This week I celebrated a milestone that I’m damn proud of: 365 days without drinking alcohol.
Lest you think this email is about to preach at you as to why you should quit too, please understand that I have zero interest in trying to tell you how to live your life.
There are plenty of well-documented health reasons to kick booze. This podcast from Huberman is enough to scare most people straight. There is a wealth of information out there about the downside of alcohol, and I trust you can find that on your own.
Instead, I’d like to share how and why I decided to quit and some surprising things I learned in the process that may not be as obvious.
First, some context on the decision itself.
I have a long and storied history with alcohol. I grew up in a small town in Texas, and I started drinking before I had even started high school. Does anybody else remember stealing liquor from their parents’ bar and refilling the bottles with water? By the time I was in high school, my friends and I were drinking every weekend night (and a few weeknights for good measure). This didn’t seem abnormal as this was exactly what every kid my age was doing in my town.
Then, upon joining the military and attending the Naval Academy, I was squarely immersed in a culture hopelessly intertwined with alcohol. 100% of my recreation with my Navy buddies centered around drinking. We epitomized the “work hard, play harder” mantra and did our best to live up to the legendary reputation of hard-working, hard-drinking fighter pilots. In fact, an early military mentor of mine told me that one of the keys to success in the military was your “bar game” – how well you could hold your liquor and still be the life of the party.
In my mid-twenties, I was stationed in Lemoore, CA, near Paso Robles. I joined a wine club, which sparked a passion that would become one of my favorite hobbies. For almost two decades, I learned everything I could about wine. I visited some of the most beautiful winemaking regions in the world and built a sizeable collection over the years.
When I married my wife, my vows promised her a life full of “good food, good wine, and good conversation.” When we built our dream house in 2020, we designed it with two separate wine cellars as a central feature of our home. I literally built my house around wine.
And for nearly two decades, I would drink two to four glasses of wine every single night.
I give this context because none of this seemed abnormal to me. My wine hobby was a part of my identity. I loved the history, the tasting notes, the beauty of the wine-making process. I loved sourcing rare, interesting wines and sharing them with my friends and family.
But a few years ago, something started nagging at me. I began to shift my focus to cultivating peak performance from both an athletic and psychological perspective. I became dedicated to becoming the best version of myself.
I started to become aware that drinking every night was no longer compatible with the person I was becoming.
Quitting altogether was not something I even considered. There was too much at stake – my shared hobby with my new wife, a house built around my collection, not to mention the years of study and vast knowledge that I had accumulated.
I started trying out different methods of attempted moderation – only drinking on weekends or at restaurants. But an unexpected pattern started to emerge: every time I would try a new set of rules around drinking, I would only last a week or two and find myself right back into the habit of nightly consumption.
It was in this space that I started to question my behavior.
I never resonated with the term alcoholic. My daily wine habit was my choice. It never felt compulsive, and I certainly didn’t feel like what I was doing was dangerous or out of control. I never resonated with the idea that I would walk into AA, admit I was an alcoholic, and that I had no control over my disease.
This was perhaps the first and most important breakthrough. I realized that because alcohol is so normalized in our culture, that to quit must mean that you have a problem. When you talk to people who are in recovery, they often explain that they were out of control when they used to drink, and so they couldn’t trust themselves with alcohol.
That wasn’t my experience at all. I never felt out of control or that drinking was negatively affecting my life.
In fact, alcohol played a role in many of my favorite memories, like romantic weekend wine tasting in Spain or Napa with my wife, or trips to resorts with our friends where we sipped pina coladas all day by the pool.
This created a cognitive dissonance that kept me from even considering quitting for several years.
Then, one day last summer, my 6-year-old daughter handed me a crayon picture that she had drawn of me.
In my hand was a glass of wine.
Then and there, I knew I had to make a change. This was not the man I wanted to be for my children.
I must admit, even contemplating quitting was daunting at first. I realized that I held a lot of judgments about people who didn’t drink, and would now be faced with those same perceived judgments from others.
Despite my fears, I started to plan my exit strategy. My dear friend Dan Martell was coming for a visit, and he had been sober for 10 years. If anyone could help me with the transition, I knew it was him.
The first thing I decided to do was to remove the pressure that came with making a permanent decision. The idea of quitting forever seemed heavy, with success only possible with 100% compliance.
Instead, I decided to treat this like an experiment. Rather than framing this as a problem that had to be fixed, I approached it with curiosity. I wanted to quit long enough to take a step back and reshape my relationship with wine while keeping track of various metrics like how I looked, felt, and performed.
With this frame, I decided on a year as the period for my experiment. I figured this would be enough to notice both short-term and long-term differences while giving me the flexibility to revisit alcohol if and when I felt like it.
