Mindful Drinking & Moderation in Midlife: How to Drink Less, On Your Terms

151. Beating Quitter’s Day! The Dry January Myths That Sabotage Your Success

• Denise Hamilton-Mace • Episode 151

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We're smack bang between Quitter's Day and Blue Monday - that dreaded mid-January slump when Dry January motivation nosedives and everything feels a bit meh. 

You’re not alone. In this episode, I’m diving into the top Dry January myths that make the challenge feel harder than it needs to be—like thinking you have to be completely sober, believing one drink means you’ve failed, or assuming your social life is over.

Discover how these all-or-nothing beliefs can sabotage your motivation, and learn practical tips for bouncing back and resetting Dry January without guilt or going back to day one. 

If you’re ready to challenge these Dry January myths and reclaim your motivation, this episode is for you!


0:01 Quitter’s Day And Blue Monday

2:52 Why All Or Nothing Backfires

4:29 Damp January

7:14 Reframing Slip Ups As Data

9:11 What Success Looks Like After January

10:22 Keeping Your Social Life Alive

13:23 When You Do Drink More - Reset Now, Not Next Monday

16:22 Reconnect to Your Why

18:49 Listener Milestones

 

Also mentioned:
ep#63: What Are Zebra Striping and Bookending (& Do They Work)?
ep#150: Dry January: The Pros, The Cons & The Sunnyside Perspective

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SPEAKER_00:

