What I learned after 3 months of sobriety
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It’s been three very long months of going sober.
When I first started giving up alcohol, I tried not to count the days. It was so hard not to. I would remember my current number of days every time I woke up. It was something that I had become obsessed with. After a while though, I stopped counting the days and just set reminders for the big milestones. 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months and then a year. Here’s what I learned after 3 months of sobriety.
How the first month felt
After hitting the month milestone, I honestly didn’t feel any different. 30 days didn’t feel like it was long enough to really understand who I was before drinking. It was everything that you would expect a first month to be.
- I did have the worst hangover feeling for about a week when I first quit
- All the sudden free time made me really restless and bored
- The craving for sweets is pretty unreal
It didn’t feel real to me though. I had also done quite a few ‘dry’ January months or ‘sober’ Octobers so it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment to me. I also noticed that the first month didn’t really seem to be long enough for other people as well. I would tell them I hadn’t drank in a month and it was assumed I would go back to it.
I figured once I got to 60 days, that’s when it would really click that I’ve succeeded. And it did.
Sixty days
Sixty days was when I started to be taken seriously by other people, including people I had drank with before.
The cravings were still there though and this is when I started having thoughts about drinking. Not exactly that I wanted to go get black out drunk at a bar but more like, I missed the feeling of relaxation and distraction I had gotten from drinking. The same day that I hit sixty days, I went to a birthday lunch and there was a lot of drinking there. I started to feel anxious and a little jealous that people could still drink while I couldn’t.
It was harder during this time to remember why I gave up drinking in the first place. It was long enough that I couldn’t remember the taste exactly but also long enough that I started to feel…
