Is Dry January Just Kicking the Can Down the Road?

Why temporary abstinence might be missing the point 🥂

Jan 06, 2026

ICYMI 👉

I'm ditching Dry January this year—not because I'm opposed to abstinence (I'm all for taking breaks from alcohol)—but because I’m starting to think Dry January has become a month-long hall pass that lets us avoid the harder, more important work of examining our relationship with alcohol.

Don’t get me wrong: I will always celebrate anyone and everyone in recovery. And if abstaining from booze for the month helps you reset your habits, sleep better, or feel more energized, that’s EXCELLENT. But here’s what I see in my practice: patients who white-knuckle through January, announce their (deserved) success on February 1st, and then slide right back into the same drinking patterns that motivated them in the first place. The month of sobriety can paradoxically give permission to resume business as usual. After all, if you can go a whole month without alcohol, clearly you don’t have a problem—right?

Maybe. Or maybe Dry January is letting us off the hook too easily?

The real question isn’t whether you can stop drinking for 31 days. The question is: why do you drink in the first place? What happens when you don’t? And what does your body tell you about how alcohol is actually affecting your health—not just in January, but all year long?

The Illusion of the Reset Button

There’s something seductive about the all-or-nothing approach. It’s clean, definitive, socially acceptable. You’re either doing Dry January or you’re not. You’re either in the club or you’re out. But this binary thinking can obscure the more nuanced—and more useful—conversation about how alcohol fits into your life.

I’m thinking about a patient I’ll call Melissa, a woman in her 60s who came to me complaining of poor sleep, GI distress, and escalating anxiety. Her drinking habits wouldn’t raise immediate alarm bells to most doctors—a glass or two of wine most evenings, occasionally more on weekends with friends. She proudly did Dry January two years in a row. But by March, she was back to her nightly wine ritual, and her symptoms returned along with it.

What she needed wasn’t another month of abstinence. She needed to understand that her evening glass of wine was disrupting her sleep, spiking her anxiety, and messing with her digestion. Once she connected the dots—that is, once she realized how alcohol was affecting her body (not just scary statistics about cancer risk), she could make informed decisions year-round.

The Better Questions

Instead of asking “Can I make it through January without drinking?”—which is really just testing your willpower—try asking yourself:

How does alcohol actually affect my sleep, my mood, my energy, my relationships? Not in general. Not according to studies. But for me, specifically, in my body, with my particular medical history and risk factors?
What am I using alcohol for? To unwind? To socialize? To quiet anxiety? To fill an evening void? To cope with grief or stress or loneliness? These aren’t moral judgments; they’re data points that tell us something important about what we actually need.
What happens when I don’t drink? Do I sleep better? Feel sharper? Have more patience? Or do I feel deprived, resentful, white-knuckling my way through social situations? Both sets of observations are valuable.

Consider a patient I will call Michael, 50-something-year old with recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes. His hemoglobin A1C was 8.2 percent despite diligent exercise and healthy eating. He considered himself a moderate drinker—one or two beers most evenings. When he cut back to only one drink twice a week, his A1C dropped to 6.8 percent within two months without changing anything else. The shift wasn’t about proof of his willpower; it was about recognizing a clear connection between his evening habit and his metabolic health.

Or take Nicole, a mom in her 40s who came to me with rising cholesterol despite taking statins. What emerged was a story of complicated grief. After her mother’s death, wine had become a source of relief after putting the kids to bed in the evenings. She didn’t need Dry January; she needed to acknowledge that her grief was a natural response to loss, and that alcohol was preventing her from seeking the support she needed from trusted friends and a grief counselor.

Risk Is Personal, Not Universal

As I wrote when the Surgeon General issued his warning about alcohol and cancer, health is about tradeoffs. Every time you drive a car, have sex, or breathe communal air, you’re making micro-decisions about what you consider “acceptable” risk. The same logic applies to alcohol (though with the added complication that alcohol itself impairs the judgment you need to assess risk).

For my patients with higher-than-average cancer risk, the Surgeon General’s 2025 warning might be the final nudge to quit drinking altogether. For others, alcohol is woven into the fabric of their life, not because they’re cavalier about cancer risk, but because they’ve weighed the data against their personal circumstances and values.

The key word here is personal. Your tolerance for risk, your medical history, your reasons for drinking, your genetic predisposition. All of these factors should inform your decisions about alcohol. A one-size-fits-all approach, whether it’s Dry January or doctor-mandated abstinence, ignores the uniqueness of our biology and psychosocial factors.

Beyond January Thinking

What if, instead of a dramatic month of abstinence, we committed to genuine curiosity about our relationship with alcohol? (Read my article on how to evaluate your relationship with alcohol here.) What if we paid attention all year to how we feel after one drink versus three? To whether we’re reaching for wine because we’re celebrating something wonderful or numbing something difficult? To what our wearable devices are telling us about our sleep quality after drinking?

Notice what changes when you abstain. Notice what’s easier and what’s harder. Notice whether you’re counting down the days until you can drink again or whether you’re genuinely curious about how your body responds.

And if you discover that alcohol is significantly impacting your health—disrupting sleep, elevating blood pressure, affecting mood, interfering with medications—then the conversation shifts from “Can I make it through January?” to “What do I actually want for my health, and what am I willing to trade for it?”

QUESTIONS 🙋🏻‍♀️

Are you doing Dry January? If so, what are you hoping to learn from it?
Have you noticed patterns in your drinking that concern you, even if you wouldn’t call it a “problem”?
What do you think makes it easier to commit to a month of abstinence versus making smaller, sustainable changes throughout the year?

I’m all ears!

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