How to quit drinking

I quit a bunch of times before it stuck.

Not a few times. Over 15 years of drinking a bottle of gin a day, I tried to stop more times than I can count. And every time it didn’t hold, I added it to the pile of evidence that I was broken — that I couldn’t do it, that other people got sober and I couldn’t figure out why it kept not working for me.

What I know now is that every single one of those attempts was actually doing something. I just couldn’t see it yet.

First, the safety part

I stopped cold turkey. After 15 years of a bottle a day, I just stopped — and I didn’t have any of the dangerous physical stuff happen to me. But I might have gotten lucky, and I want to be honest about that.

For some people, stopping suddenly after heavy, long-term drinking can be physically dangerous. It can cause seizures. In the worst cases it can kill you. I’m not saying that to scare you — I’m saying it because I didn’t know it at the time, and I’d rather you know.

So this is the one thing I’ll actually tell you to do: talk to a doctor about coming off it safely before you just stop. Not about whether you “have a problem” — you can work that out on your own time. Just the physical part. Tell them how much, how often, and be honest about the number even though everything in you will want to round it down. They’ve heard worse.

That’s it. That’s the only instruction. Everything else is just what happened to work for me.

What didn’t work, and why that matters

I tried the traditional stuff. AA. Rehab more than once. Psychiatrists, therapists, different combinations of pills. If any of that works for you, go — genuinely. There’s no hierarchy here and no right way to do this. AA keeps a lot of people alive and I’d never talk someone out of the thing that’s holding them up.

But none of it worked for me. And for a long time I thought that meant I was the problem.

What I eventually understood was that I’d been waiting for something external to fix me. Handing my recovery to a program, a clinic, a prescription, and waiting for it to reach in and do the thing. None of them could, because that part was mine to do. I needed to go through all of it to figure that out.

Here’s the other thing though — and this is important: all those failed attempts weren’t wasted. By the time it finally held, I’d been through enough rounds that I knew exactly what to expect. I knew what the first few days felt like. I knew which moments were going to be hard and roughly when they’d come. I knew what had pulled me back before, and I knew which of the things I’d tried had actually helped, even when the overall attempt didn’t stick.

That knowledge was real. It didn’t feel like it at the time — it felt like failure, over and over. But it was information. And when this attempt came, I had it all.

The other thing that made this time different

My mom sat me down and said, plainly: you drink.

I’d been lying to everyone close to me for years. Not that much. Not by myself. Everyone already knew — those lies are for you, not for them. But something in that moment broke differently. Instead of arguing it down, I said: yes. True.

I don’t fully know what shifted. But that one honest sentence out loud, to one person who already knew, was the actual beginning. Not a meeting, not a formal decision, not a rock bottom with any kind of clarity to it. Just that.

What held me up: the most boring thing imaginable

Once I was through the first stretch, the thing that kept me standing was embarrassingly unglamorous.

I made myself live the same day, over and over. Every morning: overnight oats, the same ones I’d made the day before. A walk, more or less the same route. Exercise some days. The same snack before bed. Sleep. Then do it again.

Nothing about this was exciting. But it was the first time in years my body felt calm. The routine was the point — not because I’d read that structure helps, but because I’d learned from the previous attempts what my body actually needed. Predictability. No decisions. The same quiet day on repeat until my nervous system started to believe it was safe without a drink in it.

I want to be clear about something: I’m not telling you that this is the routine. I’m telling you it was mine. The overnight oats aren’t the answer. The specific walk isn’t the answer. What’s underneath it — giving your body something to count on, something that isn’t chaos — that might be. But what it looks like for you is yours to figure out.

Don’t waste energy feeling guilty about not doing it the “right” way. There isn’t one. The only job is to find the combination that works for you — and if you’ve tried before and it didn’t hold, you already know more than you think you do. That knowledge is yours. This time you get to use it.

What actually made it hard (and it wasn’t what I expected)

The cravings weren’t what I’d braced for. They weren’t some overwhelming physical urge I had to wrestle down. They were more like nostalgia — a memory of the good part, that first drink loosening something, the brief warm window before everything went sideways. My brain kept offering me that highlight reel on a loop.

What helped was learning to run the tape past that moment. Okay, that feeling. And then what? Because I knew exactly what came next. I’d lived it hundreds of times. The feeling lasts maybe twenty minutes. What follows it is the rest of your life — just a nightmare you keep choosing to stay in because that twenty minutes is the only thing that feels like relief.

The moment I could hold the whole sequence in my head instead of just the opening scene, the craving stopped having the same pull. It was still there. I just wasn’t negotiating with an edited version of the story anymore.

The part I wasn’t prepared for: nobody believed me

Something I didn’t expect, and that was harder than I thought it would be: the people close to me didn’t believe it was going to hold this time.

And they were entitled to that. I know they were. I’d done this before, multiple times, and it hadn’t stuck. They’d watched it happen. Of course they were skeptical.

But it still stung. There’s something particularly hard about doing the right thing and having no credit left to spend. You’re already fighting the battle internally — and then you’re also managing other people’s wait-and-see, their quiet doubt, their not-quite-believing-it-yet looks across the dinner table.

The thing I had to keep coming back to was this: I wasn’t doing it to convince them. The second I started thinking about stopping drinking as a way to prove something to anyone — even to prove them wrong — I was doing it for the wrong reason and it was going to fall apart. I was doing it for myself. For my health. Because I was tired of feeling sick of who I’d become. The people around me would either see it eventually or they wouldn’t, and that couldn’t be the point.

It wasn’t easy to stay in that headspace. But it was the only one that held.

So, how do you quit?

I can’t tell you. That’s not me being cute — it’s the honest answer, and it’s the most useful thing I’ve got.

What I can tell you is that I quit without doing any of the things that are supposed to be required, after years of being told there was a correct way to do this. The dangerous part, the physical part, you handle with a doctor. The rest of it, you get to figure out for yourself. For me it turned out to be the least dramatic thing imaginable — the same plain day, over and over, until it held.

If that sounds like nothing, good. Sometimes nothing is exactly what works.