How to stop drinking alcohol

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 one of those attempts was doing something. I just couldn’t see it yet. This guide is what I wish I’d had in front of me on the first day: the safe order of things, the practical steps, and the parts nobody warns you about.

The short answer

To stop drinking alcohol:

1. Check if stopping suddenly is safe for you. If you drink heavily or every day, talk to a doctor about the physical part first.
2. Decide what “stop” means and write down your reasons while you feel clear.
3. Count honestly how much you actually drink.
4. Set up your first three days: no alcohol in the house, simple food, one person who knows, and a plan for the evenings.
5. Ride out the cravings instead of fighting them. They rise, peak and pass.
6. Build a boring routine so your body has something to count on.
7. Build support you control. One person, a routine and tools that ask nothing of you.
8. Plan for a slip before it happens, so one drink doesn’t turn into a week.

The rest of this page walks through each step, and explains why.

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. If you’re dependent on alcohol, stopping suddenly can be very dangerous. That isn’t me being careful, it’s what the NHS says plainly. Withdrawal can cause seizures and confusion, and in the worst cases it can kill you. About half of people who suddenly stop or cut down heavily have some withdrawal. Around 3 to 5 percent of those go on to delirium tremens, which once killed up to one in five people who developed it and is now closer to one in a hundred (StatPearls, a hospital overview). 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.

If you’re not sure whether that applies to you, the safety guide goes through who is at higher risk, what a medical detox looks like and which symptoms mean “get help now.”

Call emergency services (or go to the emergency room) if, after stopping or cutting down, you have seizures, severe shaking, confusion, hallucinations or an irregular heartbeat. Don’t drive yourself.

That is the only instruction I’ll give you as an instruction. Everything else is just what worked, and what the evidence backs up.

If you’re stopping today: your first hour

This site is named after the hour that decides the rest. You don’t need the whole plan yet. You need the next sixty minutes. If you drink heavily every day, do the safety check below first and come back.

Minutes	Do this
0 to 10	Eat something and drink a glass of water. Sit down. Nothing else yet.
10 to 20	Get the alcohol out of the house: pour it out, or hand it to someone. Check the hiding places.
20 to 35	Tell one person, or find a helpline. A line you can copy: “I’m stopping today. Can I message you tonight?“
35 to 50	Write tonight’s plan: what you’ll eat, where you’ll be at the hour you’d usually drink, who you’ll message if it gets loud.
50 to 60	Open Today and set up a simple morning for tomorrow. Then go to bed early.

That’s the whole hour. The steps below explain each part and what comes after.

Step 1: Decide what “stop” means for you

People say “stop drinking” and mean different things. Some mean never again. Some mean a long break. Some mean “get it back under control.” All of those are real goals, and you’re allowed to start with the one you can say out loud today.

Two things are worth knowing:

• If you’re dependent on alcohol, the usual aim is stopping completely. If dependence is in the picture, stopping fully is the usual aim (that’s the NHS line too).
• Cutting down works for some people and wears out others. If the “I’ll have two” switch is already broken, moderation tends to become a lot of tiring negotiating. There’s no shame in testing it honestly. Be honest about the results. Cutting down or quitting completely goes into this in detail.

Write down your reasons while you feel clear. One line is enough: “I’m tired of waking up sick of who I’ve become.” You’ll want it later, at nine at night, when your brain offers an edited version of the story.

Step 2: Get honest about how much you drink

Everything about safety and planning depends on this number, so measure it. Not what you tell people, not what feels reasonable: what you actually drink in a day.

• Count in standard drinks, or in the bottle. A bottle of spirits, a bottle of wine, a six-pack of strong beer: write the real figure.
• Note when you drink, including mornings and in the night.
• Note whether you’ve ever had shaking, sweating, nausea or anxiety when you didn’t drink for a day or so.

If you drink more than 15 units a day, or score 20 or more on the AUDIT questionnaire, medically assisted withdrawal should be on the table. Above 30 units a day, or with a history of withdrawal seizures, so should inpatient care (that’s UK NICE guidance, as summarized in the British Journal of General Practice). You don’t have to calculate anything precisely. The point is that the heavier and the longer the drinking, the more reason there is to get the physical part checked before you stop.

Step 3: Set up your first three days

The first three days are mostly logistics. You’re not trying to become a new person. You’re trying to get through seventy-two hours with as little friction as possible.

Before you stop:

• Remove alcohol from the house. Pour it out. This is the single most useful practical step, and the NIAAA says the same: keep little or no alcohol at home.
• Tell one person. Not an announcement. One person who will answer the phone. If your relationships are complicated, it can be a helpline, and you can find one here.
• Pick your start. A calm day beats a perfect one. Clear what you can from the calendar.
• Stock simple food and plenty of fluids. Eating regularly matters more than eating well.
• Write down numbers: a helpline, the person you told, and emergency services.
• Plan the evening. For many people the hardest hours are the evening ones. Have something to do with your hands and a place to be that isn’t near a drink.

On the day:

• Don’t drive if you have any shaking, dizziness or confusion.
• Don’t try to manage symptoms with leftover pills or other sedatives. Mixing sedatives with alcohol or with withdrawal can be dangerous.
• Keep the first few days boring on purpose.

If you want a place to hold all this, the guide to stopping at home covers a full home setup, the role of a supporter, and what’s normal versus a red flag.

Step 4: The first 72 hours

What you feel depends heavily on how much and how long you drank. Many people have little more than poor sleep, anxiety and irritability. Others have shaking, sweating, nausea and a racing heart.

