[Regular_John]

I’m 38 and just passed one year of being dry at the beginning of July, after gradually determining the perfect number of drinks turned out to be zero for me.

I spent the first 12 years of my career working in advertising, beer fridges and bottles in your desk kind of agencies. It wasn’t unusual at all to have 1-2 pints of beer at lunch on Friday, while imbibing in a few double bourbons/gins at home most nights of the week.

About 4 years ago I started to notice that certain beers would leave me feeling like utter crap the next day. Like I’d have 1-2 beer with dinner and feel like I’d had 7-8 the next morning. So I tried cutting out certain beer types and this worked a year or two.

Then the scale moved again and the amount of alcohol I could have without feeling like crap, and the window of time before I felt like crap got even smaller.

1 beer after work, I’d be dog tired the rest of the night and into the morning.
1/2 beer after work, same thing.

It eventually got to the point that each drink would essentially mean signing up for 12-18 hours of voluntarily feeling like crap.

When I initially stopped last year I had told myself I would only drink while travelling, as it’s part of the experience and I didn’t want to miss out. By the time my next trip rolled around I was about 3 months into it and realized that never being hungover is pretty damn great.

Now if I should find myself in Spain with my wife, I may very well choose to enjoy a glass of red wine... but outside of that I really have nothing on my bucket list that seems to be worth the hours of being a tired bag of crap for anymore.