Dry January
We are nearly a week into “dry January,” a health phenomenon that has gained substantial cultural currency in the past two or three years. (I personally know several people abstaining this month.) I highly endorse moderation and designating a month for abstinence has given people a window where they are free(r) of the expectation to drink. A month without alcohol is certainly a healthy one.
Though I support the month and any travelers journeying through it with fridges full of La Croix, I do wonder if it’s not actually the shadow of the unhealthy relationship Americans have with booze to begin with. As a stopgap it’s fine, but is there a better way?
The vast majority of Americans don’t drink too much. Two-thirds of Americans drink at least occasionally, and 92% of those who do consume two or fewer drinks a day on average; 84% drink one or fewer. Those are within the recommendations for healthy consumption. (Some health authorities argue no alcohol is safe, a joyless and to my mind absurd position. No refined sugar is surely “healthier” than some, but only fractionally, and who wishes to live in a world where a scoop of ice cream is regarded with suspicion?)
On the other end, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) pegs the total number of US adults with an “alcohol use disorder” at 14.4 million. That’s a lot of people, but just 6% of the adult population.
The bigger problem is binge drinking. A lot of people aren’t just having a glass or two of beer with dinner—they’re bingeing after periods of abstinence. According to NIAAA research, “in 2018, 26.5 percent of people ages 18 or older reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month.” The definition for binge drinking is a session in which blood alcohol goes above .08%—a pretty sensible measure. A quarter is a lot of people and it points to the way some sizable number of Americans drink.
Alcohol is a dangerous drug. It causes a host of problems, from health issues to accidents to violence, every year. A depressant, it can make hard times in life much worse. We should take it seriously. That would suggest finding a healthy and sustainable way to use alcohol that is neither pure abstinence nor heavy use. A middle way, if you will.
This more sensible approach is to limit the binges, drink modestly, and sprinkle a week with mini-fasts of 48 hours or more. If the default setting is drinking to intoxication, then the “healthy” approach means having days of heavy drinking followed by days of recovery. If we reset that default setting to a couple drinks, then the recovery periods are unnecessary. We can drink more often but more healthfully. It does seem like mixing in non-drinking days is also healthy, so we don’t develop a habitual relationship to alcohol. Drink modestly, not every day, and rarely to drunkenness.
Here’s where the dry January approach leaves me a little cold. It’s like the recovery period after a year of bingeing. It doesn’t prepare one for the next 11 months of drinking, when habitual pattens will snap back into place. It doesn’t fundamentally change the architecture of drinking, where the switch is either off or set to 10. Dry January is just a longer period with the dial at zero. It seems more healthy to find a way to turn the dial to a sane 3 and leave it there all year instead.
This has been my approach over the past several years. It’s partly a function of age, partly a guardrail for my job, and partly just a way to avoid wild swings. It doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes have a longer session that pushes my BAC above .08, but the default setting is to stop well before that point. My standard session is two beers, and a serious decision point arrives if I’m eyeing a third. I’ve tried to restructure my relationship to alcohol so that it’s focused on pleasure rather than effect, and changing my relationship to alcohol has made it sustainable rather than ascetic.
This Wednesday, my gaming group will meet for our weekly session of orcs and elves (don’t judge). A few of the folks at the table will be casting forlorn looks into their chaste mugs of tea, and I’ll be thinking, “There’s got to be a better way.” Perhaps year-round moderation is the solution?