I Quit Drinking Alcohol... But Did Not Expect This

The Intoxicating Journey

Four bottles of whiskey, four bottles of bitters, old fashioned mix, the Cachaca, gin, vermouth, two bottles of tequila, Cointreau, margarita mix, whiskey, vodka, vermouth, and 31 bottles of wine. (bottles clinking) (Mark laughs) (bottles clinking) This, by my calculations, is roughly how much I drank each year when I lived in New York City. What the heck? (jazzy music) After 22 years of heavy drinking, last summer I decided to quit alcohol for good. There were a lot of reasons for this that I'll get into in a second, and obviously there were benefits. I lost some weight. I slept better at night. And I have no more ungodly hangovers. But there are also some life changes that happened that I was completely unprepared for, and once these hidden benefits kicked in, I knew that I was probably done with alcohol forever.

Cheers to Social Benefits, Jeers to Hangovers

But first, before we can talk about the benefits of not drinking, there's a far more important question to start with, and that is, what are the benefits of drinking? - To alcohol! The cause of and solution to all of life's problem. - For me, the benefits were social. Like most, I started drinking as a teenager, and as someone who struggled a lot with social anxiety and codependency issues as a young man, alcohol was the only thing that allowed me to socialize with large groups of people comfortably. Then, at university, I discovered what I thought was a superpower. I could drink, a lot. And still, somehow remain highly functional. Combine this with a social environment that rewards an ability to drink with status, and by my early twenties, I had adopted an identity as the party guy. I was out almost every night, Tuesday through Saturday, drink in hand, having a blast.

This lifestyle continued throughout my twenties into my early thirties, and by this time, I had moved to New York City. And as anyone who's lived in New York City can tell you, it is an alcoholics' paradise, that is, a ridiculously expensive alcoholics' paradise. I was married, a successful author, flying around the world, writing and promoting books. Throughout all this, the alcohol continued to flow, but it was around this time that something started to change. My party guy identity had helped me survive my insecurities in my twenties. It helped me build the confidence and social experiences necessary to become the successful man that I was in my thirties. But it also began to destroy me in my thirties because by then, life had changed, my values had changed, and more than anything else, my metabolism had changed.

The Revelation: From Hangovers to Health

My body and mind couldn't handle the booze anymore. I gained a ton of weight. I fell horribly out of shape. I slept poorly at night and became stressed all the time. Like many people, I decided to use 2020 as an opportunity to lose some weight and get back in shape. Drinking less was a big part of that, and I cut back drastically from roughly 10 to 15 drinks a week down to just 3 to 5 per week. But then a few catalysts happened all around the same time that made me quit for good. The first was that I actually started to notice how bad alcohol made me feel. When you're having 15 or 20 drinks a week, you're pretty much constantly in a state of being either drunk or hungover, so you don't really realize the degree of damage that you're causing to yourself. But when you cut back and you're only having a few drinks each week, you open up enough gaps of clarity in your day to notice how awful you feel when you have a drink. Even just one drink, one drink, and it can ruin a whole weekend.

The second thing that happened was that a lot of new research on alcohol began to come out. This research showed that alcohol is actually far worse for us than anyone initially thought. See, when I was young, the conventional wisdom was that a few drinks each week was actually good for you. Hell, a glass of red wine was supposed to make you healthy, but now, we have better data and better studies. And, sad to say, the news is bad. - No, God! - It's all bad. Every last drop of it. Alcohol is bad. - Wow. I'll never drink another beer. - Beer here. - I'll take 10. - Not only is it bad for you that day or that week, but if you're a consistently heavy drinker like I was for many, many years, it can take up to a year for your body to completely reset.

The Los Angeles Epiphany

But the final thing and perhaps the most important thing, I left New York and I moved to LA. It is impossible to overstate how big of a deal this move had on my day-to-day health. Everything in New York revolves around bars, restaurants, parties, and shows. LA, on the other hand, is in many ways the opposite. First off, you have to spend hours in your car to get anywhere, so you can't really drink that much in the first place. Second of all, the weather is perfect all the damn time, and there are beaches and mountains like 20 minutes away. So you have healthy, fun activities in the sun that require energy and clarity and getting up in the morning. Suddenly hangovers actually have social costs and downsides. Throw on top of that, the fact that everyone is so goddamn beautiful and healthy here, and yeah, you start to feel a little bit weird when you order a double rye old fashioned at 5:30 on a Tuesday. And by weird, I mean people look at you like you're a degenerate.

Finally, everything reached ahead last summer. I remember I went to an event, and it was an event I signed up for and paid for. The first night, I ended up hanging out at the bar with a few guys that I had met and just got absolutely plastered, like just shit-faced. And I was so drunk, I couldn't get up and go to the event the next day. So I gave it up end of July last year. Initially, I was gonna do three months. The three months was so amazing that I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go to the end of the year." And so my goal for 23 is to actually do all of 2023 without a drink. One year's worth of alcohol, like that, ran through my body. It's pretty crazy.

The Unveiling: Surprising Benefits of Sobriety

Okay, let's talk about the benefits of quitting alcohol and why you should quit too. First, there were the obvious benefits. I lost some weight. I slept like a baby. Date nights with the wife got much, much cheaper. But there were some unexpected benefits as well that took me by a little bit of a surprise.

Number one, less insecurity. I actually began to notice this when I cut back drinking only to a few times per month. The two to three days after I would drink, I would