The second Friday in January is known as Quitter's Day, when most people give up on their New Year's resolutions, whatever they are. The third Monday of the month is known as Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. And here we are, right smack bang in the middle of them both. Now, Truth Time, neither one of these phenomena is actually based on any real peer-reviewed research. Quitter's Day is thought to have been popularized by the fitness app Strava some time ago as the day when most people stopped recording any fitness activity. And Blue Monday was initially coined by a travel firm, Sky Travel, based on a formula by a psychologist which looked at the time since Christmas, uh the debt that you recruit over Christmas, the weather, and all of those things, and decided that it was the most depressing day of the year. But just because these terms are not ones that you will find in any modern journals of medicine, it doesn't mean that there isn't some truth to the fact that we're all feeling a little bit meh when it comes to the middle of the month. So today I want to look at those times when it all seems to be a little bit beyond us, and when the whole dry January mantra is just getting a little bit old and we're feeling a little bit tired, and we just want to go back to what we were doing before because hey, it wasn't that bad anyway, right? So we're gonna have a look today at how we can reframe any uh negative emotions, any slip-ups, quote unquote, that we might feel that we're having around the month, and how you can come out of this 31-day period still feeling like a winner, no matter what changes you have to make to your dry January along the way. You're listening to the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife podcast with me, Denise Hamilton Mace, your mindful drinking mentor. I'm here to help you design, build, and live a life less intoxicated on your own terms. After 24 years of working in hospitality and drinking daily like it was a non-negotiable part of my job, I finally recognize in my early 40s that alcohol was no longer serving me the way it was before. Now I want to use what I've learned as a publisher, writer, and speaker on all things moderation to help you cut through the noise and find out what truly works for you. Together, we will unpack the truth about mindful drinking from the good to the bad to the downright bizarre. If you're ready to make a change without judgment, pressure, or expectation to quit, then come with me as we jump into the world of low, no, and light alcohol drinks, drinkers, and drinking so that you can take back the power of choice from alcohol. So, dry January is one of those things that is surprisingly controversial in the low, no and light space. If you heard my uh episode last week where I interviewed the lovely Nick Allen from Sunnyside. Nick and I were talking about the fact that one of the biggest challenges around dry January, from our perspective, is this all or nothing approach that seems to have been perpetuated as the only way to succeed in the month. And actually, as I'm sure you'll know by now, listening to my show, I'm not a big fan of that sort of all or nothing mind frame that doesn't leave space for flexibility, it doesn't leave room to bend. And when you don't have space to bend, what happens is that you always end up breaking. But life needs flexibility. Having kids means the ultimate exercise in learning to be flexible because nothing goes as you had intended. Nothing goes to your own plans. You've got to work around the needs and wants of those little people. And you might also have to work around the needs and wants of aging parents, of demanding bosses, of a busy time at work, of other commitments that you've put forward for yourself, things like trying to get your fitness back on track, or like me at the moment trying to cut down on the amount of coffee that I'm drinking, which seems now to be a bad idea. But the all-or-nothing approach to dry January is what often leaves people feeling like if they don't go completely dry for the entire month, that somehow they have failed in their attempts at it. So I want to break down a few of those myths around it from my perspective that that I see. And the first one is that it has to be a completely sober month. Now I know the clue is in the name, it's called Dry January. And yes, the charity who designed this challenge back 14 years ago, which is a British charity called Alcohol Change UK, I recently became an ambassador for the charity, and I'm very glad to be on board. And I fully support the official uh Dry January process, which you can do by downloading their Try Dry app for free and logging your sober days and logging your drinks and all that sort of thing. And it's a wonderful way to approach it. However, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. Some people may find that that extremist um complete sobriety approach is what leads them to want to drink more. Now, I've seen a lot of memes and things out there, and people saying, you know, if you struggle with a 31-day challenge, that's all the more reason why you should be doing it. And I've got to say to those people, just piss off. Like, seriously, we can't judge everybody just because you can make it 31 days with no alcohol and come out feeling wonderful. And somebody else might find that a little bit more challenging. The very fact that you are attempting to participate in a challenge like dry January means that you are making fantastic strides in recognizing that it's time to change your relationship with alcohol. But that change doesn't look the same for everybody. You might find that for you, a dry-ish January, or it's also being called a damp January, where you cut back rather than cut out, is more beneficial to you. A lot of people don't respond well to strict uh instructions, to rules. I'm one of them myself. I hate being told what to do, even if it's me telling myself what to do. But knowing that you have that flexibility to perhaps say to yourself, right, well, I am only drinking on the weekends, or I'm only having uh one glass of wine once a week, or anything along those lines. You know, you know what works better for you. Allowing yourself that flexibility to have that also means that you allow yourself that flexibility to say, Do you know what? Actually, I've gone the whole week and I know I'm allowed, quote unquote, to have a glass of wine tonight, but I'm feeling really good and I don't fancy it. So I'm not going to. And it's that ability to give yourself the space to, as I always like to say, take back the power of choice from alcohol, which is where the true benefit actually lies. Um, the