There’s a slow-growing movement in effect this month that invites people to cut back their alcohol consumption. Sober October is the month-long challenge that’s gaining popularity as a way to reset one’s health, examine habits, and potentially create new ones. According to a recent survey from Oar Health, the virtual platform for alcohol use disorder care, only about 30% of monthly drinkers have heard of Sober October — that’s about half the number familiar with a similar Dry January challenge — And most people who try the challenge keep it to themselves.
Dr. Katie Witkiewitz, psychologist and director of the Center on Alcohol, Substance Use, and Addictions at the University of New Mexico joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about what’s behind Sober October and the rise of moderation movements. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I want to tell you at the top, I didn’t even know that Sober October was a thing, and I decided to do a Sober October all on my own. So we may talk about that as we go through, but tell us, first, about Sober October. Is it connected to other moderation movements?
Dr. Katie Witkiewitz: Absolutely, yes. So you mentioned Dry January in the introduction, and Dry January has definitely grown in a lot of popularity. A lot of people are doing Dry January each year, including myself. It’s a fun tradition to start a year off, saying “no” to alcohol. And then other people do Dry July, [that] is one you maybe not heard of, and now Sober October as an additional month-long campaign to evaluate your relationship with alcohol and whether you need it, how it’s serving you, and how it’s not serving you.
Rath: And is there a strategy behind hitting the month of October in particular?
Dr. Witkiewitz: I think it just rhymes with sober. Also, it’s kind of a prelude to the holidays. A lot of people are coming off the summer months in October. A lot of people use these campaigns as a way to kind of reset their health and reevaluate their patterns of drinking and their patterns of behavior. So I think October is this kind of interesting transition month. It’s the start of fall and takes us into the winter season, and so I think a lot of people are choosing that month as kind of that transition period [that] is happening already, and kind of we’re saying goodbye to the summer and the indulgences we might have had in the summer, and then welcoming the fall with kind of these new trends and new behaviors.
Rath: I would say that really describes me fairly well because I was coming out of the summer and kind of realizing that I’m sort of having a drink every night, that’s not that great, and I’m going to want to drink over the holidays. So October seems like a good time to just clear out the system and, have about a month of sleeping a bit better, it turns out.
Dr. Witkiewitz: Absolutely, yeah. I was going to say, you’re halfway through the month, so you’re probably already noticing some improvements in your sleep, maybe some of your energy levels starting to feel a little bit higher up. So it’s an interesting experiment to see what does change and what does shift.
Rath: I want to talk more about the trend, but that seems like a great place to talk about what the potential benefits are and can be. And I would say, again, for myself, the sleep is the biggest thing that I’ve noticed and that’s actually pretty great.
Dr. Witkiewitz: That’s wonderful and I’m curious if you could talk more about what you’ve noticed, but we generally do find that when people stop drinking altogether or even reduce their drinking – and I really want to highlight that, that this can also be a reduction in drinking – that we see people experience improvements in their sleep pretty rapidly, including sleep quality, and sleep duration. We also see, like I mentioned, people might show improvements in their energy levels, just general kind of feeling of wellbeing, more stable mood. We also see people mentioning improvements in their skin quality or their hair quality. So all the ways that, alcohol is a toxic substance that we put in our bodies, it impacts multiple organ systems. And so when you stop that, even for a short period, you might notice some improvements in various ways.
Rath: I want to play some tape. This is Leslie Delaney Hawkins. She’s the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Sober and Curious Boston. And she’s a person in recovery who says even though people do feel social pressure to drink, eliminating alcohol comes with benefits.
Leslie Delaney Hawkins: When you take alcohol out of the equation, in my own personal experience, it gives you the opportunity to not only evaluate your relationship with alcohol, but really be more authentic in your choices and to learn what you actually like to do.
Rath: That’s sort of a deeper level than the health stuff. The health stuff is great and sleeping good and having my skin look better is awesome but talk about that kind of deeper social aspect of what it can provide.
