Dry January

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January 11, 2025

I have been an enthusiastic participant in “Dry January” for many years. In the early days, it was a novel way to start the year, purging the system of real or imagined toxins that my lifestyle had deposited in my body over the holidays, and to lose a few pounds while I did that. As time went on, I realized that I felt better in January than I did the rest of the year; I slept better; my head seemed clearer. Waking up and heading to the elliptical for thirty minutes each morning came easier. Dry January sometimes morphed into Dry February, but rarely did I extend the practice beyond March. I really enjoy a glass of wine with dinner and ultimately Burgundy trumps sparkling water.

According to CivicScience Research Group, 25% of Americans participated in “Dry January”, the practice of completely abstaining from alcohol during the month. The Google machine offers up much more detail on this statistic, parsing the word “participated” to define those of us who started the month with all good intentions of abstaining (35% of Americans), and those of us who completed the exercise successfully (15%). I have a pretty good track record of completing the exercise, although I do give myself a “Passport Dispensation” if we are out of the country traveling in January, and on one or two occasions I may have counted New York City as traveling out of the country. Most of my north country neighbors would agree with that description. Last year 20% of Dry January practitioners reportedly substituted cannabis products for alcohol. I suspect that the trending liberalization of cannabis prohibitions might influence this statistic even more in future years.

Significantly, according to Gallup, only 65% of Americans say that they drank any alcohol during the past year, with 35% teetotaling abstainers. The percentage of folks who drink has remained remarkably stable at around 65% throughout recent history, with an easily explained decline for Prohibition in the 20’s. Consumption peaked at 71% in the 1970’s and I will speculate that the rise in drinking at that time was attributable to states lowering the drinking age to 18, responding to the voting age being similarly lowered. The percentage dropped back again when states raised the drinking age in 1984, in response to a threat from the federal government to cut off highway funding to states who did not raise the age limit. It has remained relatively stable since then, although recent years has seen a drop off in drinking by younger generations. According to the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, slightly less than half (49.6%) of Americans between 18 and 25 say they use alcohol, down a full ten percentage points in the last ten years. I’ll go out on a limb and attribute this stat, at least in part, to the fact that 57% of people aged eighteen to twenty-five are now still living with their parents, a rising statistic whose correlation is causal and not coincidental, in my mind. I will also propose that this housing condition is causing a significant rise in alcohol consumption (and gummies) by their parents, which is offsetting the declines in consumption by the twenty somethings, resulting in a consistent 65%—on average.

Abstaining from alcohol in January has been a very long-time practice for me personally. I remember abstaining from both alcohol and cigarettes in January and I have not had a cigarette in twenty-five years so I have been doing this for quite a long time. Despite my own unique experience, Dry January as a movement did not begin until the winter of 2012— in the United Kingdom—and much to the chagrin of restaurant and bar owners everywhere, spread around the world from there. It is now a thing.

Despite the British provenance, Dry January strikes me as a very Catholic thing: one part penance for misbehaving during the holidays, one part abstinence, as an observance, like not eating meat on Fridays. I feel the same way about Paradox Brewery’s alcohol-free Hops Water as I did about my mother’s Friday night fish sticks. Neither, I suspect, will get me into heaven.

Despite the short duration of Dry January exercise, it can have positive long-term effects. If nothing else, it has become my annual reminder of what I am supposed to feel like, sort of like a benchmark for the the rest of the year.

Pro Tip: Schedule your annual physical, with bloodwork, in February, immediately following Dry January.

I will give Dry January credit for my quitting smoking twenty-five years ago, thirty days at a time. It’s hard to kick any habit—forever—but it is a lot easier to stop doing something for thirty days. You can stand on you head for thirty days if you have to. That’s what I did with cigarettes. When February 1^st rolled around, having not smoked any cigarettes in January, it was relatively easy to commit to another month of abstinence, and then another, and then a year, and then forever. Or at least until today.

Teetotalling readers may ask why I do not use this methodology to quit drinking, and I can only respond: Burgundy (and an occasional martini). And this: I recall reading a story in the Wall Street Journal many years ago about a very long-term longitudinal study that was conducted in Sweden. The study’s aim was to assess the impact of a healthy lifestyle on morbidity and mortality over the thirty-year period of time. They compared one group of folks who exercised daily and ate lots of green leafy vegetables but no red meat and never smoked cigarettes or drank coffee or touched a drop of alcohol. The second, comparative group in the study were…people like me. Over the thirty-years, they recorded all health-related events and mortality of both groups. At the end of the study, they concluded that the health-conscious control group lived six months longer than the rest of us. Six months of hell if you ask me, which is why, on February 1, I will be popping a cork.

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