Thoughts on a Year Sober

By Sean Sullivan on 04 Jul 2026


Today marks one full year since I went sober.
One year!

Background

I had toyed with the idea of going sober ever since the middle of college. Everyone has different relationships with substances, and mine with alcohol always felt like it should be temporary. As I got older and graduated, it felt like time to move on, and that anything more than a nice buzz should stay back in college. But month after month, I kept having nights where I got more drunk than intended, and I hated it. I could always control whether I drank — I had plenty of totally sober stretches in college — but when I drank, I was never the guy who could have one or two and stop (The em dashes were me, not ai). That’s what I hope would have changed by now. I also just hated how I acted when I was drunk.

My path to sobriety didn’t really take off until I got some concerning blood tests back in early 2025. The tests showed significant elevation in my ALT and AST, key liver enzymes used to detect liver stress and damage. My doctor mentioned that I should probably slow down on drinking if that’s what I had been up to, but that he didn’t think I had any kind of liver disease. But after seeing the results, and being more embarrassed than anything, I realized it was obvious what needed to change. I started to take my health much more seriously. I started to supplement with various things to help out my liver, eventually creating my own supplement stack for it.

FOOTNOTE ON Other Projects

Later on into sobriety, I also built a web dashboard to track my blood test results so I could watch them more closely. But at this point I hadn't built it yet.


These things did help, and they pushed me to really want to use moderation and to drink less. But weekend after weekend, I just couldn’t have one drink and call it a night. I wouldn’t even blame peer pressure, it was just that I never set a good boundary for myself. So, one morning that summer, I woke up and decided to cut it off entirely. Time to go sober.


Rules of my sobriety

Sobriety felt pretty scary at first. For the first few days I was terrified I’d give in, constantly thinking, “What if I drink again? What if I mess up?” I couldn’t even picture a long-term goal, only that I had to make it for two months.

But as the weeks went by, I started to get less scared. With each day in those first two months, I started to collect evidence that I could live my life and not drink. It started to feel more good than scary.

I started to settle in to things, thinking about them more practically. At first I had no idea what was in the bounds of sobriety versus out, so I banned alcohol of any kind. Mouthwash, even. Sobriety is less simple than it sounds, and there are a lot of technicalities. What about a “non-alcoholic” beer that actually has 0.1% or 0.5% alcohol? I would have to drink ~40 of those to equal one beer, but it’s still alcohol, right?

At first I was really strict about all this, but after a while, I realized that a single drop of alcohol in the NA beer was never the thing I was trying to escape. I was just trying to stop getting drunk. So I made new rules:

  1. If it’s labeled “NA” (0.5% alcohol or less), I could drink it.
  2. If something was classified as alcoholic, so >0.5%, it counted as breaking sobriety if I swallowed it.

That meant the trace alcohol from an NA beer was fine, and any kind of mouthwash or other alcohol was also fine if I rinsed out afterward. You might say these are permissive rules, and that’s fair, they worked for me. I was never in the territory of life-or-death alcoholism, so I didn’t feel like my sobriety needed to be that strict. I stuck to these rules for the entire year, so it was really important that they at least be manageable ones (Also, it feels both weird and pretty cool to say that I did that).

Another point of my sobriety was that it actually became threefold. I wanted it to feel like a real personal reset, so I brought in smoking (weed) and vaping too, not just drinking. Plenty of people don’t do these things to begin with, so I don’t think I’m “special” in any way, I just wanted to make it a little more challenging and remove the chance I’d replace one substance with another.


Just go longer

While my sobriety was threefold, it was only alcohol that made me afraid of relapse. Like I said, I told myself I was sober for now, not forever. I told everyone that I was doing it for two months, just to see where things went. I didn’t commit to going longer until I knew I could.

Cravings are like that. At first, they seem impossible to get rid of, but they fall off fast and don’t really come back. As I neared the halfway point of those two months, the daily panic about when I would drink next faded away, replaced by thoughts that felt more normal. It was around that time that I caught up with an old friend, who gave me what turned out being the single most important piece of advice I’d heard all year.

We got into chatting, and I explained my sobriety to him as well as the two-month goal. He had been sober for a pretty long time, so I imagine this didn’t sound like anything crazy. He asked why I settled on two months.

I don’t know, I told him. I just assumed that I’d be giving in at two months and wouldn’t be able to keep this going. I didn’t really want it to end in two months, I told him, but that I assumed it would.

“Why don’t you just go longer?”

I stared at him for a second. It never even occurred to me that I could just plan for longer.

But yeah, I could. Just go longer. So that’s exactly what I did. At the end of the two months I decided to keep going. Two months turned into six, and then at six months I said twelve. Now here we are, twelve months later. It’s crazy.



Changes I noticed

The changes in my body showed up fast, within 3 months. I noticed increased energy during the day and whiter eyes, which was a surprisingly great combo. I also worked on my general health and refined that supplement stack I mentioned. Around the same time as this, my cravings evaporated. By month three I no longer had any big urge to drink. I’d settled into the reality that I would just go to the bar with friends, sit my ass down, and order a soda or an NA beer. The lack of alcohol didn’t really manifest as a craving anymore, more like it was just a routine I had to follow. Get the NA option, nothing else.

