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If you’re thinking about going all-in on Dry January—or weighing whether Dry or Dry(ish) makes more sense—this episode helps you think it through calmly and realistically. We talk about what a full break actually gives you, how focusing on what you want to gain makes the month easier, why slip-ups don’t undo progress, and how January can set you up for a more intentional February—whether you stay dry, drink less, or adjust along the way.
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Listen to Journey to the Sunnyside Podcast: https://bit.ly/4bxCqT3
Subscribe to Sunnyside’s YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3zuoID4
CONNECT WITH SUNNYSIDE:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joinsunnyside/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joinsunnyside/
- Twitter: https://x.com/joinsunnyside
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinsunnyside
ABOUT SUNNYSIDE: Sunnyside is the #1 alcohol moderation app that helps you drink less without any shame, guilt, or pressure to quit. Optimize your alcohol habits to achieve benefits like sleeping better, losing weight, feeling more energy, and saving money. We know that an all-or-nothing approach doesn’t work for everyone, so we focus on helping you set your own goals, celebrate small wins, and build a lasting system of accountability. As a result, 96.7% of our members see a big drop in their drinking after 90 days.
Disclaimer: This podcast is not intended as medical advice, and the views of the guests may not represent the views of Sunnyside. If you’re concerned about your health or alcohol use, please consider seeking advice from a doctor.
--
Listen to Journey to the Sunnyside Podcast: https://bit.ly/4bxCqT3
Subscribe to Sunnyside’s YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3zuoID4
CONNECT WITH SUNNYSIDE:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joinsunnyside/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joinsunnyside/
- Twitter: https://x.com/joinsunnyside
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinsunnyside
ABOUT SUNNYSIDE: Sunnyside is the #1 alcohol moderation app that helps you drink less without any shame, guilt, or pressure to quit. Optimize your alcohol habits to achieve benefits like sleeping better, losing weight, feeling more energy, and saving money. We know that an all-or-nothing approach doesn’t work for everyone, so we focus on helping you set your own goals, celebrate small wins, and build a lasting system of accountability. As a result, 96.7% of our members see a big drop in their drinking after 90 days.
Disclaimer: This podcast is not intended as medical advice, and the views of the guests may not represent the views of Sunnyside. If you’re concerned about your health or alcohol use, please consider seeking advice from a doctor.
Creators and Guests
What is Journey to the Sunnyside?
Journey to the Sunnyside is a top 1% podcast, reaching over 500,000 listeners every week. It’s your guide to exploring mindful living with alcohol—whether you're cutting back, moderating, or thinking about quitting.
While Sunnyside helps you reduce your drinking, this podcast goes further, diving into topics like mindful drinking, sober curiosity, moderation, and full sobriety. Through real stories, expert insights, and science-backed strategies, we help you find what actually works for your journey.
Hosted by Mike Hardenbrook, a #1 best-selling author and neuroscience enthusiast, the show is dedicated to helping people transform their relationship with alcohol—without shame, judgment, or rigid rules.
This podcast is brought to you by Sunnyside, the leading platform for mindful drinking. Want to take the next step in your journey? Head over to sunnyside.co for a free 15-day trial.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in our episodes do not necessarily represent those of Sunnyside. We’re committed to sharing diverse perspectives on health and wellness. If you’re concerned about your drinking, please consult a medical professional. Sunnyside, this podcast, and its guests are not necessarily medical providers and the content is not medical advice. We do not endorse drinking in any amount.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Journey to the Sunnyside. And as we're getting ready for Christmas here this week, there's probably a good chance that January is actually on your mind. Maybe you're thinking about doing dryest January. Of course, here at Sunnyside, we're hosting that challenge.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you're still trying to decide. And that's actually a really good place to be. Really good awareness. Start thinking ahead. But then also these facts.
Speaker 1:The fact is, what's the right way to do it? Well, first of all, you already know yourself better than anyone else, so you have the answer in you, whether you know it or not. And there is no one right way to approach January. So no wrong answer as long as you're doing something. So what I want to do today is pretty simple.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to decide between dry or dry as January and you're leaning one way, but you're still curious about maybe the other, What I want to do is walk through the benefits of taking a full break. And the reason I really want to do that is because this has been impactful for me. And so I can speak from my own experiences here. And so you can decide in a way that feels most supportive for you. Not because one approach is better.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm only speaking from my own personal experience. Not because you should do anything right now. You still have a little bit of time. This is more about just talking about the options and the benefits so that you can make that decision with maybe a little bit clearer eyes. So the first point is dry as January.
