Read This If You're Resolving to Reduce Your Drinking

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After a season of parties, boat loads of eggnog, rivers of champagne gulped at New Year’s Eve celebrations, and the all-around drinking people do to manage their emotions during long and intense family visits—it is no surprise that many of our most common New Year Resolutions involve reducing alcohol consumption.

Most people do not necessarily resolve to join a twelve step program and become totally sober but rather to moderate their drinking and an increasingly popular trend is the Dry January Challenge—resolving to abstain from drinking entirely for the first month of the year.

The question is do these kinds of resolutions work or do Dry Januaries cause a rebound effect and usher in Drunk Februaries and a Tipsy Marches?

A new study is providing some answers. The study, originating in the United Kingdom (where Dry January also first got traction) followed 857 British adults who participated in a Dry January Challenge for six months. Researchers evaluated the participants’ alcohol consumption, and drink refusal self-efficacy or DRSE (how confident participants felt about being able to refuse a drink).

As anticipated, the less drunk participants tended to get before starting their Dry January, the more successful they were during their month of abstinence. However, it was the changes in drinking behavior that occurred after participating in Dry January that were more interesting.

Specifically, regardless of how successful they were, just participating in the Dry January challenge tended to reduce alcohol consumption and increase drink-refusal self-efficacy (DRSE) at the six month follow-up. Success did matter however, as participants who were more successful during Dry January had even greater alcohol reduction and stronger drink-refusal self-efficacy.

Further, the researchers found no evidence of ‘rebound effects’ as very few people reported an increase in their consumption of alcohol after participating in Dry January and at the six month follow-up.

The bottom line is that increasing our mindfulness is extremely important when we’re trying to change a psychological/behavioral habit. The Dry January Challenge establishes a full month in which we are unlikely to engage in mindless drinking and in which we are significantly more aware of our drinking habits and choices (even when we choose to violate our resolution and drink). Our increased mindfulness and awareness about our drinking behavior is likely to carry over past January and allow us to better manage our alcohol consumption even once we’ve resumed drinking.

There are many other science-based techniques to adopt healthy psychological habits and you can read a book-full of them in, Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure and Other Everyday Hurts (Plume, 2014).

Watch my TED Talk and learn about increasing your emotional hygiene.

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Copyright 2015 Guy Winch

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