Giving up alcohol brought me closer to my daughter

Just over a year ago, I gave up drinking. I’d been mulling over the idea for months beforehand, often wondering what life would be like if I didn’t drink alcohol. At All. I’d love to tell you the inclination was all mine, but had it not been for Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Spencer Matthews, Bradley Cooper, Steven Bartlett, Miley Cyrus, Bella Hadid, Drew Barrymore and a list of other aspirationals who’ve given booze the heave ho, I would probably still be drowning my anxieties in a bottle of pinot noir. 

Not that wine is bad per se; some experts, such as Dan Buettner, the researcher of blue zones (the areas on earth with the largest number of centenarians), count wine as a healthy part of a longevity diet, particularly when shared with friends and family. But ask a neuroscientist and their advice is inevitably abstinence. 

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, is one such expert – and the facts clearly resonate. His Huberman Lab podcast episode What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health was the sixth-most shared episode in the UK in 2023 on Apple, despite the fact that it was uploaded in 2022. It probably helps that Huberman isn’t your typical finger-wagging lab coat (he gives beefy Marvel character energy). 

This episode and others like it are hard to hide from. In contrast to the “clean living” crowd who are all over social media insidiously casting judgment on our dirty lifestyles, scientists such as Huberman shine a light on one thing: the facts. The evidence, highlights Huberman, is clear: when you drink, even a teeny bit, the quality of your sleep is inevitably poor and brain health is compromised. 

Perhaps the most shocking revelation: even when you quit, it takes six months before the brain resumes normality. This alone told me everything I needed to know: alcohol, despite its social benefits, is a health-sucker. And when your health, as mine has been in the past year, is suboptimal including a fibromyalgia diagnosis and a string of debilitating migraines, then all health-leeching habits must go, including wine. 

Dr Daniel Amen is a leading psychiatrist who softly but powerfully educates his followers about brain health. He told The Telegraph: “When you drink alcohol, it goes into your bloodstream, crosses the blood-brain barrier and enters your brain cells. Almost immediately, it begins to reduce activity in your prefrontal cortex, which is involved in judgment, impulse control, decision making, empathy and forethought,” says Dr Amen. Alarmingly, he adds: “Over time, alcohol can be harmful to the brain in many ways. Having just one to seven alcoholic drinks per week shrinks brain volume, according to a study in Archives of Neurology.” 

It’s scientific insights such as these that proliferate in the sober-curious movement: the idea that living alcohol-free is not just for the alcohol-addicted but a gateway to peak success, a tool any of us can implement in the short or long term to help us live and feel better. It’s what fuels Dry January and Sober October, the thing many Gen-Xers like me take part in to sublimate their guilt over drinking too much. But millennials and Generation Z, the statistics show, are less enamoured of boozing in general, giving fuel to the concept that alcohol could one day go the way of cigarette smoking, a comparable unhealthy habit that’s reduced significantly in the UK since records began in 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

When I interviewed Steven Bartlett recently, the Dragons’ Den investor disclosed that he had quit drinking alcohol. “Me too!” I chirped, excitedly assuming this made us instant friends. Having watched his business partner suffer from alcoholism (“I’d find him downstairs in the laundry room late at night drinking and I never understood it back then”), Bartlett chose to give up after observing his sleep nosedive when he’d had just two glasses of wine. “I was always on the fence; the person who drank because the waiter came over and passed me the wine list. 

But when I looked at my Whoop (a wearable health-tracking device), my heart rate variability [fluctuations in the amount of time between heartbeats], which scientists cite as the magic metric of health, would suffer. So I decided not to drink and see how it goes,” he said six months into an experiment he now deems permanent. 

The minute you begin to question your relationship with alcohol, serendipitous encounters with non-drinkers such as Bartlett show up like the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, reminding you who you could become without ethanol, the neurotoxin otherwise known as alcohol. 

Suddenly, everywhere I went, another former drinker would tell me how they’d finally started the business they’d always dreamt of, found their soulmate, regained their health, turned their mental health around, or – the classic – lost weight, since giving up. Made in Chelsea star Spencer Matthews founded the non-alcoholic drinks company CleanCo after quitting and began running ultra-marathons. Drew Barrymore’s talk show has soared alongside kicking booze, while Miley Cyrus and Bella Hadid did it under the advice of their psychiatrist, Dr Amen. 

Did I worry I was an alcoholic? No, but I did have this sense that alcohol was holding me back, and had become a barrier to my health, the thing I took for granted until I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition last summer that precipitated a cascade of inconvenient ancillary ailments from irritable bowel syndrome to bouts of depression, vertigo and – a biggie – cardiovascular issues that knocked me sideways. These health hindrances weren’t alcohol-specific problems, but it couldn’t have been helping. When your body starts whispering for help, the sound of champagne corks popping isn’t so sweet. And so I decided to give up. 