Speaker 1:You know, why this works so well for a lot of people. Because it's more of a newer option. It's flexible. It maybe feels easier socially for many people. And that flexibility is what makes it workable.
Speaker 1:We're all about options that you can do, that you can actually follow through on because a plan with no action is just there's not much value in that. And a full January break, that's what I wanna talk about because that offers something different. So the first point I wanna say is one thing that makes January much easier, no matter what path you end up choosing, is being very clear on your why, why you're doing this, not what you're taking away. And why that's so important is that you don't wanna focus on what you're taking away. You know, I can't drink for January.
Speaker 1:You wanna focus on what you're aiming for. And when you focus on your why, you're not focusing on what you're taking away. You're focusing on what you're aiming for, what's driving you. So for example, instead of saying, like, I can't drink tonight because I'm doing dry January, The framing changes and becomes, you know, tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up. I'm gonna feel good.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have my coffee. I'm gonna be clear headed. My mood is gonna be stable, and my energy is gonna be through the roof. These are all things that can drive you forward instead of that feeling of like, I can't do this because of x, y, z. And why this is so important is that when you anchor a reason to how you want to feel, the decisions after that tend to feel much easier to make.
Speaker 1:You're not so much fighting something that you don't want to do, and instead you're choosing a direction that you want to go. Now, of the first things I noticed during a full break and many people that I've talked to also is this binary decision. Because first of all, we're only talking about one month. And so it's not forever. It's just I'm not doing it right now.
Speaker 1:And that binary decision actually quiets your mind. You know, when you're moderating or mindful drinking, you might have to make a lot more decisions. But in January, if you've already made that decision once, you don't make it again. You're not deciding every night, is this a drinking night? You're not talking yourself into something or out of something, maybe how you're going to have drinks in a certain social situation, and you're not revisiting the same questions over and over again.
Speaker 1:And this is what surprises a lot of people because that actually makes it easier. Evenings don't get harder because you've already made the decision. And once that decision is gone, well, some of these nights, they just kinda tend to happen. You maybe come home, you eat dinner, you unwind, watch a movie or whatever you do, and then you go to bed. And that actually tends to be less friction than most people expect.
Speaker 1:Now once that decision's removed, sort of that noise is gone, patterns begin to appear. They become easier to see. Maybe you start noticing what throws your sleep off. Maybe you see what affects your mood the next day. Maybe cravings show up, and what's usually underneath them is more recognizable because there's no biological connection there.
Speaker 1:The alcohol has been removed, so now it's external circumstances or internal dialogues that are going on. And, of course, not everything all of a sudden feels amazing, although it would be great if it does. For some people, it does. But this happens because it's easier to tell what's connected to what because that one element has been removed, And now we can see more clearly some things that are affecting us without alcohol in that equation. So if I can take this one step further, this full break, it makes it easier maybe to recognize why you drink in the first place.
Speaker 1:And let's say that example, when an urge shows up, you can sit there and you can think like, what happened before it? Or maybe an urge showed up because of an external cue, like a habit loop. You know, when you walk in the door, what are you trying to change in that moment? Are you trying to de stress? Are you maybe trying to transition out of work into unwind mode?
Speaker 1:Are you just giving yourself a reward for a certain situation? Or maybe you're just doing it out of habit. As I said, you walk in the door, you put your keys down, you go to the fridge, you grab a drink. So those things, they're harder to notice when you're actually still making those decisions in real time. But a pause is going to give you space to see what's happening without having to respond to it.
Speaker 1:And once you start to see those patterns, they don't really go away. You start to see them afterwards. So you might recognize patterns that you wouldn't otherwise see without taking a full break. Now, the biggest part about dry January is that it just seems so long, thirty days. And most people here's the thing.
Speaker 1:That first week is definitely the hardest. You're changing your routines. You're interrupting your habits. Maybe you're navigating situations that you're used to automatically having a drink in hand. And that's completely normal.
Speaker 1:Now here's what I noticed in my own experience. As each week goes on, things tend to settle in as in they get easier. And I'm not saying that all the cravings are going to disappear because they won't. But when you start to feel better, that starts to guide your choices. You know, when your sleep improves a bit, mornings feel steadier, you're feeling good, the day doesn't feel so much like a grind, and also you don't feel like you need to escape it.
Speaker 1:And at that point, you're not pushing so hard to maintain what your commitment is. And here's one helpful reframe maybe for you. You know, thirty days is so long. Well, unless you're drinking every single day right now, you're not actually doing thirty days of no drinking. You're doing a month with fewer drinking days than you normally would.
