The 30-Day No Alcohol Challenge
College. The only time when it’s OK to be an alcoholic. Getting drunk on a Wednesday doesn’t mean you have a problem. It means you’re in a frat. Getting the most inebriated is a badge of honor, while sleeping next to the toilet is the badge of shame. And for most sheltered kids in high school, alcohol and partying shattered the shell of my introversion/shyness.
Throughout those college years, alcohol allowed me to express the part of myself that I couldn’t express sober. Super social, can act cool, amazing beer pong player, flirting with girls( which still needs work), I could say the things that I’d be too scared to say sober. I could be the person I was afraid to be.
And for most people, as you mature, you start to get comfortable in your own skin. You get better at expressing who you are. You start caring less what people think. You start becoming incapable of dealing with pointless conversations. Life’s trivialities shrink as life experiences grow.
I’m still pretty young, 24, so I don’t want to sound too jaded. But obviously, my 24 year old self, is much much better at expressing myself than my 16 year old self. And my 30 year old self will be much better than my 24 year old self.
And as I’ve started getting more comfortable in my own skin, I started to question the need for alcohol in my life. Because the reason I started drinking in the first place, was to be the person I couldn’t be sober.
Does alcohol have a place in my life? Rather than flat-out quit, let’s test it out with a 30-day challenge: The 30-day No Alcohol Challenge.
In this post, I’ll talk about why I’m doing this, and alternative approaches I’ll use to drinking.
Why I’m doing this
I want to test out a few hypothesis that I think quitting alcohol will confirm:
1. Improvement in my social skills: If I was learning how to play the guitar, I wouldn’t take 5 shots before practicing. Similar to guitar, social skills is a skill. How can I get better socially, if I can’t reflect on the previous night, and pin-point weaknesses in my social interactions? How can I get better with girls if I don’t remember how that interaction went, what I said?
2. More time to do cool activities: Most college grads working a full-time job realize that we don’t have as much free time as we did in school. For most jobs, we have less control over our time, which means our time is precious. I get annoyed when I spend my entire Saturday binge-watching youtube videos due to my hangover. I love learning new things, writing, going on adventures, and I can’t do that when I’m hungover.
3. Increased inner-confidence: Learning how to have fun, in any situation, from my internal resources seems like a superpower. No matter where I am, what I do, I can have fun. This one is more about not being dependent on one thing to make me happy.
How I’m Planning to Do this
Obviously, our moods and states change day-to-day. Some days we feel amazing, super confident, while other days we feel sluggish, anti-social. Usually after a long day’s work, our minds are in that thinking mode, which is good for work, but not very useful for being social. And alcohol often serves as the tool to help us stop thinking and loosen up. But since I’m quitting, I’ll need to figure out other methods of loosening up/turning off my thinking mind:
1. Improv Comedy Warm-ups: Learning improv was a great way to learn how to loosen up, be silly and in the moment. There was an exercise where the group got into a circle. Each person would jump in the middle and be as silly, crazy as possible. Then the circle would mimic him/her. I would obviously do this solo. (15 minutes)
2. Rapid-Fire Approaches: Before going to a social event, I’d go and strike up conversations with as many people as I can. That way, I’m forcing myself to be social, before my mind can catch myself. When I go into the social event, I’ll be ‘warmed-up’ socially, and then I can continue talking to people. ( >30 minutes)
3. Social Challenges: There are a ton of different social challenges, but the key is to do something that isn’t socially normal. Some ideas:
- Call restaurants/stores and tell them a joke
- Ask random strangers to give you a compliment
- Give 15 strangers high-fives
- Put on your headphones and start dancing in public
- Lie down in a crowded area
What I’ve learned from doing social challenges, is that they HAVE to be kinda scary and on the edge of my comfort zone. If they’re too easy, it’ll have no effect on me.
4. Self-Amusement: When I was less confident, I often supplicated to others. I’d try to say things to get them to like me. But I’ve realized, that when I say things to entertain myself, it puts me in a good mood. And then that good mood flows out to the people around me. And then people want to be around me. Kinda like when your friend is laughing too hard, and you start laughing, but don’t really know why. This one is less practical, and more about having awareness in a social situation.
Doing many of these will make me look like a crazy person to most people, which is the point. But what I’ve learned from doing weird things in public, is that people are usually too stuck in their heads to pay much attention to what I'm doing. And there are no social repercussions. In fact, the weirder I am, people come to respect me more, since most people would not have the balls to do that.
We’ll see how this goes. I’ll probably write up an update after the 30-days, to see what worked and what didn’t work, and whether I still want to stop drinking.