Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober – forever

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Within days, our doorbell was a-jingle with beer deliveries: cases of Surreal’s Chandelier Red I.P.A. (burnt toast and caramel), WellBeing’s Intentional I.P.A. (peach and pineapple), and BrewDog’s Hazy AF (clover, thistle, mowed lawn). All these beers are delicious, and some are flavorful to the point of funkiness, with billowy heads of foam and the fizz of added carbonation. But Run Wild remained my go-to. Fromme’s students continue to use balanced-placebo-design methods to study the role that alcohol plays—and doesn’t play—in sexual arousal, domestic violence, and disinhibited behavior. (Most researchers, however, no longer study a group that expects tonic but receives alcohol, because few of the participants are fooled.) “Does alcohol really make you more aggressive, or do you think, I’ve been drinking, so I can be disinhibited?” Fromme said. “Does alcohol make people more flirtatious, or do they believe that drinking gives them permission to be more flirtatious? It’s all about what you expect to happen.” Shufelt drew pints of Two Trellises for himself and Walker and pulled up a stool near mine. He said that on graduating from Middlebury College, in 2005, he had gone to work for a financial firm in Jersey City, and then for a hedge fund in Stamford, not far from Darien, where he grew up. “Everyone I knew was in finance, so I went into finance,” he said. My glass was almost empty. My string of alcohol-free days had come to an end. I’d hung around the barbershop too long, and now I’d had my haircut.

Phenomenal; only a 14 per cent falter rate. But hang on, pipes up the negative-seeking drone inside me; that’s not zero, is it? That’s still 14 per cent. And the central theme of my last few years has been about that number, if I had to be a reductionist. About casting around for ways to feel as protected from it as humanly possible. Not living in fear, but being productive in protecting this rainforest from deforestation. But now Shufelt had a different problem: what to drink at social occasions and business dinners. “If you’re at a fancy Italian restaurant and you pair the food with a Diet Coke, it just murders the experience. Plus you feel like a six-year-old.”

No other author writes about sober living with as much warmth or emotional range as Catherine Gray. Her deep insight into the subtle psychologies of drinking, and of life, means that everything she writes is both utterly relatable and stretches our minds. Hers is a rare wisdom.' - Dr Richard Piper, CEO, Alcohol Change UK Ritual, a Chicago-based startup launched in 2019, makes zero-proof liquors in four varieties: Whiskey Alternative, Gin Alternative, Rum Alternative, and Tequila Alternative. Marcus Sakey, a co-founder of Ritual, told me that if he were to make a zero-proof vodka it would instantly become his best-selling product. Vodka is the most popular spirit consumed in the U.S., in large part because it has the lowest tasting profile. So a zero-proof vodka would have to taste like no-taste. Shufelt, still at the hedge fund, would get up early to call brewers in Germany. German brewers have traditionally relied on “arrested fermentation,” a process that stops the beer from becoming alcoholic in the first place. Roger Barth, a professor emeritus of chemistry at West Chester University, and the author of “ The Chemistry of Beer: The Science in the Suds,” explained to me that brewers can use special yeasts, and remove them from the “wort”—the mixture of water and maltose that is the mother brew—before the yeasts fully ferment the sugars and the starches. “Timing and temperature control are critical, because the fermentation must run long enough to generate desired flavors but short enough to curtail ethanol production,” Barth said. “This is difficult to control.”