second, the second myth, and this is one that I suffered myself when I did dry January several times. I did uh two uh attempts at it, and then I did a third one where I did actually go dry for for three months, but then went straight back to drinking the way that I was before. Um, is that if you have had a quote-unquote slip up, if you have had a drink, if you have had uh the odd moment where you drank more than you've intended to, that you have failed at it. And so you might as well just throw the towel in and crack on and just get absolutely rat assed. Uh, I gotta say that that's probably not the best thing that you can do for yourself. Instead, what I would love for you is if you took this, and I know it's a really cheesy thing to say, but if you took it as a learning opportunity, and all I mean by that is to look at what it was that led you to take that drink in the first place when your intentions were not to have it. Was it the people that you were with? Was it the place that you're in? Uh, was it the situation? Was your boss being a dick? Was your other half being a prat? Were the kids being annoying? You know, all of these are perfectly valid triggers, and we all feel all of them at some way at some point, uh and they can affect us more or less, depending on lots of other things, like how well we've slept and how well we're looking after ourselves and how much we may have drank previously. So look at those situations and assess honestly what it was that led you to have that one drink. And if you then had more, the thought processes that you underwent that let you go from, oh, I'll just have one, to oh, I've had one bottle. Because the more you can understand yourself, the more you can make changes to your behavior. And that's one thing that I think we we often miss out when we're talking about this dry January approach, is that it's not just about not having alcohol for 31 days, full stop, February the 1st, start again. The idea is that you take some time out to look at your relationship with alcohol, to think about the role that it's playing with your life, and to decide how you want that to manifest going forward. For some of you, that might be, do you know what? I've had enough, not at all, I feel fantastic, I don't want to do this anymore. Fabulous. For some of you, that might be actually, I don't feel that different to who I was before. I haven't been drinking as much as I used to, and I'm okay with my levels. And for some of you, that might be I do feel the benefits of it, but I'm not ready to give up alcohol entirely. I still love my glass of Argentinian red, and I want to be able to have that when I'm out for a nice meal or as a weekend treat. So I'm going to allow myself to do that. But I also now know that I feel better when I drink less or I drink differently. And so when I've got important things to do, I won't allow alcohol to be part of the equation. That is a successful dry January. It doesn't matter how many drinks you've had in between if you come out of the end of it and you have one of those frames in mind for you to take forward into the rest of the year. The third myth that I really want to break for you for dry January, and this one's a big one, is that the belief that uh going dry for a month, going sober for a month, however you want to frame it, also means um making your social life go dry. Nobody wants a dry social life. When I was a kid in school, we used to say, don't be dry, and it meant don't be boring, don't be rubbish. Um, can't believe I've just said that publicly, and it sounds terrible, but you know what? It's staying in because, hey, this is who I am. So, what I mean is the fallacy that you have to just stay in the whole time and have Netflix on permastream drinking endless cups of tea or glasses of uh orange squash whilst you do nothing and the world passes you by. That is really not the point of this time. It is so crucial that you continue to socialize, you continue to see your friends. Now, that might look different. Okay, I'm not saying that you're gonna go raving every weekend whilst you're trying to uh reduce your alcohol intake for the very first time. Perhaps instead of that, you might just go for a coffee with somebody, or you might go for a walk with somebody, or you might think, Denise, it's bloody cold outside, I want to sit down. So you still go to the pub, but you make choices to have different drinks than you normally would. I've mentioned before that the pubs, particularly here in the UK, I'm not so sure about the US because it's such a vast landscape that when I speak to my friends there, I know it's different in different places. But here in the UK, pubs are getting so much better. And the vast majority of UK pubs have at least one alcohol-free drink available on offer. Now, not enough of them have more than one, so I know that that can be a little bit limiting, but they are all so much more receptive to you going in there as a non-drinker for that occasion and asking for something that tastes amazing, that feels adult, that allows you to participate with your friends, whether that is a quiet little lunch for two, whether that is a Thursday or Friday or a Saturday night out. Um, so don't think that you have to be embarrassed or you're not allowed to join in or you can't have as much fun just because you're not drinking full-strength alcohol. It's so important that you still have the support of your friends. And that means seeing them and talking to them and being part of the social circle. It means not just sitting inside and hiding away from the world, because then you never learn how you can incorporate a different way of drinking into the lifestyle that you are trying to build. And that is a really important part of what we're trying to do. It's about changing elements of your lifestyle so that you can support what you want to achieve from it, not so that you're just constantly taking things away. So if you do have a moment where you drink more than you intended to, whether that is one drink, whether that is several, there's a couple of ways I want you to approach this. Okay. So one of the first things that you could do is if you had started off with the intention of going completely dry and you do have one or two drinks, you can make a choice. You can choose to switch to a dry-ish or a damp January approach, where, like I said before, you do allow yourself to have uh drinks on certain occasions, whether that be uh just on the weekends or um a specific evening or a specific event or something like that. Your other option, of course, is to restart the challenge. But when I say restart the challenge, and I want you to hear me when I say this, I don't mean