How I gave up 

My biggest worry was that I’d become a bore. Nobody likes a goody-two-shoes who can’t help reeling in their new-found healthy lifestyle. Ultimately, I’ve discovered, it boils down to wanting to fit in; you don’t want friends to skulk off with the cool crowd to get tipsy without you, and you don’t want to be judged for not drinking. 

But the truth is that unless you have a serious problem, drinking is habitual and for me, like so many others of my generation, the ritual of it was associated with socialising and unwinding. Acknowledging this meant that if I could break the habit, I could learn to make new associations. 

It was hard at first. I ordered a wall calendar to chart my progress and marked an X for every day I’d gone without a drink. In the beginning, I would walk past the calendar scanning how many black X’s marked the spot, but two months in and the pattern of pouring a glass of red after a long day at work had waned and the calendar became irrelevant. I now trusted myself not to drink; I’d almost forgotten to, and that feeling was liberating, like something heavy had been lifted. 

How alcohol affects relationships

After three months, I began to question whether I’d ever drink again. And by six, the smell of it was abhorrent. 

Then something profound happened. I began to notice that interactions with my teenage daughter were richer and more frequent. “You’re a better person now you don’t drink,” she would say every so often. “Was I a bad person before?” I would ponder silently until one day, I just asked her. Not bad, she replied. But certainly less present. And now I was less irritable, less self-indulgent – and more observant of her needs. Translation: more mothery. In the months that followed, our bond strengthened as she prepared to leave for university. We were close before I launched into an alcohol-free experiment, but we were even closer now. 

The health benefits

It never occurred to me that the calibre of my relationships would improve through not drinking. After all, I wasn’t a park bench drunk – but then again, you don’t have to be intoxicated to experience the negative side effects of ingesting alcohol, even if it’s one or two glasses every other night. As it turns out, waking up with a clear head 100 per cent of the time is motivating. Some shallow benefits: facial puffiness subsides, hair resumes its natural glossiness, and skin takes on a healthy glow when sugar spikes (which are all over the place when you drink) are regulated. 

Interestingly, my taste-buds became heightened after I cut out booze. The reason, says gastroenterologist Dr Alan Desmond, is that alcohol reduces our ability to taste food, causing a craving for salty, sugary foods to quell the limitations in our palate. As for my gut health, he couldn’t have put it more plainly. 

Ethanol, says Dr Desmond, worsens heartburn and compromises the intestinal barrier (the cells that line the gut), causing what’s known as “leaky gut”, which in the long term drives inflammation, a known driver of disease. “Just two or three alcoholic drinks a day boosts bowel cancer by 25 per cent, according to a peer-reviewed study from 2020,” he warns. The good news is that within a few days, a healthy appetite and enjoyment of healthy nutritious food resumes. While inflammation and the gut microbes can recover within weeks, depending on what you feed them, Dr Desmond recommends a plant-rich diet void of ultra-processed foods. 

What happens to your brain 

Alas, the brain is slower to respond. “Our brain-imaging work at Amen Clinics shows that heavy drinkers tend to have decreased blood flow to the brain. Low blood flow is associated with lack of focus, brain fog, depression and increased risk of memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Research shows that drinking just one or two glasses of wine per day has been linked to atrophy in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in memory and learning. Drinking too much also decreases the generation of new brain cells, according to studies,” Dr Amen explains. 

With a nugget of encouragement, he adds: “When we compare SPECT scans of the brain before and after heavy drinking, we can see remarkable improvements after just two months of not drinking, provided it’s in conjunction with healthy lifestyle changes,” concluding: “Giving up alcohol will likely lead to enhancements in brain function after one month. This will continue to improve at three months, six months and ongoing.”

An alcohol-free future? 

Looking back at the pivotal decision I made last May, when I promised myself I’d go alcohol-free until my 50th birthday in December, I had no idea whether I’d stick with it after the fact. 

I didn’t. I had three glasses of champagne at my 50th dinner party, not because I missed alcohol but because I was curious. Curious as to whether I could dip in and out; a glass here and there on special occasions. I decided I could and went on to have a glass of wine with dinner over the Christmas break, only to resume my alcohol-free ways once Dry January got under way. 

I haven’t sworn off alcohol altogether and may decide to toast the next big occasion with a glass of the good stuff, but for the foreseeable future I’ll be living life sober. Alcohol has been a good friend to me, but a toxic one that I no longer need to boost my mood or lower anxiety. I have real friends for that, and we laugh until our sides hurt, whether I’m drinking or not.