Here’s how ‘Zebra Striping’ could change the way you drink for the better
With dry January now over, some of you might have rushed to have an alcoholic drink the second that the clock ticked into February, while others might be wondering whether getting back into the cycle of costly drinking and anxiety inducing hangovers is really the best idea.
With actor Tom Holland launching a non-alcoholic beer, and former party celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Kate Moss heralding the benefits of a booze-free life (while still being visible on the social scene!), it appears that the sober curious movement is gaining popularity.
What does it mean to be sober curious?
Whether you’re looking to cut back or stop altogether, sober curious is a term for when you’re questioning your relationship with alcohol. This reflection can be for many reasons from realising drinking is a seriously destructive addiction to wanting to make some steps towards improving your mental health.
Alcohol can be bad for your health, can put you in danger when you consume excessively and its more expensive than ever with little but a headache in return for your spending. With a better acceptance of those who chose not to drink due to its increasing popularity, and a whole host of non-alcoholic beverages, it seems that curiosity is actually turning into a new way of socialising.
If you don’t want to completely give up the booze, you can still be part of this alcohol self-awareness. ‘Zebra Striping’ is a term where you alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, which in theory, keeps your consumption in better check and for some, it feels like a compromise when the ‘fear of missing out’ kicks in. A study found that even a small amount of training in drinking mindfully reduced participants’ weekly alcohol intake by more than a third. Having a better understanding of which drinks you consume, is also a positive step – how often have you checked the percentage of something before you order it?
Simple changes can make a big difference but for some, giving up alcohol completely is a necessary step.
Cathy Wallace is a journalist, novelist and non-fiction author. She explains how she thought alcohol was making her happy but her sober curiosity has paid off.
I am among the 22 percent of women in the UK who don’t drink alcohol and with 43 percent of British women reported as saying that they want to drink less, it looks like there are quite a few others who are considering a life without the booze.
‘Sober curious’ is the new term used to describe those who are interested in a life with less alcohol. That’s not to say that these are women who see themselves as alcoholics, rather they are questioning their current drinking habits, and the effect that drinking is having on them. A few years ago, I was one of these people. And my curiosity paid off; I’m now much happier not drinking alcohol. Which is ironic, considering the reason I drank in the first place was because I bought into the widespread theory that alcohol would make me happier.
“Why be sober, when you can be drunk?” recovering alcoholic Catherine Grey asks in her Sunday Times bestseller, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober (Aster, £8.99). As she points out, sobriety is synonymous with words like boring, conservative and staid. “Meanwhile, greetings cards announce, ‘Wine: It’s like a hug from the inside’. Pub clapboards go viral with jokes like, ‘Alcohol. Because no great love story started with eating a salad’.” It might seem like harmless fun, but the widespread enabling of alcohol can hide a much murkier truth.
Sober mother-of-three Hayley Nass says she hid her drinking behind the ‘gin o’clock’ and ‘pass the wine’ memes that joked how alcohol eases the burdens of parenting. “Mummy wine culture only fuelled my ability to deny what I knew was true,” she says. “I would pour alcohol into mugs at dinner time so they wouldn’t see what I was drinking.” And as she points out, mugs bearing cheeky slogans like ‘this is probably wine’ are ten a penny.
Binge drinking
The arrival of children often provides a natural pause when it comes to drinking, which can lead to a moment of reckoning for a lot of women – it certainly did for me. Two quick successive pregnancies ended the overblown ‘fun’ of the weekend binges that defined my 20s. When I started drinking again, I saw how alcohol changed my personality. I had accepted the notion that booze made me more entertaining, interesting and ultimately worthy with every glass, shot and bottle I downed, and I was unable to stop at ‘just the one’. That was until one unremarkable Friday night in July 2014, when I polished off a bottle of red at home by myself in just a couple of hours, for what felt like no reason whatsoever. That was the moment that I suddenly knew that I was done with it, and I haven’t touched alcohol since that night.
For Sas Petherick, a former hard-drinking and ambitious city executive, her moment came the morning after the night before. “I woke up with shame in the pit of my belly. The night before I had said cutting, hurtful things to people I loved deeply, in pursuit of a cheap laugh. I couldn’t remember the last night I’d had without a drink. I didn’t like who I was becoming.” She quit her city career after retraining as a life coach, and she now runs has own business as a self-doubt researcher, coach and podcaster. “Because so much of my life revolved around drinking, I realised that the only way to stop the negative effects that drinking had on me was to change my life,” she recalls. She decided to go through recovery without any professional help: “I was too embarrassed to ask, and I never went to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] as I wasn’t sure I was ‘qualified’ to attend.”
Negative effects
For Samantha Tonge, a bestselling author who describes the effects of drinking as “constantly feeling that the world was a spinning top”, AA was the answer. The process was so transformative that it changed the direction of her writing, which had previously been romantic comedies. “A big part of the programme is making amends with those you have negatively affected whilst drinking,” she says. “Some can forgive and some can’t. I wanted to explore that theme.” The result of that exploration, her novel Forgive Me Not (Canelo, £9.99), was received 5-star reviews.
Of course, a shift towards sober does not have to come from a ‘rock bottom’ moment. Ruby Warrington, founder of the mindful drinking movement Club SÖDA NYC and author of Sober Curious (HarperOne, £20, available January 2019), started to question her relationship with alcohol when she discovered meditation. Over the next four years, she began to drink less, but still found that there were some situations where she felt compelled to drink, even if she had intended not to. “At this point I decided to try AA, but the program and the teachings didn’t resonate with me. I do not identify with the label ‘alcoholic’,” she remembers. “But I did appreciate the opportunity to talk openly about my journey with alcohol, and realised I likely wasn’t alone in my experience.”
Addiction coach Dr Bunmi Aboaba says that this trend of seeing what life is like with less alcohol in it is as much led by the younger generation as it is by people who are moving away from the effects that alcohol has had on their life. She suggests that the cost of going out drinking is putting them off before they even start, and that new ways of socialising, such as gaming or social media, don’t come with a drink in hand – unlike a catch-up in the pub. There are cultural reasons too; in recent years, we have been embracing health and wellness, tuning into ourselves and our bodies, and not feeling the pressure to drink if we don’t feel like it.
Lone soldier
Bangs Carey-Campbell is the author of The Pocket Cheerleader: A Positive Guide to the Life Changing Power of Movement (Unbound, £20). She has never drunk alcohol – it simply never appealed to her – and she has very much noticed this shift in attitude. Now 37, she says over the last 15 years she has gone from being “a lone soldier” to finding herself increasingly among non-drinkers. “I’ve had people debate with me on it, saying that I must be an alcoholic, or even trying to spike my drinks, but as the years go on that’s fewer and further between,” she says.
So, what are the benefits of exploring a sober lifestyle? We know that alcohol can have many health implications, so reducing our intake is beneficial to our physical wellbeing. But for me, it was the effect that it had on my mental wellbeing that made me see sobriety as a gateway to a whole new life. My biggest reward has been my debut novel, Summer At Hollyhock House (Sapere Books, £8.50), which was published this year. I’d tried so many times to write a novel before but something always held me back – time, energy, procrastination, creative block. And while alcohol isn’t always to blame for these things, it was removing alcohol that solved them for me.
Our journeys are all different, and sobriety isn’t always the answer. But as we start to move past the jokes, the memes and all the pressure, we can indulge any sober curious thoughts we have, and realise that we have a lot more choice about how much we drink than we once thought.
For help
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a free self-help group. Its "12 step" programme involves getting sober with the help of regular support groups. For the UK visit www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk or www.aa.org for the US