going back to day one. I don't mean scratching off all the work you've done up until the moment that you've had that extra drink and then feeling like, oh my God, I've got to start again, you know, I've lost my streak. That is not helpful. It psychologically undoes all that fabulous hard work that you've done and makes you feel like you haven't achieved anything. But I promise you, you have. You have achieved so much because you've made this recognition, you've made this choice, and you've taken actions. So when I say restart, what I mean is right now, right this moment, right after you've had that drink, the instant that you recognize that actually I'd rather not have had that drink, or I really don't want any more, that is when you restart your challenge and say, Do you know what? I'm gonna put that glass down, or I'm not gonna pick that bottle up and I'm gonna go from here with the learnings that I've just gathered from whatever situation I was in before. Don't wait till Monday, don't wait till tomorrow. Start straight away and just say to yourself, I'm human. I made uh an error in terms of what I wanted to do. Now I'm gonna learn from that and I'm gonna use it to help me do better by my own standard in whatever direction I take this in next. And that doesn't need a uh next Monday start date. That doesn't mean that you need to give up on January and then say to yourself, oh, do you know what? I'll do it in February instead. You can do that at absolutely any time. The power of choice is in your hands and you can make the decision to win at this month, whatever that looks like to you, simply by not giving up. So please don't give up on yourself. Don't give up on your dry, dry ish or damp January challenge, whatever that looks like. And don't beat yourself up if on occasion you have drunk more than you intended to do. You are human, as I said, and we all make mistakes. The worst thing we can do is beat ourselves up for it. Reconnect to why you're doing this. You you made this choice for a reason. You decided that this was something that was gonna be beneficial to you because something needed to change. Hold on to that and remember that you can give yourself permission to change the experiment whenever you need to, to be flexible in how you approach it, as long as you're doing it with honesty, as long as you're not just using as an excuse to go, oh, do you know what I am gonna get rat ass tonight, but you know, I'll I'll be keep going with dry January tomorrow. Be honest with yourself. If that's what you want to do, then that's absolutely fine. But be with honest with yourself about why you're doing it. Moving forward, I want you to make sure that you take whatever it is that you're gaining from this dry January experience and you take it forward into the rest of the year. The biggest risk factor for me in people doing this challenge is getting to February the 1st and then just going, oh yes, I made it. I did 31 days, whatever that looks like. Now I can get pierced. You know, that means that all you do is undo all that great stuff, all that physical, mental, psychological benefit that you've been building up over the last few weeks, whatever that looked like for you. Don't throw it all away by getting absolutely blind drunk on February the 1st. I'm not saying you can't have a drink, of course. You do what you want to do. But make sure you take that mindfulness with you. Take that consciousness about your drinking with you, that realization of how it feels to drink a lot versus how it feels to drink a little bit less. Keep your mind open to alternative drinks and low, no, and light drinks and to different ways of moderating, whether you want to explore zebra striping or bookending or coasting. Um, and I will link to episodes that I have done on those terms before in case you haven't heard them and you want to know a little bit more about them. Remember that this is not a month to uh beat yourself over the head with. Dry January should not be a stick to punish yourself with. This should be an opportunity for you to explore yourself and to explore your options and to make choices that serve you better for the life that you want to lead. I hope you can take what I've said today and really use that to help you on your dry January journey, whatever it looks like. Speaking of journeys, I want to just take one or two minutes before I let you go to share something with you. I've spoken on this show before uh about the fact that podcasting can be a bit lonely. You never really know um how much of an impact you're having if people are really uh connecting and resonating with what I'm I'm trying to do. And I received uh at the end of December something called my Spotify Wrapped for Creators. And it's just like all those other uh year roundups that you get on different platforms like Spotify or um, I don't know, LinkedIn or your fitness app. And I was literally blown away and left speechless, which is a big statement for a podcaster to find out that because of the support that you have shown this podcast, Spotify had listed the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife podcast as a rising star show for the year. And not only that, you have allowed this show to land in the top 7% of shows globally as one of the most talked about shows. So the most commented on, and also one of the most shared shows on the platform. And that blows me away to know that you are taking what I've said and it is touching you, it's resonating with you, it's helping you, and you see so much value in it that you are sharing it with your friends, your family, your colleagues or contacts, or whoever. Um, it makes me um I'm very touched. I'm very touched. Uh uh, and as you may hear, I am struggling to find the right words without getting too emotional because I'm not an emotional person, but to know that my show is actually reaching and helping people in such uh uh uh an honest and raw and touching way is absolutely phenomenal. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I welcome all the new listeners uh who joined the show in December and now in January who have no idea what I'm rambling on about, but you're here at the end listening to me anyway. Uh and so I'm super grateful to you too. I've got some um great episodes lined up coming up for you uh in January and beyond to continue to help you on your journey to a life less intoxicated. And thank you so much for being part of my journey to a Spotify top 7% global show. All right, I will catch you next week. Until then, cheers to a life less intoxicated.

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Denise Hamilton-Mace

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