He spent two years studying the industry. In the U.S., “there was no belief in non-alcoholics as a business,” he told me, gesturing with his glass of Two Trellises. “It had been an eighty-to-one-hundred-million-dollar industry with zero innovation for thirty years.” Could I restore the old customs to my evenings, using non-alcoholic wine and liquor placebos instead of alcohol? When I ran my concept, “zero-proof therapy,” by George Koob, he pronounced it “very dangerous.” To Lisa, it sounded like an argument made by Wile E. Prevaricator, once and future alcoholic—a clever way to introduce and rationalize the idea of my returning to real drinking. The number one advice I would give is to immerse yourself in the teetotalin’ world. Listen to every podcast you can, read every book, follow sober influencers, join Facebook groups, find alcohol-free role models in the shape of great thinkers, artists, writers and actors who are ‘out’ (there are lists of these in both The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and Sunshine Warm Sober). A good rule of thumb, and advice given to me very early on, is to spend as much time thinking / talking / reading about sobriety, as you did drinking. As time rolls on, the ‘immersion’ time you’ll need will become less and less. But in the beginning, I treated learning about being alcohol-free much as I did studying for a degree. I was already happy as a sober. Happy as a clam, happy as a camper, happy as Augustus Gloop in Charlie’s Chocolate Factory. I had a brief spell of feeling bored, but that was soon torpedoed by a clever therapist who cleared his throat and said, ‘Maybe you’re just bored in general?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked? ‘Maybe you’re just bored with your life right now, rather than bored with sobriety?’ Hot damn, he was right. So, I went out and got a more interesting life. YouTube is your free friend, whether you want to learn to sea-swim or make a soufflé. I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest.As the millions who choose to stay sober now know, the propaganda around drinking and sobriety is wonky. Sober doesn't feel stony, or cold. Why three months? A UCL study found that while a new habit can become automatic within just 18 days in some cases, on average it takes 66 days for a new habit to become second nature. Personally, I noticed that something magical happened after my 60 th alcohol-free day, and I started to find my stride, like a runner that’s pushed through the punishing first mile and is now flying, starting to feel the buzz of endorphins. You may experience the same, you may not. What matters is, that you’re going to give it a whirl just to see. Early to mid-term recovery is an absolute blast, but also a terrifying tightrope, whereas from year four on, you’ve totally gotten used to not feeling like an extra from Walking Dead on a Saturday morning, so the gleam of that wears off. Making 9am yoga class feels less like a revelation, and more routine. ‘So what?’ Germans have been making far better N.A. brews since the nineteen-seventies, when a brewery in Berlin began producing Aubi, short for Autofahrerbier, so that drivers could drink the national beverage without exceeding Germany’s strict legal limit of 0.05 per cent blood-alcohol content. (In the U.S., the legal limit for drivers is 0.08 per cent, except in Utah, where it is 0.05 per cent.) In the early nineteen-seventies, G. Alan Marlatt, a clinical psychologist then at the University of Wisconsin, published the first account of his now famous “balanced placebo design” experiments, which demonstrated the influence that expectations and setting can have on alcohol’s psychotropic effects. He and his students recruited non-recovering alcoholics and social drinkers from the Madison area and divided these people, who were told that they were taking part in taste tests, into four groups. Those in group one received a mixed drink (the researchers used decarbonated tonic and vodka, in a five-to-one ratio) and were told that the drink contained alcohol. Those in group two were also told that they were getting alcohol, but they got a tonic-only placebo. Those in the third group were told that they were getting tonic, and they did. The participants in the fourth group got alcohol, but were informed that it was tonic.

