This article is part of Dry January, Straight Up, your no-BS guide to cutting out alcohol for 31 days—or longer. SELF will be publishing new articles for this series throughout January. Read more here.
Dry January can turn some folks into sobriety evangelists: They dropped the booze and found their skin brighter, their energy boundless, their focus sharper, or some other life-changing effect that inspires them to quit drinking forever. (Good for them!) But it’s also possible for an alc-free month to be less…revelation-ary. Perhaps you felt a little clearer-headed or slept more deeply—just not enough to swear off dirty martinis for life. Or for whatever other valid reason, you’re planning on drinking alcohol again after taking a break in January. Just know that much like cutting the hard stuff out, reintroducing it can be an adjustment.
That dry-to-wet transition will be most noticeable if you’re someone who would typically down at least one or two drinks a day (or the equivalent number in a week) because you likely had developed a good deal of tolerance previously, Henry Kranzler, MD, director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, tells SELF. A boozeless month will have knocked that tolerance down, so drinking again after Dry January hits a lot harder—especially if you go right back to your normal quantity. It’s the same reason going dry likely affected you more in the first place if you were a frequent versus occasional drinker: The pendulum swing is greater in both directions.
But even if you weren’t drinking heavily beforehand and don’t plan to do so now, you may find that any amount of alcohol affects you differently after a monthlong break from it. And any positive changes you experienced from stopping drinking are bound to fizzle once you pick it back up again, especially if you go harder on the alc than you did before—which is a common temptation. Below, experts share what you should know about drinking again after a break, and how to smoothly reincorporate alcohol into your life, if you choose to do so.
Be aware that you might overdo it when you first start drinking again…
Returning to alcohol after restricting yourself from the stuff could lead you to drink even more than you were before. In studies conducted with lab animals, this is called the “alcohol deprivation effect,” Dr. Kranzler says: When they’re given daily access to alcohol for a long time in their feed and then abruptly denied it for a brief period before regaining access again, they tend to up their intake beyond what they were initially consuming, at least temporarily. This exact mechanism hasn’t been shown in people (largely because of ethical reasons around supplying and restricting booze), but it’s been posed as a model of how we might behave when it comes to alcohol dependence.
The reason why we might chase the opposite extreme after a dry spell isn’t totally clear, but it’s often compared to the tendency to binge-eat after doing a restrictive diet, Sarah Wakeman, MD, medical director for the Mass General Hospital Substance Use Disorder Initiative, tells SELF. “If you feel like you’ve been deprived, there is a natural instinct to push back or even celebrate what you’ve achieved,” she says. That can quickly devolve into all-or-nothing thinking, she explains, or the idea that if you’re no longer dry, you might as well get plastered. But of course, such overcompensating can undo any benefit of what you just did, which is why Dr. Wakeman advises being mindful of this inclination and making a point to reintroduce alcohol gradually (say, having one or two drinks on the first few occasions).
…And alcohol is likely to affect you more than it did before.
On top of potentially being tempted to drink even more than you did pre-January, you might also be more susceptible to alcohol’s effects after a dry spell. Here’s why: When you regularly bathe your cells in alcohol, they adapt to the effects of the substance—but once you press pause, “those neurochemical changes begin to reverse,” Dr. Kranzler explains. Your tolerance, then, regresses back toward whatever it was when you first started drinking, he says.
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