Here’s the broad picture (NHS and MedlinePlus agree on it):

• Symptoms usually start within 6 to 12 hours of the last drink, though they can start later.
• They typically peak somewhere between 24 and 72 hours.
• For most people they last three to seven days.
• Some of them, like disrupted sleep, low mood and fatigue, can last for weeks or months.

The difference between “unpleasant” and “emergency” is the thing to learn. Unpleasant: anxious, sweaty, sleepless, queasy, headachy, on edge. Emergency: seizures, confusion, hallucinations, fever, or an irregular heartbeat. If you see any of the emergency signs in yourself or in someone you’re with, call for help.

Step 5: Ride out the cravings

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, 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.

Remind yourself of your reasons. Distract yourself with exercise or a non-drinking hobby. Or accept the urge and ride it out without giving in. The NIAAA lands in the same place. Urges pass.

A short toolkit for a craving:

• Name it. “This is a craving. It is a wave.”
• Delay it. Tell yourself you can decide in ten minutes. Then decide again.
• Change your body’s state. Slow breathing, cold water on your face, a short walk.
• Eat or drink something. Hunger and thirst make everything louder.
• Run the tape. The warm part, then what comes after it.
• Tell someone. One text is enough.

If you want help in the moment, the Ride out a craving tool in Ease walks you through this with the kind of craving you’re having, and the Slow things down tool gives you a minute of guided breathing.

Step 6: Build a boring routine

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’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, might be. What it looks like for you is yours to figure out.

A good starter routine has four parts:

1. A fixed wake-up time. Even on bad nights.
2. Something to eat soon after waking.
3. Daylight and movement: a walk, even a short one.
4. A wind-down at about the same time every night.

Today is built around exactly this: a small morning routine you can edit, a one-tap check-in and nothing to perform. The Settle my mornings tool in Ease helps you see how steady your wake-up time actually is.

Step 7: Build support you control

You don’t have to join anything or prove anything to anyone. The support that held for me was small and mine:

• One person you trust. Often the most important one. Someone who’ll answer a message at nine at night and won’t lecture.
• A routine that doesn’t need you to be strong. The same plain day, over and over. Today is built for exactly this.
• Something in your pocket for the hard minutes. Ease has tools for a craving, a loud head, or needing a person.
• Your own record. In You you can see your own patterns, with no score and no streak.
• Anything else that’s yours. Some people add a group, a doctor, a therapist or a program, and if that holds for you, use it. None of it is required and none is the default. You choose the path.
• A helpline, if you need a voice at 3 a.m. Find one here.

Does a tool like this one help? A little. Across 57 studies (34,390 people), those using personalized digital programs drank roughly one to three fewer standard drinks a week than control groups (Cochrane). Those people were drinking at hazardous or harmful levels in the community, not necessarily dependent on alcohol. That is a small but real effect. It is not a cure, and we say so.

I tried the traditional stuff. AA. Rehab more than once. Psychiatrists, therapists, different combinations of pills. If any of that works for you, go. 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 didn’t work, and why that matters

What I eventually understood was that I’d been waiting for something external to fix me. I handed my recovery to a program, a prescription, someone else, and waited 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, and it matters: 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 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 program, not a formal decision, not a rock bottom with any kind of clarity to it. Just that.

If you can only do one thing from this whole guide, do that: say it out loud to one person.

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’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.

What 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.

Step 8: Plan for a slip

Plan this before you need it, because at nine at night after a drink you won’t plan anything.

• A slip is information. What was happening in the hour before? Where were you, who with, how did you feel? That’s the most useful thing you can learn about yourself.
• Start again with the next hour, not next Monday. The only meaningful restart is the next decision.
• Tell the person who knows. Shame makes slips longer. One honest message ends it faster.
• Mind the safety rule. If you were drinking heavily and you stop again after a slip, the same advice applies: withdrawal can be dangerous, so don’t stop suddenly without medical advice.
• Don’t count it as zero. Everything you learned in the days before still exists.

There’s no streak to lose here, and that’s deliberate. We don’t count days in The First Hour, because counting days can turn a slip into a verdict.

How long does it take, and what about “for good”?

The physical part is short: for most people, a week or so. The rest doesn’t have a clean end date, and the people who say it does are selling something.

What changes is how loud it is. The first days are about getting through hours. After a few weeks it’s about getting through evenings. After a few months a drink will occasionally cross your mind and you’ll let it go by. “For good” is built out of days that each feel ordinary. When you’re ready for that part, the work moves from stopping to building days that hold.

So, how do you stop?

I can’t tell you one way. 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 stopped 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 physical part, if you’ve been drinking heavily every day, is worth getting checked before you stop. 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.

Keep reading in this guide

• The cravings guide gives you a plan for the twenty minutes a craving lasts.
• Stopping the nightly drink plans the evening hours that usually decide it.
• Stopping on your own terms maps the paths people take and helps you choose yours.

Sources

1. Alcohol-use disorder (NHS) · NHS, last reviewed April 2026
2. Alcohol withdrawal (MedlinePlus) · U.S. National Library of Medicine, reviewed January 2025
3. Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome (StatPearls) · Canver, Newman and Gomez, updated February 2024
4. Harmful drinking and alcohol dependence: advice from recent NICE guidelines · O'Flynn, British Journal of General Practice, 2011
5. Rethinking Drinking: tips to try · National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
6. 2001-2002 survey finds many recover from alcoholism · NIAAA, National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions

We check these when we update a page. See how we write and check on the editorial policy.

The First Hour isn't medical advice, and we're not doctors. This is writing grounded in research by people who got sober and wanted to share what helped. It's not treatment, diagnosis, or a substitute for a doctor, therapist, or recovery program. Alcohol withdrawal can be medically dangerous. If you're detoxing, struggling, or in crisis, please reach out to a medical professional or a helpline.