One Year No Beer COMPLETE | Reflections on 365 Days of Stone Cold Sober Living

By Chase Parnell  —  August 17, 2020

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I struggle to include the word “sober” in the title of this post because, really, getting sober was never the goal in and of itself. My abstention from alcohol was more of a life experiment than any sort of hail mary to save my life, marriage or future. It was about trying to live my best life, a way to optimize my experiences and abilities. The questions I wanted answers to were in this vein: What would a life without alcohol look and feel like? Would I become a better husband/dad/person? Would I tap into an elevated plane of existence that was somehow being suppressed under my ritualized alcohol habit? And lastly, what would it do for my running? 

To set the table for those that haven’t been following along, prior to removing alcohol from my life I was probably what most would consider a moderate drinker; a two to four beers OR a half a bottle of wine OR a Manhattan or two a night kind of guy. Besides the night before I started my year of no beer, I hadn’t been actually drunk since 2011. I mostly just really enjoyed the buzz and used alcohol to relax and take the edge off after a long day. Much like the roles coffee and running play in my life, alcohol was something I used to cope with the daily grind of life. It was something I looked forward to, romanticized, and thoroughly enjoyed. But eventually, I began to feel like I had less and less control over it and was teetering on the edge of developing a real problem with it.  

I finally reached a point where I knew I needed to assert some authority over alcohol, so on August 16, 2019, I made a deal with myself; I was going to uncork a little bit for one night, then hunker down for a full year. It was time for some… ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.  

Why go a full year though? Well, you know, why run ultras? Some of us need more extreme objectives to make them interesting enough to attempt. I’m not going to buy a sailboat someday so I can learn to sail, I’m going to buy a sailboat someday so I can sail around the whole damn world! Lots of people do dry January or sober October, but that didn’t feel like enough for me. Deep down, I knew too that it was going to take more time than that to manifest a genuine lifestyle change. And let me tell you, turns out a year is a LONG TIME. Riding the emotional highs and lows has been an adventure, similar to any other epic undertaking I’ve attempted. 

Another inspiration for doing one full year was the One Year No Beer organization. One of their founders, Andy Ramage, blew my mind as a guest on the Rich Roll podcast. Listen to the episode here. He was the first person I’d heard that talked about quitting alcohol in a way that I could relate to. You don’t have to be an alcoholic to want to quit drinking, he said, quit because you want more out of life! I wasn’t at risk of ending up in some ditch somewhere, I wasn’t making a fool of myself in public, I wasn’t ruining relationships or waking up hungover every day, but I knew I was drinking more than I should and I wondered if life could simply be better. Could total sobriety be the missing piece to the puzzle that would unlock the ever-elusive sense of inner peace? I had to try.

So I took the plunge, made the commitment, blasted my intentions all over the internet for some contrived accountability, and now, after 365 nights of laying my head down 100% lucid, I completed my goal. 

Before I talk about whether or not I found what I was looking for, I want to tackle some of the more practical questions that might interest a broader audience. I’ll use the five claims from the One Year No Beer website as a framework. Here we go:

What Happens When You Take A Break From The Booze?

Improved Sleep

My opinion here is that alcohol might PUT you asleep, but it won’t KEEP you asleep. When I drank, I had absolutely no problem falling asleep. In fact, Nikki would get mad at me because we’d get in bed, put on a Netflix show and I’d be out after the first scene. That doesn’t happen anymore. I have to be more intentional about choosing to go to sleep. That said, when I was drinking, my sleep was interrupted. I don’t think I was hitting the REM cycles and deep sleep. 

There’s also the bit about me being a sleepwalker when I drink. Something happens in the chemistry of my brain that causes me to every so often take an unconscious stroll around the house. And again, I was never drinking excessively so this wasn’t a drunken stumble. It would happen on occasion after even just a couple beers earlier in the evening. Sometimes I’d wake up on the couch and have no recollection of when I moved there. It was always a little disconcerting and Nikki is freaked out by sleepwalking in general so a perk of total abstinence is that I don’t do that anymore.