However, there was still one giant looming question that felt insurmountable. What about my hobby? What would I do with a house full of wine, a head full of knowledge, and a heart full of passion for wine culture?
Here, Dan offered an off-the-cuff bit of advice that was a total game-changer. As I was telling him about my apprehension and my reluctance to just ditch my lifelong passion, he offered a different perspective.
He told me about a friend who had a massive wine collection but was given strict orders from his doctor that he could no longer drink due to a medical condition. Dan had recently gone to a party at his house, and while he poured legendary bottles of Bordeaux for his friends, he walked around with a wine glass and a spittoon, just as a sommelier might.
That night, I pulled a favorite from my collection: a 1999 Chateau Musar, a birthday gift from my wife.
Dan and I opened the bottle, and I explained the wine’s history, significance, and tasting notes, just like I might while enjoying any other special occasion.
Except we didn’t drink it. We tasted it, enjoyed it, and spit it out. In fact, because I was only drinking for the taste, I savored and appreciated every sip like never before.
In that moment, it clicked for me. I could still taste wines and share them with my friends. I could sip wine anytime I wanted to. I could simply spit instead of drinking. I’m not suggesting this would work for everyone, but it was a very elegant solution to my perceived biggest hurdle.
The next few months weren’t without challenging days, but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I settled into my new way of being. By day 90, I was on fire. I felt more energy, clarity, and joy than I had in years. I found out that this is a well-documented phase of recovery, nicknamed the “pink cloud.”
I worried that the euphoria would wear off and reality would settle in, but my fear never really materialized.
That’s when things really started to shift. Not only was I looking and feeling better (I dropped 15 lbs in the first two months), but I found a whole new gear for life.
Now, after 365 days of clear-headed mornings, peak physical performance and a newfound level of presence with my family, I count this as a top 3 life decision.
As promised, here are the surprising things I learned over the past year:
- Sobriety is trendy AF. Nationwide, alcohol consumption is down by up to 10%, led by Millenials and Gen Z. I felt like I would be alone on an island in a sea of drinkers, but it turns out I was far from it. Everywhere I went, it seemed like there were others who had recently eliminated or dramatically reduced their alcohol consumption.
- Non-alcoholic options have dramatically improved in recent years. When I was growing up, it seemed like Odoul’s was the best you could do. Not so these days. Brands like Athletic Brewing have brought excellent alternatives to the market, and the non-alcoholic beverage category is growing like crazy, up 35% in 2023. Almost every restaurant I went to this year had clearly put in effort to source palatable N/A options, to the point where now I am an offended snowflake if the only choice is Heineken Zero.
- I was spending a crazy amount of time drinking, recovering from drinking or thinking about drinking. This was probably the biggest shock in the first few weeks. I had so much more time for work, fitness, and family that I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I got absolutely shredded because it turned out that the hardest part of sticking to a diet had always been empty calories from booze.
- I stopped missing it. This was maybe the craziest part of the transformation. In the first few months, I drank a lot of N/A beer and sip and spit wine often. But after about 6 months, I simply stopped thinking about it. At first, I would think about how nice it would be to have a drink, but then stop myself in service of my goals. Over time, though, the thought of alcohol actually stopped being appealing. I began to feel like drinking would make me slow, and that was no longer desirable as I got used to the newfound clarity and presence.
- I was in a hidden shame spiral. When I was trying my various moderation attempts, every morning, I would wake up with the intention of not drinking, but by 5, I found myself opening a bottle of wine and pouring a drink to unwind from the work day. Every single day, I was breaking my word to myself. This led to the erosion of my self-confidence and discipline over time. The most important word you can keep is to yourself.
- 99% of my fights with my wife were fueled by alcohol. This is personal, but I think it’s worth sharing. I have an amazing wife and partner, and I would never do anything to harm the relationship intentionally. But that’s exactly what I was doing by drinking. I noticed that despite having very strong communication practices, on nights when we were drinking, we would often end up arguing about nothing. We would wake up in the morning and apologize, but I could see the long-term damage that was occurring by normalizing this behavior. Once I quit booze, the bickering stopped with it. This is perhaps the most massive win of the whole experiment.
So, what does all this have to do with wealth?
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember that I define true wealth as freedom in four areas: health, relationships, time, and freedom of mind.
Giving up alcohol yielded one of the best ROIs in all four areas that I’ve ever experienced.
I dramatically improved my fitness and body composition, my relationship with my wife, reclaimed countless hours, and broke the shame spiral of not keeping my word to myself – all with one decision.
Bottom line: if I knew what the return on this investment would be, I would have made it years ago.
When we consider changing a habit, we tend to focus on what we are giving up.
But in the case of alcohol, here’s the real question:
Who could you become if you ran a simple expiriment?
It may be worth finding out the answer.
Raising my glass (of N/A beer),
mb
