Why Autumn is a Brilliant Time to Rethink your Drinking
It’s a great time of year for a fresh start
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always felt that autumn is a natural time to commit to healthier habits. It’s that back-to-school, change-of-seasons feeling. A chance to reset after the summer and get back into some kind of routine. So why is now a good time to give up booze?
Before I give you my top five reasons, let’s remember something here: you’re not actually “giving up” anything. There is so much to gain when you stop drinking.
Let’s crack on.
1. By the time Christmas comes around, you’ll already have a decent stretch of sobriety under your belt.
Rather than heading into December thinking, “I’ll deal with my drinking in January”, you’ll have already experienced socialising, weekends and everyday life without alcohol.
2. It’s cosy season.
Or the ’ber months, as the influencers like to call them. Snuggle up on the sofa with a mug of steaming hot chocolate, binge some comfort TV and embrace the fact that staying in suddenly feels completely acceptable.
3. You might notice improvements in other areas of your life too.
This isn’t a given and everyone’s experience is different, but for me, stopping drinking helped enormously with my IBS, UTIs and anxiety, and my skin and sleep improved massively too. I’d spent so long thinking I had lots of separate problems without really considering (or admitting) how much alcohol might be contributing to them.
4. If you’re anything like me, you’ve had a busy summer and you’re ready for a reset.
I love summer, but by September I’m usually ready for routine again. Proper meals, lots of healthy whole foods, delicious soups, earlier nights and generally taking better care of myself.
5. I’ve never woken up and regretted not drinking the night before.
Not once. But I can think of countless mornings when I desperately regretted drinking.
It was actually in September 2022 when I first started to think that I really needed to do something about how much I was drinking. I took an “Am I drinking too much?” quiz online and was told that I could be becoming dependent on alcohol. I can’t remember how truthful I actually was when I answered the questions because, at that point, I was DEFINITELY dependent on alcohol.
The problem was, I felt there was so much shame attached to the word “dependent”.
In my head, alcohol dependence belonged to other people. I associated it with the stereotypical idea I had of an “alcoholic” or someone addicted to drugs. It certainly wasn’t something I could relate to myself.
I had a home, a family and a job. I was getting on with my life. How could I possibly be dependent on alcohol?
But dependence doesn’t always look the way we’ve been taught to think it does. And, looking back, I can see that alcohol had become far too important in my life. I thought about it constantly: when I could drink, how much I could drink, whether there would be enough and when I could drink again.
That September quiz didn’t make me stop drinking there and then. But it planted a seed. And maybe this September could be the time you plant one too.