So yes, generally speaking, quit drinking and your sleep will improve. It wasn’t life-changing or overwhelmingly energizing, but there were some marginal benefits I appreciated. 

Feel Noticeably Better

Okay, this one is undoubtably true. Everyone knows that alcohol feels good going down, you get an hour or two of nice feelings, and then you feel bad. Maybe not really bad, but you’re dehydrated, tired, maybe bloated, and just generally blah. For most of us, those discomforts were a small price to pay in exchange for the feel-good. 

This benefit is most noticeable in the mornings. I don’t wake up feeling parched or depleted or like I need to pound water and coffee to replenish and feel normal. I remember telling Nikki that I routinely woke up feeling like I literally had one too many, not five too many, just one. But it was enough to give me a twinge of regret. And psychologically speaking, it’s not good to constantly start your day in the red, taxed from the night before. Finally, the first few miles of my morning runs were undoubtably affected by the IPAs or bottom-shelf whisky oozing from my pores. Gross. 

More Productive

This one is probably the benefit I am most pleased with. For me personally, once I started drinking in the evening, I became a fairly useless human. Sure, I could do menial chores like the dishes and cleaning up the kids’ toys, but I couldn’t do anything that involved using my brain. I 100% cannot read a book or write well even after just one beer. 

Now, I’m consistently reading before I go to sleep and I love it. If I need to finish writing an article after the kids go to sleep so I can release it early the next morning, I’m capable of crafting something coherent, although as a morning person I still feel like my writing quality declines significantly after noon. 

One of my longstanding reservations about drinking was that I didn’t want to be the “buzzed dad”. It always felt a little weird reading my kid a story book after a beer or two. Like, was he starting to associate me with the smell of alcohol? Or could my son tell when I’d been drinking in any way? And was this doing any harm to his development? Regardless, it’s been nice not having to question what sort of effects, if any, my drinking might be been having on my kids. 

Reduced Anxiety

This one is complicated but ultimately very true as well. I think my alcohol habit progressed in equal parts with how unhappy I was in my professional life. I’d hate my work environment and couldn’t wait to get home and have a beer because that was my short-term fix and shortcut to feeling good. No matter how toxic life was during the day, at least I could come home to my family and have a drink. So in that way, alcohol actually helped me to cope with my work anxiety, which I was extremely thankful for at the time, although I knew it was only a temporary solution and that I’d have to eventually pay the piper for this habit I was developing. I’ve also wondered if having that comfort to come home to might have contributed to me staying in positions that weren’t good fits for me longer than I should’ve. 

The longer I let the drinking habit go the less I felt I had control over it, and that became a source of anxiety. If your mind tells you that you should cut back and you fail over and over in your actions, there’s a disconnect where tension begins to build. Finally removing alcohol from my life gave me a sense of empowerment and made me feel like I was in control again. There was no foreign substance in my body telling me what to do or affecting the way I thought or processed emotions. I proved to myself that I could deal with the cards life had dealt me just the way I am. 

Think about the anxiety piece this way: quit drinking and you’ll be trading in short term relief for a long term peace. 

Lose Weight

This one I can’t really agree with. If it said, “physically healthier” then I’d totally agree. I think I was doing damage to my liver and who knows what else. 2-3 drinks every night for multiple years in a row must have some sort of deleterious effect on the body, just as any other bad habit might if you do it on a daily basis. As far as my weight goes, it fluctuates solely based on how much I’m running. 

I have to mention that since I quit drinking, I’ve become an absolute sugar fiend. Instead of drinking alcohol before bed, I’m eating ice cream or snacking on who knows what. I thought this was going to taper off after the first couple months once my physiology adjusted to alcohol being eliminated from my diet, but now I know my cravings are more psychological than anything. If I don’t have alcohol to make me feel good, then dammit, three scoops rocky road, one scoop cookies and cream will have to do. A winning combination.  

What Now? Will There Be Another Year of No Beer?