Dr. Witkiewitz: It’s such a great point because alcohol plays often a lot of roles in our lives, including social roles and also a way to relax, maybe a way to have connection with other people, and so taking a month to explore, what am I really interested in doing? What are my hobbies? I’ve got all this space to fill up that I’m not spending at the happy hour. How am I gonna spend my time? And sometimes that might include still going to the happy hour, but having a non-alcoholic drink, having a mocktail or a non-alcoholic beverage, or it might be exploring new hobbies and exploring new ways of interacting with friends. I know when I’ve done Dry January in the past, I’ve often done it with friends. And so, we kind of explore together different hobbies, different activities that maybe we couldn’t do while drinking alcohol or that we didn’t have space for because we were working, going to happy hour, going home, and going to bed, right? And so, it provides this space to explore different hobbies, different ideas, different ways of interacting. And I really liked the comment about being intentional. I think that’s a piece that a lot of people find [abstaining for an] entire month can give them a new outlook on what are their interests and what are their hobbies [are], and really being intentional about that.
Rath: I want to talk more about what’s driving this in general. We talked about some specifics with people, but I know that there’s a kind of a post-pandemic thing of people kind of reevaluating alcohol. And also, I know that GLP-1 drugs are also working in all of this.
Dr. Witkiewitz: It’s a really interesting trend and I’ll say, I’ve been an alcohol researcher for 20 years and so seeing the changes of the past couple of years has been really fascinating to me. So I think a couple of things, one is that generally more and more research is coming out showing that probably any level of alcohol use is not great for our health, and any reductions in drinking is associated with improvements in health. And so there’s this kind of growing recognition that maybe I should reduce my drinking, and I’m not going to die. I might experience some health benefits. It’s kind of a broadening of, I feel like, for most of our time as humans, we’ve had kind of this dichotomy of, like, some people have problems with alcohol and they can never drink again, whereas other people can drink as much as they want and should drink as much as they want, and it’s socially sanctioned and socially encouraged. And now we’re in this different era where people are starting to say, no, actually, there’s maybe a continuum here, like any other health behavior, and we probably, wanna reduce our drinking, improve our health, just like we wanna get more physical exercise, we know to get more sleep at night, we know to eat healthy. Alcohol is starting to fall into that equation as another behavior that we should maybe be looking at as a way of improving health. So there’s growing recognition of the health risks of alcohol and the health benefits of reducing. I think another piece that’s really fascinating is just the explosion of no alcohol and low alcohol beverages on the market, right? For so many years, we had two non-alcoholic beer options, and that was it. And now we have all sorts of canned mocktails and de-alcoholized wines, and every variety of beer that you might imagine comes in a non-alcoholic version. And I mean, at my grocery store—
Rath: And bars and restaurants now! I was actually, I was just in Las Vegas, and now in Las Vegas, every place has, on the cocktail menu, mocktails.
Dr. Witkiewitz: Wonderful! Wonderful! So we have these options now that we never really had before, where we can actually be in a Vegas casino and choose a non-alcoholic option that actually tastes good. And so that’s, I think, what’s really exciting and different is just having that market available to people to be able to be in places where social cohesion is happening. Because that’s one aspect of alcohol that it does have social facilitative effects and we don’t want people to just not engage socially because they’ve decided to not drink or stop or reduce their drinking. So having those options available is really important.
I also think, you mentioned GLP-1s, and I do think there is this growing just recognition of wanting to be healthier, right? I think maybe that has to do with the fact that we all wear smartwatches or smart rings, or many of us do, and we get to see our sleep score, right? We get to see our sleep quality, or our readiness score, and that tells us that we’re ready for the day or not, or we’ve slept well last night. And you start to see, oh wait, when I drink, my scores go down. And so maybe that’s giving more and more people signals that alcohol is having an effect on their health and that reducing it actually improves their health and well-being. So I think it’s kind of all of those things together. And then there’s also the social effect of other people trying these campaigns and other people reducing their drinking and that being socially accepted, which I think is very different from how it used to be. It used to be if you weren’t drinking, people would say, “Why? Do you have a problem?” And now it’s “Oh, you’re not drinking? I tried that last month!” And so it’s a much more open society to the idea of drinking reductions, which I think is great.
