Was it hard? It’s always the first question. Not how. Not why. Was it hard. People lean in like I did time, waiting for the war story. The shaking hands, the white knuckles, 90 days of misery.
Here’s my answer. No. Is it hard to stop drinking? Not the way you think. And I’ll go one further. The belief that it’s hard is doing more to keep you drinking than the drink is.
What People Expect Me to Say
They want to hear it was brutal, because brutal lets them off the hook. If it’s brutal, they don’t have to try. Be honest with yourself here. When you ask if it was hard, you’re not really asking about me. You’re asking for permission to stay right where you are.
I used that permission slip for years. The merry go round: drunk Friday and Saturday, hungover Saturday and Sunday, useless Monday, repeat. Playing the tape about the bad hand I got dealt. The tape was boring. Nobody wanted to hear it, including me.
So Is It Hard to Stop Drinking or Not?
Straight answer. If you do it on willpower alone, yes. It’s brutal, and you’ll probably lose. Willpower is a conscious effort. True change comes from the subconscious. That’s not a slogan, that’s the whole ballgame. When you fight the habit with willpower, you’re gritting your teeth against your own wiring, and your wiring has been practicing for years. You’ll lose on some ordinary Tuesday when you’re tired. Not because you’re weak. Because it was a bad plan.
I went underneath it instead. That’s the whole idea behind Unconscious Moderation. Carl Jung said it best, and we built our alcohol moderation app around it: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Hypnotherapy, journaling, short daily practices, almost all of them under 5 minutes. You put more effort into deciding what to drink on a Friday. You change the way you think about alcohol, and the craving gets fired. It has no job left. Once you know why you crave a drink at night, it can’t ambush you anymore.
Was it uncomfortable some days? Sure. If it’s a little uncomfortable, you’re probably growing. But deprivation, suffering, counting the minutes? No. It felt like somebody finally cleaned the windshield. I didn’t know how blind I’d been driving.
The Differences You Actually Feel
The second question is the better one. What’s different? Let’s go down the list.
Week one is the body. You sleep like you paid extra for it. You wake up with no detective work to do on last night. Concentration comes back so fast it’s embarrassing.
Then it compounds. Twelve hours a week, back. Thousands a year, back. You’re playing with the casino’s money now, and the money is still the smallest chip on the table. The real prize is that you never have to decide again. Not wine or beer. Not 2 drinks or 8. That one decision was eating entire evenings of your life. Now it’s gone. What a freedom that is.
And then the quiet stuff, which turns out to be the big stuff. Little things stopped bothering me. I quit rehearsing my problems on a barstool and started fixing them. Problems I used to dream about fixing took an afternoon. When I say no to a drink now, I’m not missing out. I’m holding aces. And if you’re worried life gets duller without a drink, you have it backwards. The world was never the dull part.
So here’s my full answer for the dinner table. The drinking was hard. The hangovers were hard. Foggy decisions about my money and my people, that was hard. Stopping was the easiest hard thing I’ve ever done, because I finally stopped fighting myself.
It’s not your fault. But it is YOUR problem, and nobody else is coming to fix it. Good. That means the job is yours, and you happen to be the most important person in the world for it. The best time to plant a lemon tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is TODAY.
Was it hard? Wrong question. The right question is what waiting costs you. Stop asking. Start. Let’s go.
J.B. is the founder of Unconscious Moderation, a 90 day program that changes how people think about alcohol through hypnotherapy, journaling, and habit science. He writes in first person about what actually changes when the drinking stops.