FOOTNOTE ON N.A. BEERS

And on that note, NA beers are awesome. They're not for everyone, but a ton of stores and bars have started stocking them in this last year. It definitely beats a soda if you're doing something social and want a drink in your hand. Also, if you aren't a beer person, NA beers might make you one after you go sober, lol


Between the six-month to one-year period, the changes were more gradual, but these biomarkers trended to the best levels I’ve ever tested for:

This was a really big accomplishment for me, since some of these were pretty high to begin with. I’m happy to say that, as of 2026, I have never had a better-functioning liver in my life, and that’s saying a lot since I have been getting these tests since I was seventeen!


What I still miss

I don’t miss being drunk. I actually saw that coming before I quit, as I could feel the hangovers kicking in before I would even get back home from a night out. Heavy drinking had already lost its appeal, which is why I had been slowly cutting the number of nights I drank per month. I don’t really miss that.

But something I do miss is that nice buzz you get after one, maybe two drinks. The state where you have a slightly elevated mood, and things seem a little more fun and playful. And that’s still where my head is today. The moments of drinking that I miss are pretty specific and infrequent. You’re at someone’s house, out on a date, at a birthday dinner, and one drink would be perfect to soften the mood. Without it, social stuff takes on a slightly different feeling. Not worse, but just a little different. Not drinking is fine, I’ll live, but I would like to experience alcohol again in moderation.

Drinking is also just part of culture here in the Midwest. We don’t have as much of the great outdoors as other regions, and we get some pretty bad winters, so a lot of times this is how we bond. Going sober made it pretty obvious to me that alcohol is ingrained into how people connect out here.



Would I recommend you do this?

People have asked me this, and I would recommend it! But I think you should do what’s right for you. Sobriety is awesome, but there’s something to be said for having the ability to use alcohol on occasion, to treat a drink the way you might have a sweet treat to celebrate a milestone. Or even to treat it like caffeine: you should be able to have a three-coffee day once in a while if that’s what you want. For people who can participate in this kind of thing responsibly, I would say to take advantage where you can.

In an ideal world, that’s how it would work. You’d use what you want in moderation, feel a specific way, and stop if you notice negative effects. But the last part takes a lot of introspection and honest self-assessment, and I don’t think it always plays out that way in real life. So for that reason, if you have issues with moderating your drinking, and you want to do something, there are tons of things you can try, from therapies to supplements and medications. And if you want resources for different things you can try, or different things that I’ve tried, I’m here for you. And if you want something more drastic, and you want to go sober full-stop, then yes, go for it! But if you don’t have a problem and you’re just asking whether you should go sober, I’d say you may get more satisfaction out of holding yourself to one or two drinks a night. Just start trying things and see what works!

FOOTNOTE ON WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT PEOPLE

People have been really supportive of me for the most part. I've had tons of questions about my sobriety, and it's most often a nice conversation.

But what I also get sometimes (very rarely though) is a look of guilt. Sometimes, other people almost seemed upset that I wasn't drinking when they were. Or maybe just judgement that someone is going against what most people do. I get it, though. It would be like going out for a friend's birthday and bringing your own food because you're on a meal plan. It just breaks social norms and confuses people, since it's the opposite of what the vast majority do. The alternative for us, who are doing these things, would be to stay home and skip social events, which is a terrible alternative.


And while not necessarily specific to me, I have also noticed a lot of judgement over people who are trying to better themselves by using uncommon means (anything that the majority isn't doing), not just by going fully sober. I don't think most people get how common addiction actually is, alcohol or otherwise, and how many people are fighting it daily. The problem with not realizing how common this is, is that people will judge someone without knowing what's going on, often times shaming them for the thing that's getting them out of the addiction.

For instance, I tried naltrexone for a while. It's a drug usually reserved for people with a diagnosed alcohol use disorder, but my doctor said it was totally fine for me to try on weekends. But if it got casually brought up to an acquaintance that I was taking a drug alcoholics use, and they didn't know everything I just told you here, they might judge me for it. I think it could be similar to when someone with food addiction takes a GLP to kill their cravings. Their goal might be to simply stop the urge to constantly shove calories into their body. But I think people might judge them based on what they are doing, without knowing the context.

So my hope is that over time, people can become a little more respectful of others situations.


Will I stay sober past one year?

I’m not sure yet. For me, it was about getting healthier and getting rid of my craving to drink. A year later, I’ve achieved a lot of what i was hoping for. I want to keep this same relationship with alcohol going forward, but with the ability to have a drink if I want one.

It’s also been incredible to see how much I got done with all the weekends I wasn’t going out. I refined my self-driving car project. I honed my health and got the best blood test results of my entire life. I worked on a passion project that graded two dozen phone chargers, continuing a Google engineer’s work. I created a half-dozen AI-assisted vibe coding projects, replacing stuff like my Spotify and my workout app with custom-coded alternatives that are 100% free to operate (article coming soon). A lot of stuff.

I plan to return to drinking casually one day. Maybe not just yet, but one day. And if I still can’t do the 1-2 drinks a night thing, I’ve got a year’s worth of sobriety showing me I can always do it again.



#meta | #blogging