The highs and lows of Dry January

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting round to jobs I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t that my willpower increased. It was that making myself perform tedious administrative tasks took less effort. My inner clerk woke up.

Two weeks in and I’m beginning to get bored. High on the list of benefits of being teetotal, according to the finger-waggers, is that your mood stabilises – and I’ve definitely noticed that. But the novelty of being calm and even-tempered wears off pretty quickly. When I’m drinking, my mood doesn’t just change from one day to the next, but over the course of 24 hours. I wake up full of self-loathing for having overdone it the night before; I then expiate my guilt by putting in a solid nine hours of work; and at 7 p.m. I have my first glass of wine, which I feel I’ve ‘earned’. Though clearly I haven’t done enough to earn all the subsequent glasses, since if I had I wouldn’t feel guilty again the next morning. Indeed, the self-disgust usually kicks in before I’ve finished the bottle, so my day is bookended with remorse.

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You’d think this routine would itself get boring – and it does, but not quite as boring as ‘one mood, all the time’.