I want to be clear about something before we start: I am not going to be one of those people. You know the ones. They quit drinking and suddenly they're posting sunrise photos with captions about clarity and gratitude and being present. They've found a book about dopamine. They want to tell you about it.

I'm not that bloke. I stopped drinking because I felt rough on Mondays and my parkrun time was getting embarrassing¹. That's it. There was no revelation. No rock bottom. No inspiring podcast episode. I just thought "this probably isn't helping" which is, I think, the most middle-aged reason to do anything.

But ten weeks in, some things have happened. And my mate Paul said "you should write that down" which is the same thing he says about everything, including the time I got into an argument with a self-checkout machine². So here we are.

Sleep

I expected this to be the first thing people mention when you tell them you've stopped drinking and I was right. "Bet you're sleeping better!" they say, with the enthusiasm of someone who's just discovered a new podcast about sleep. Which, come to think of it, they probably have.

The honest answer is: yes, but not in the way I expected. I don't fall asleep faster. If anything it takes slightly longer because I don't have that third-glass drowsiness pulling me under at 10pm. But I stay asleep. The whole night. No 3am panic. No lying there doing maths about how many hours I've got left if I fall asleep right now versus if I fall asleep in twenty minutes. Just... sleep, and then morning.

My wife noticed before I did. Apparently I've stopped doing the thing where I get up at 4am, go downstairs, eat half a packet of digestives, and come back to bed pretending nothing happened. I was not aware this was a regular occurrence. According to her it was a "two to three times a week" situation. I choose to believe she's exaggerating, but the biscuit consumption data does corroborate her version of events³.

Running

My 5K time has come down from 34:12 to 32:47 in ten weeks, which I am aware puts me firmly in the "decent for a 46-year-old who started running less than a year ago" category and absolutely nowhere near the "actually fast" category. I'll take it.

The difference isn't fitness, really. Or not just fitness. It's that I actually want to go. Saturday morning used to be a negotiation between the version of me that signed up for parkrun and the version of me that had two glasses of wine at 11pm the night before. The second version usually won. Now there's only one version of me on Saturday morning, and he's annoying but at least he's consistent.

I bought a GPS watch. Then I bought a better GPS watch. Then I bought a running belt to hold my phone even though I now have a GPS watch and don't need my phone. This is, I think, what happens when you redirect pub money into hobbies. The money doesn't disappear. It just becomes gear⁴.

Evenings

This is the one that surprised me.

I thought evenings would be the hard part. The 7pm Tuesday thing I wrote about last time - that ritual, that "the day is over" signal. I thought losing that would feel like losing something important.

Turns out the ritual was the important bit, not the alcohol. I still have a beer at 7pm most evenings. It's just an IMPOSSIBREW now. Same can, same sofa, same rubbish on the telly. The difference is that twenty minutes later I feel genuinely relaxed rather than slightly numbed, and an hour later I'm not thinking about whether to have a second one or whether a second one would make tomorrow morning worse.

I know how that sounds. "Man drinks non-alcoholic beer and feels relaxed" is not exactly front-page news. But the thing that makes IMPOSSIBREW different from every other AF beer I've tried is that it actually does something. There's stuff in it - ashwagandha, L-theanine - that means Tuesday evening still feels like Tuesday evening instead of Tuesday evening but somehow flatter. I wrote about this in the beer comparison and I'm aware I'm repeating myself but it genuinely is the thing that made this stick.

Without that, honestly, I think I'd have gone back to real beer by about week three. The taste of AF beer is fine. The taste was never the issue. The issue was always "why am I doing this if it doesn't do anything" and IMPOSSIBREW is the only one that has an answer to that question.

Weekends

Weekends are longer now. Not literally - I haven't discovered time travel, although if I do I'll write about that too - but experientially. Saturday and Sunday used to start at about 11am because the first two hours were spent in a negotiation with my own head about whether I felt well enough to participate in being alive. Now they start when the 7-year-old jumps on me at 7:15, which is worse in some ways but at least I'm functional for it.

We've been doing more stuff. Not "wellness stuff" - I want to be very clear about that. Normal stuff. Took the kids to a castle last weekend. Went to B&Q on Saturday afternoon, which I appreciate sounds like the opposite of living your best life but I needed a bracket and the bracket situation was urgent⁵.

The point is: I'm present for it. Even the boring bits. Especially the boring bits. Turns out the boring bits are actually quite good when you're not experiencing them through a mild fog.

Social Situations

This is where I'd love to tell you it's been completely fine and nobody cares and the social stigma around not drinking is a thing of the past.

It's mostly fine. But not entirely. There's a moment - you'll know it if you've done this - where someone offers you a drink and you say "no thanks, I'm not drinking" and there's a pause. A tiny one. A recalibration. They're working out whether this is a diet thing or an addiction thing or a religious thing or a boring thing, and how much sympathy is appropriate, and whether they should put their own drink down.

The answer is: it's none of those things. I just felt rough on Mondays. But that's somehow harder for people to process than a dramatic reason. A dramatic reason gives them a script. "I just couldn't be bothered feeling bad anymore" does not⁶.

My mate Paul has settled into a comfortable routine where he offers me a real beer every single time we meet, I decline, and he says "more for me then" as though this is the first time he's made that joke. It's been ten weeks, Paul. The joke has not improved with repetition.

The Honest Bit

Not everything is better. I should say that.

I'm slightly more bored. Not in a crisis way. Just - evenings are longer when you're not slightly sedated, and I haven't fully figured out what to do with that extra bandwidth. I've read more books in the last ten weeks than in the previous year, which sounds impressive until you learn that the previous year's total was four⁷.

There's an identity thing too, which I wasn't expecting. I was a "couple of beers in the evening" person for twenty-something years. That was part of who I was. Not a big part, but a part. And when you remove a part of who you are, even a small part, there's a gap that takes a while to fill with something else. I'm filling it with running and an unreasonable interest in GPS watches, which my wife assures me is not an improvement.

But on balance - and I know this is where the not-drinking evangelists would normally start playing inspirational music - it's better. The mornings are better. The running is better. The weekends are better. The Tuesday evenings are, against all expectations, still good. And I'm spending roughly the same amount of money, it's just going to Garmin and IMPOSSIBREW instead of Majestic Wine.

I'll take that trade.

Thanks for reading. Normal service - which is to say, no service at all and occasional ramblings from a man with a website - will resume shortly.