Again, that shift will be most pronounced in folks who drank regularly enough to develop a significant tolerance to begin with, versus people who only sipped on occasion. But Dr. Wakeman emphasises that nearly everyone will have some change in their tolerance if they completely cut out alc for a month. So “if you don’t take that into account and you immediately go back to drinking as much as you ordinarily would, you could find yourself more intoxicated than you expected,” Dr. Kranzler says. Cue: blacking out on February 1 (and waking up with a raging hangover on February 2).
By being aware of this potential change, however, you can reframe it as a positive, Dr. Wakeman says. Maybe you used to need three or four drinks to really feel something, and that was adding up to 15 or 20 drinks a week — which is well above the level deemed moderate (and lower risk) by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (that is, one drink a day for people assigned female at birth and up to two drinks a day for people assigned male). Now, post-Dry January, you might get the same effect from, say, one or two drinks in a sitting, which would be a win for both your health and your wallet.
It’s best to use Dry January as a reset and an opportunity to guide your drinking habits going forward.
Two things can be true: No amount of alcohol is good for your mind and body — or, as Dr. Wakeman puts it, “you should never start drinking for your health.” And also, you might want alcohol to play some role in your life once you finish Dry January. “There are lots of things we do that we don’t do explicitly because they make our health better,” Dr. Wakeman points out.
But at the same time, you don’t want to negate the benefits of the dry month you successfully observed. While there’s research to suggest that even a single month off from drinking can bring meaningful improvements to your health, like giving your liver a chance to repair itself and lowering your blood pressure, you’ll toss all that out the window if you wind up drinking more after Dry January ends than you were before.
It’s important to know that one month of eliminating alcohol, in and of itself, “isn’t going to fix anything permanently,” Elizabeth Kovacs, director of the alcohol research program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said. “What would be more beneficial is drastically cutting down from, say, 14 drinks a week to maybe three [per week] for the rest of your life,” she says. In other words, being a moderate drinker forever is better than doing a fully dry month each year only to get sloshed in the weeks or months to follow.
So even if Dry January didn’t change your life so dramatically that you decided to cut out alcohol, consider what it might have shown you about your relationship with booze that could help you strike a balance going forward. Maybe the takeaway was that you’re actually drinking lightly enough that you’re not having any negative consequences from it — and you’re going to reinstate your “damp” way of life in February and beyond, Dr. Wakeman says. Or perhaps you identified social settings in which you had really just been drinking because you always have or because others were, and you didn’t actually need any alcohol to have fun, Dr. Kovacs says. And maybe you can skip the hard stuff in those scenarios going forward, without it feeling like any kind of a loss.
The point is to tune in and be a little more mindful about when, why, and in what circumstances you’re drinking as you restart — versus just instinctively jumping back in where you left off or rebounding toward even heavier tippling. (Dr. Kovacs also recommends not partaking on an empty stomach and alternating hard drinks with water or nonalcoholic beverages to avoid getting accidentally drunk on your first days back.) This way, you’ll hold onto the momentum you’ve gained — and choose to imbibe with as much intention and clarity as you put toward bypassing the booze last month.
This article originally appeared on SELF.
