Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober – forever

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I didn’t relapse, however; I was shorn only of my day count. As a member of the expects-tonic, receives-alcohol group, I could argue that my slip doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t intentional. But I’ll take my lumps, and start over. ♦ Cofresí described a common alcohol-conditioning experiment using rats. First, the rats are trained to associate a light with the availability of alcohol, which they obtain by pressing a lever. This goes on for two weeks. Then, after they are conditioned, you stop the alcohol and the light, until the rats are no longer interested in pressing the lever. This goes on for another two weeks. You then show them the light alone to see if they press the lever again. “And it’s very clearly demonstrated in the animal literature that when you do this they will press the lever,” he said. “A lot.” He went on, “It is just crazy to me that, with so little over-all exposure to the drug, they would have such persistent memory.” Phenomenal; only a 14 per cent falter rate. But hang on, pipes up the negative-seeking drone inside me; that’s not zero, is it? That’s still 14 per cent. And the central theme of my last few years has been about that number, if I had to be a reductionist. About casting around for ways to feel as protected from it as humanly possible. Not living in fear, but being productive in protecting this rainforest from deforestation. I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest. No other author writes about sober living with as much warmth or emotional range as Catherine Gray. Her deep insight into the subtle psychologies of drinking, and of life, means that everything she writes is both utterly relatable and stretches our minds. Hers is a rare wisdom.' - Dr Richard Piper, CEO, Alcohol Change UK

It felt good to be conducting an interview in a bar again. As a reporter, I had relied on interviews over drinks as a way of loosening a subject’s tongue. But alcohol only works as a disinhibitory lubricant if all parties are drinking. But now Shufelt had a different problem: what to drink at social occasions and business dinners. “If you’re at a fancy Italian restaurant and you pair the food with a Diet Coke, it just murders the experience. Plus you feel like a six-year-old.” A reflective, raw and riveting read. A beautiful book on what it takes to root for yourself' - Emma Gannon, Ctrl Alt Delete Catherine has been sober for over 7 years now. While her first book explores the early stages of change and the learning along the way, this one provides guidance on long-term change. Sunshine Warm Sober: Unexpected Joy That Lasts is all about what comes next. She notes that many people can manager shorter stints of sobriety, but that many find the longterm change the struggle. This book inspires hope for a brighter future, where alcohol isn’t centre stage. Catherine shares her own experiences and learnings, this is a refreshing and honest read. She encourages the reader to think beyond quitting drinking and look at the big stuff. What do we want life to look like? What boundaries do we need to set? If you are seeking longterm change and a life without alcohol, this book is a great tool to have in your kit.Ethanol was what I had tasted on that first sip, and my body, after five years free of it, had immediately detected the toxin. By the second sip, the molecular cascade had started, and by the third sip the poison was delicious. In the early nineteen-seventies, G. Alan Marlatt, a clinical psychologist then at the University of Wisconsin, published the first account of his now famous “balanced placebo design” experiments, which demonstrated the influence that expectations and setting can have on alcohol’s psychotropic effects. He and his students recruited non-recovering alcoholics and social drinkers from the Madison area and divided these people, who were told that they were taking part in taste tests, into four groups. Those in group one received a mixed drink (the researchers used decarbonated tonic and vodka, in a five-to-one ratio) and were told that the drink contained alcohol. Those in group two were also told that they were getting alcohol, but they got a tonic-only placebo. Those in the third group were told that they were getting tonic, and they did. The participants in the fourth group got alcohol, but were informed that it was tonic. It can last for many months,” he said. “If you cease administering the substances, rats will show memory for what happened in that cage months later. They still lever-press.” He added, “We think that these models are informative of what’s going on when a person has a relapse. They map well onto specific high-risk situations.” It took them nine months to come up with Athletic’s proprietary de-alcoholizing process, which combines and modifies elements of established methods. “It wasn’t just one step—it ended up being over ten different differentiations in the brewing process,” Walker said. “Changing one degree of temperature here, two there, adding ten more minutes to a step.” Once they had an effective process, they began tinkering with the recipe, making a hundred three-gallon batches. They also worked with a food-safety consultant to determine how to sterilize the equipment and pasteurize the beer. “When you remove alcohol as a preservative,” Shufelt said, “you open the door to E. coli, salmonella, and other kinds of bacteria. And it only takes one cell to get into a can and the can will explode.” Fromme added that her bar lab had improved on Marlatt’s placebo. The researchers now serve subjects drinks made of cranberry juice, Diet Cherry 7UP, Rose’s Lime Juice, and decarbonated tonic, some spiked with vodka, others not. She also rubs alcohol on the glasses to add the smell. “You can’t tell the difference,” she said.

