety days isn't a magic number.

Nothing drops out of the sky because the calendar reaches Day 90.

For me, it was simply long enough to see more than I had seen during the 30-day breaks I already knew how to complete.

I started those 90 days worried about what I might lose.

By the later part, the thing I'd been frightened of losing was becoming the thing I didn't particularly want to put back into my life.

That was my experience.

And when I reached Day 90, the next decision was still mine.

That's exactly how I think it should be.

You don't take 90 days off because somebody else has already decided what your life should look like afterwards.

You take 90 days to get enough of your own evidence to make a more informed decision.

Thirty days might show you something important.

Just don't assume it has shown you everything.

See How Press Pause 90 Works.

SAFETY NOTE

If you drink heavily every day, or you experience withdrawal symptoms when you reduce alcohol, get medical advice before suddenly stopping.