Thoughts on a Year Sober

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 let anything more than a light buzz 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. I created my own supplement stack to help out my liver.

These things did help, and they pushed me to really want to use moderation and to drink less. But weekend after weekend, I could never just 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 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.

What changed

The changes in my body showed up fast, within 3 months. I noticed increased energy during the day and whiter eyes, which was a surprising great combo. I also worked on my general health and refined that supplement stack I mentioned. Around the same time as his, 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.

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:

• ALT
• AST
• HDL Cholesterol
• LDL Cholesterol
• Fasted Glucose
• Hemoglobin A1c

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!

Something I miss

Something I already knew but see much more clearly now is that I don’t miss being drunk. I do miss that nice buzz after one, maybe two drinks. But thinking back to college times and how often I went out and got drunk for real, no, I don’t miss it. It used to be a lot of fun, but I know what’s waiting at the bottom of any bottle of something strong now, and it’s a nasty hangover.

I actually saw that coming before I quit. In the weeks right before I went sober, I could feel the hangovers kicking in while I was still drunk. Heavy drinking had already lost its appeal, which is why I’d been slowly cutting the number of nights a month I drank. I don’t ever want to go back to that, those nights where you need an entire Sunday to recover. Good riddance to those.

But that nice state where you have the tiniest buzz from a single drink? THAT is the state I miss. And that’s really where my head is today. Not drinking is fine, I’ll live, but I would like to experience it again in moderation. Without alcohol, social stuff takes on a slightly different feeling. Not worse, but just a little different.

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. It’s 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 that is how we bond. Alcohol is ingrained into how people connect out here, and going 100% sober made that pretty obvious.

Would I recommend others do this?

People have asked me this, and honestly I probably wouldn’t recommend it. There’s something to be said for having the option to use alcohol on occasion, to treat a drink the way you might have a sweet treat to celebrate a milestone like a birthday. Or even to treat it like caffeine: you should be able to have a three-coffee day once in a while at work if that’s what you want. For people who can participate responsibly, take advantage where you can.

In an ideal world, that’s how it would work. You use what you want in moderation to feel a specific way, and stop if you have noticed you are doing too much. But the last part takes a lot of introspection and honest self-assessment, and I don’t think it actually plays out that way in real life. So I would say to monitor your drinking, and if you’re interested, start researching what tools, supplements, and treatments are out there if you want to drink less but don’t know where to start.

I also want to touch on addiction, and treatment for addiction, since that’s really what the “just use less when you’re using too much” idea is talking about. I don’t think most people get how common it is. I wouldn’t classify my situation as alcoholism, but I would say it was an addiction of some kind. And the problem with people not realizing how normal that is, is they end up shaming the exact people who are trying to climb out of it. I tried naltrexone for a while. It’s usually reserved for people with a diagnosed alcohol use disorder, but my doctor said it was totally fine to try it on some college weekends. And still, if we talked when we were out one day and a casual friend found out I was taking a drug alcoholics use, without knowing my underlying story, they’d probably judge me for it. It’s the same thing when someone with a food addiction takes a GLP-1 to kill their cravings so they can feel normal instead of putting 5,000 calories down their throat every day. People might be shaming the one thing that saved their life without realizing it. Being on both sides of addiction, with more than just alcohol in the past, I’ve seen that the quickest people to judge those interventions are most often the ones who hadn’t been through any of it. So one thing I do hope is that regardless of what intervention anyone tries, we all become a little more respectful of people’s situations.

So that’s the background for my actual recommendation. I think sobriety is awesome, but I don’t think everyone needs to do it. I think moderation is better. But if, for any reason, you aren’t someone who is blessed with the ability to consume alcohol in moderation, and you want to go permanently sober for you, then yes, go for it! I’ll be here cheering you on. And if you want resources for different things you can try, or different things I’ve tried, I’m here for you. But if you don’t have a problem and you’re just asking whether you need to go sober, I’d say you’d probably get more satisfaction out of holding yourself to one or two drinks a night, if you can.

Some things I learned about people

People ask a lot of questions, and most of them are supportive. I love to share my story when people are curious, so I do love the questions and having those conversations. What I also get, sometimes, is a look of judgement from other people who almost express guilt that I’m not joining them. Like if you went out for a friend’s birthday and you brought your own food because you’re on a meal plan. It breaks social norms and confuses people. For people on a meal plan, I assume they would rather go to the event and still show face, lest they have to stay home and avoid the whole thing. That’s the attitude I took toward social events that involved heavy drinking.

I don’t really care about the looks from other people, but there is something I had to watch out for: people who encouraged me to drink back when I was trying to cut down. Those alcohol cravings were very real at the start. And back when I was less determined, I’d explained the goal to people when it was just to drink less, not go full-on sober. It’s really hard to avoid the cravings, because people will egg you on. You just have to be vigilant and remember what your goals are, and why you’re pursuing them. And then stick to them, no matter what other people say.

I also have to add that there were countless people who were incredibly supportive. People who’d start buying me an NA beer whenever I did go out. People who were just perfectly comfortable in those situations with me even if I wasn’t drinking. People who asked how it was going, how many months I made it. I love those people to death!! And I feel bad because I don’t think I’ve ever expressed the same level of concern for all of them. So if you’re one of those people, take this apology and know that I really really appreciate you being supportive, and I care about you!

Will I stay sober past one year?

Probably not. For me, it was about getting healthier and getting rid of my craving to drink. A year later, I’ve achieved pretty much everything I was looking 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 if I need to.