Speaker 1:And for a lot of people, that can make it feel much more doable. Now one thing I want to talk about, and this is an important thing to say here and that trips a lot of people up, is that if you slip up at some point in January, it doesn't mean it's all over. You know, one night is not gonna undo everything that you've already built. And even if you only got three days in, same goes. It definitely doesn't mean that you should throw in the towel for the rest of the month.
Speaker 1:That right there would be an all or nothing reaction. And what happens is that all or nothing reaction is a bigger problem than the actual slip up itself. So from a habit standpoint, one slip up or even a couple has very little impact on habit formation. What actually matters is the pattern that you return to, not that one exception. And sometimes those moments are actually useful in guiding habit formation.
Speaker 1:These resets show you what has been happening that day, and you can identify what happened and use that information moving forward to try and self correct. And just remember taking this break in January that even if it's imperfect, that it's still doing its job, that you're still getting massive benefit. Now, another important piece that I want to talk about is what comes after January. And this is a big one, especially if you decide to go all in with dry January because a lot of people come out of it tripping, stumbling because it was so restrictive. And we don't want that.
Speaker 1:We do not want the yo yo. So we have to have a plan. This isn't about winning one month and then undoing the rest of the year for yourself. January is the most useful when it helps you to decide what you want for the rest of the year and how that's going to look like. So as you go through the month, keep February in mind.
Speaker 1:You know, how do you really want to go into February? So for example, maybe you want to drink less than you were before back in December. You take January as a reset, and then February, you're going to start drinking less. Maybe it's going back to where you were because you were happy there and you just wanted to take a break, see what it feels like, and you're genuinely good with that. Or maybe you want to see what it would feel like to keep going a little bit longer.
Speaker 1:Those are all malleable. Those are all flexible throughout January. They can change with whatever feels right to you. And those are all reasonable outcomes. And January is not about forcing this answer.
Speaker 1:It's about making the next choice a little bit easier after this reset. Now I'll share this briefly because this was my own experience. I once did this experiment and this ended up lasting almost a year. I did not plan for this. And what really surprised me was that after the first couple months, I really just didn't think about it anymore, to be honest.
Speaker 1:I didn't miss drinking. Yeah, of course, there were occasional times where I thought, oh, you know, when we were in Chicago, having a drink on the river, that would be fun. But then I moved on pretty quickly and just went on with my day. And that experience in that experiment really changed how I think about alcohol and choice altogether because it showed me that, first of all, it's not as hard as you think it is and that I can have a take it or leave it and not really think about it for as long as I want. I get to decide.
Speaker 1:Okay. Here's one last optional idea, and you don't have to do this and many people will cringe, and that's okay. You don't have to wait until January 1 to get started. Now I tried this several years ago and I took the year off, and honestly, I've done it every year since because when I woke up, I felt like I had a cheat code. While other people were sleeping it off, I woke up clear headed, starting my new year with a nice cup of coffee.
Speaker 1:I went for a bike ride. I took some quiet time to think, to plan for the year, and that feeling ended up mattering way more to me than celebrating with a couple drinks the night before. So it might not be your move, but I wanted to share it because it's been impactful to me and it's there if you want it. So if you're deciding between dry or dry ish January, here's the simplest way to think about it. If flexibility helps you to commit and stay engaged, dryish might be the right place to start.
Speaker 1:If contrast is what you're most curious about, then maybe a full break can give you that quickly in just a thirty day period. Now either way, it's going to be a win because you're choosing on purpose. Alright. Let's close here. January doesn't have to be a pause on life.
Speaker 1:You're not restricting things. You're doing this because you have anchored your why. And this can be a full reset for how you move through the rest of the year, and every year compounds. So think of it as this marathon. You're not trying to prove anything in January.
Speaker 1:There's no winning the month. We're just trying to start the year feeling a little bit more clear, a little bit more steady with our mood and our intentions, and just move more aligned with how you actually want to feel. And when you do that, February is gonna get a lot easier for you to choose how you keep moving forward. Alright. Thanks for hanging out with me today.
Speaker 1:You know, this is the end of the year. If you got anything out of this podcast throughout the year, first of all, I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email, mike@sunnyside.co. And if you leave a rating or review, that would mean the world to me. That's how I get real feedback and how others can find the podcast.
Speaker 1:I hope you have a wonderful, joyous holiday and a happy new year. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.