A reflective, raw and riveting read. A beautiful book on what it takes to root for yourself’– Emma Gannon, Ctrl Alt Delete I think it was something largely driven by social media. When I quit drinking in 2013, the notion of being ‘out and proud’ about sobriety on socials was unheard of. All the ex-drinkers I knew hid away in private groups (either physically or virtually) and talked in hushed whispers. They hid their recovery from workmates, friends, even family in some cases. I even used a pseudonym while chatting in a private Facebook group made up entirely of such ex-drinkers! There was still an enormous amount of shame and stigma around it. At that point, quitting drinking was only a path for extremely addicted drinkers; it wasn’t remotely a positive lifestyle choice. Fromme added that her bar lab had improved on Marlatt’s placebo. The researchers now serve subjects drinks made of cranberry juice, Diet Cherry 7UP, Rose’s Lime Juice, and decarbonated tonic, some spiked with vodka, others not. She also rubs alcohol on the glasses to add the smell. “You can’t tell the difference,” she said. Ergo, many teetotallers have once been the last one standing at the bar. The one hounding their mates to go to a club. The ones who found it pretty easy to polish off a bottle of wine on their own. (The former two scenarios feel alien right now.) During the pandemic, many of you may have discovered that what you’d previously pegged as a ‘social’ drinking habit, became a runaway ‘at-home’ drinking habit. And no bloody wonder, given the impending doom we’ve been surrounded with over the past year, like a moat of snapping crocodiles. It took them nine months to come up with Athletic’s proprietary de-alcoholizing process, which combines and modifies elements of established methods. “It wasn’t just one step—it ended up being over ten different differentiations in the brewing process,” Walker said. “Changing one degree of temperature here, two there, adding ten more minutes to a step.” Once they had an effective process, they began tinkering with the recipe, making a hundred three-gallon batches. They also worked with a food-safety consultant to determine how to sterilize the equipment and pasteurize the beer. “When you remove alcohol as a preservative,” Shufelt said, “you open the door to E. coli, salmonella, and other kinds of bacteria. And it only takes one cell to get into a can and the can will explode.”

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Is this getting a little weird?” she said. Lisa doesn’t have a drinking problem, but twenty-five years with someone who does had made her a reluctant expert. It felt good to be conducting an interview in a bar again. As a reporter, I had relied on interviews over drinks as a way of loosening a subject’s tongue. But alcohol only works as a disinhibitory lubricant if all parties are drinking.

This hotly anticipated sequel enlists the help of experts and case studies, turning a curious, playful gaze onto provocative questions. Is alcohol a parenting aid? Why are booze and cocaine such a horse and carriage? Once an addict, always an addict? How do you feel safe - from alcohol, others and yourself - in sobriety? I had a list of brewers, and every morning I’d get ten rejections,” he said. “People were nice about it. They’d say there’s no market for non-alcoholic, and the equipment is hugely expensive. I got about two hundred rejections. By the time I got to John, I had taken ‘nonalcoholic’ out of the job description.”Staying sober from year four on became, dare I say it, easy. But the less obvious yet more profound work began. I started finessing life skills that seemed like they were nothing to do with sobriety, yet they were totally related. I learned how to do things like say no (regularly), set boundaries (hate boundaries), ask for what I needed, preserve my energy for the parties I wanted to spend it on and learned how to open the chamber of shame (the things I’d done) in safe company. I’ll be frank, much of this was less fun, but ultimately more transformative. So I wasn’t unhappy and I wasn’t bored, but my challenge in long-term recovery was this. How to finally feel safe. Safe from myself, safe from others, safe from my memories, and last but definitely not least, safe from alcohol and the ultra-pressurised culture around it. That’s what we’re going to explore here. My first book was about finding the ‘happy’. Here, we’re going to plunge into the ‘ever after’. If you find yourself at this dilemma junction, you’ve probably already spent many years trying and failing to ‘reduce volume’. Drinkers who don’t struggle to ‘moderate’ (ie. those who drink one or two and then stop) don’t really contemplate quitting booze. Why? The negatives of their drinking have probably not outweighed the positives yet. It’s hard to experience many negative offshoots from a few glasses of wine over the course of a week. So by the time people arrive at the notion of potentially quitting altogether, or ‘harm reduction’, they’ve most likely already established that they are not a moderate drinker anyhow. Few people are, as it happens. They’re rare. I can count the ‘moderate drinkers’ I know on one hand. So by all means, try a moderation experiment, many do before alighting on quitting altogether. It’s often the final ‘convincer’. The irony is; none is far easier than one. Cold turkey sounds petrifying, but it’s easier overall. I didn’t relapse, however; I was shorn only of my day count. As a member of the expects-tonic, receives-alcohol group, I could argue that my slip doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t intentional. But I’ll take my lumps, and start over. ♦