The number one advice I would give is to immerse yourself in the teetotalin’ world. Listen to every podcast you can, read every book, follow sober influencers, join Facebook groups, find alcohol-free role models in the shape of great thinkers, artists, writers and actors who are ‘out’ (there are lists of these in both The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and Sunshine Warm Sober). A good rule of thumb, and advice given to me very early on, is to spend as much time thinking / talking / reading about sobriety, as you did drinking. As time rolls on, the ‘immersion’ time you’ll need will become less and less. But in the beginning, I treated learning about being alcohol-free much as I did studying for a degree. This hotly anticipated sequel enlists the help of experts and case studies, turning a curious, playful gaze onto provocative questions. Is alcohol a parenting aid? Why are booze and cocaine such a horse and carriage? Once an addict, always an addict? How do you feel safe - from alcohol, others and yourself - in sobriety? Those drinking more, and those choosing not to drink at all, have more in common than we think. Because it’s often after a period of drinking more (like, for instance, during a terrifying apocalyptic-vibed pandemic) that we choose to quit. And there’s absolutely no shame in that. That’s when we choose to quit most things, right? After a period of overuse, whatever that might look like. The results were startling. One man in the group that expected alcohol but received tonic began acting intoxicated and tried to make a date with one of the lab assistants, and several men in the group that expected tonic but received alcohol experienced tremors—a symptom of withdrawal—even though they’d downed multiple vodkas. I think it was something largely driven by social media. When I quit drinking in 2013, the notion of being ‘out and proud’ about sobriety on socials was unheard of. All the ex-drinkers I knew hid away in private groups (either physically or virtually) and talked in hushed whispers. They hid their recovery from workmates, friends, even family in some cases. I even used a pseudonym while chatting in a private Facebook group made up entirely of such ex-drinkers! There was still an enormous amount of shame and stigma around it. At that point, quitting drinking was only a path for extremely addicted drinkers; it wasn’t remotely a positive lifestyle choice.

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He spent two years studying the industry. In the U.S., “there was no belief in non-alcoholics as a business,” he told me, gesturing with his glass of Two Trellises. “It had been an eighty-to-one-hundred-million-dollar industry with zero innovation for thirty years.” Ritual, a Chicago-based startup launched in 2019, makes zero-proof liquors in four varieties: Whiskey Alternative, Gin Alternative, Rum Alternative, and Tequila Alternative. Marcus Sakey, a co-founder of Ritual, told me that if he were to make a zero-proof vodka it would instantly become his best-selling product. Vodka is the most popular spirit consumed in the U.S., in large part because it has the lowest tasting profile. So a zero-proof vodka would have to taste like no-taste. Was I in a high-risk situation? It seems like a lot of Americans are compulsively lever-pressing when it comes to alcohol. Recently, a grad student asked George Koob what the greatest disappointment has been in his tenure as the director of N.I.A.A.A. He replied, he told me, “It’s how little Americans know about alcohol.” He continued, “We have a problem with alcohol. It’s bigger than people think, but that requires getting people to understand that alcohol in large amounts is toxic. It’s a fact.” Just as I was shutting down my home bar lab, two bottles from Leitz, the German vineyard, arrived via UPS. One was the Eins-Zwei-Zero rosé, and the other the famous Riesling. I put both in the fridge.

Drinking hoovered up my time, energy and money like an anteater on ants. Now, I spend these precious finite resources on things such as yoga, living in different countries, writing books, (very) amateur photography, parenting a puppy, running, art galleries, paddleboarding, reading about psychology, cycling on the seafront in Brighton. When people ask me, ‘What have you replaced drinking with?’ I find myself confounded. There’s no singular answer. Because the answer is – everything that is pleasurable about my life. I’ve replaced a kind of half-life, where I limped along constantly hungover or jonesing for a drink, with a full-life. As the millions who choose to stay sober now know, the propaganda around drinking and sobriety is wonky. Sober doesn't feel stony, or cold. How has the process of writing about your sober journey been and have you found it helpful to be open about your personal experience? Why three months? A UCL study found that while a new habit can become automatic within just 18 days in some cases, on average it takes 66 days for a new habit to become second nature. Personally, I noticed that something magical happened after my 60 th alcohol-free day, and I started to find my stride, like a runner that’s pushed through the punishing first mile and is now flying, starting to feel the buzz of endorphins. You may experience the same, you may not. What matters is, that you’re going to give it a whirl just to see.Shufelt, still at the hedge fund, would get up early to call brewers in Germany. German brewers have traditionally relied on “arrested fermentation,” a process that stops the beer from becoming alcoholic in the first place. Roger Barth, a professor emeritus of chemistry at West Chester University, and the author of “ The Chemistry of Beer: The Science in the Suds,” explained to me that brewers can use special yeasts, and remove them from the “wort”—the mixture of water and maltose that is the mother brew—before the yeasts fully ferment the sugars and the starches. “Timing and temperature control are critical, because the fermentation must run long enough to generate desired flavors but short enough to curtail ethanol production,” Barth said. “This is difficult to control.” I was already happy as a sober. Happy as a clam, happy as a camper, happy as Augustus Gloop in Charlie’s Chocolate Factory. I had a brief spell of feeling bored, but that was soon torpedoed by a clever therapist who cleared his throat and said, ‘Maybe you’re just bored in general?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked? ‘Maybe you’re just bored with your life right now, rather than bored with sobriety?’ Hot damn, he was right. So, I went out and got a more interesting life. YouTube is your free friend, whether you want to learn to sea-swim or make a soufflé.