The short answer is probably not. Despite all the positives I spelled out above, I’ll likely reintegrate drinking into my life, but I plan to do so at a drastically reduced level. Instead of jumping back into the nightly routine, I intend to save it for special occasions. I’m proud of what I accomplished and I really enjoyed and appreciated the experience of an extended break; it was just the reset I needed. I proved to myself that I could rid my life of the habit should I so choose, which was important for me to learn, but moving forward, I’m releasing myself from the pressure of the ticking sobriety clock and the premise that all is right in the world if I’m not drinking. 

I recognize that I’ve yo-yoed a lot over the last year. I’ve gone back and read some of what I wrote in my other updates. The toughest was my six months article where I wrote, “…if in six months from now, I meet you at the finish line and I’ve got my feet up with a beer in hand, I’m going to tell you that life is good and that I felt like one year was enough…but don’t buy it. What that’ll mean is that I caved, that I decided the cost was worth the relief alcohol provides. My one year of no beer will then be just another story I tell to convince people I have everything under control. A run of the mill ‘I went a year once’.” While I get where I was coming from at the time, today, six months later, I don’t feel that any future drinking of mine will be an auto-failure. That said, if you see me at that finish line and I’m a 6-pack of 10% IPAs deep and can’t get out of my lawn chair, then yes, feel free to cast your judgment. 

There’s this scene in a movie where a man goes to his priest and says something to the effect of, “Father, I’ve lost my faith. What should I do?” The priest looks out over the town square, dramatic orchestral music fills the silence, and after much internal deliberation, the priest says, “…fake it.” I can’t tell you the title of this movie, or the names of any actors in it, but for some reason this line has stuck with me for many years. The lesson of course is that even if the man wasn’t a believer anymore, he should still act like it so as to encourage others to stay strong in the faith. I feel a little bit like I’m in that position now and I disagree with the priest’s advice. I could have easily crafted a much more rah-rah message, a rallying cry around sober living. And trust me, I wanted to, especially for those of you out there who said I inspired you to give this alcohol-free lifestyle a try. But I can’t represent myself as something I’m not. 

To be clear, I haven’t lost my faith in sober-living, in fact, I think if you were to choose the healthiest/best/most productive lifestyle, alcohol would have no place in it. What I’m acknowledging for me personally, is that similar to how I don’t have the self-control or extreme discipline to not eat fistfuls of M&Ms when there’s a bag lying around, or gorge on holiday feasts, I also don’t think I have it in me to go the REST OF MY LIFE without alcohol. For me, I’ve learned that total abstention creates obsession.

A reader posted the following on my 10 months update, “I was listening to Brené Brown speaking about sobriety of all kinds. When she was asked why she doesn’t drink, her response was that she is a better abstainer than she is a moderator. I thought that showed an important insight into one’s relationship with alcohol. If you can be a better moderator, then go for it. If, like me, you’re probably a better abstainer, then that should inform your decision.” I think this approach is wise. While I did complete one year as an abstainer, I’m not walking away feeling like I’m good at it. Quite the opposite.

Final Thoughts

In a few days, a few weeks, or a few months from now when I decide to have a drink, I don’t think it’ll carry the same heaviness as it once did. I won’t have to wonder if my life will magically become 5x better if I just quit it altogether. I tried that and it didn’t work… for me. I can envision a glass of wine with Nikki at a nice restaurant, a post-run trailhead beer with friends, a Manhattan on a Saturday evening, and while I acknowledge that these will not necessarily add anything to my life, I also think they won’t necessarily take anything away either. 

To those of you out there looking for answers, sorry, I don’t have them. Maybe giving up alcohol completely and forever is a requisite step in your journey, maybe it isn’t. Maybe try the One Year No Beer challenge to give yourself time to process like I did. But no matter what, you have to be honest with yourself and follow your heart on this one. Always know that you are unique and different than anyone else; don’t let anyone place you in a box. There is something new under the sun and it’s called YOU. Only you have the answers so decide what’s best for you and be confident in that. I don’t judge or condemn anyone for drinking, nor do I celebrate or glorify someone for choosing not to. Neither of those choices define you.

Regardless of how things shake out for me personally, I can assure you I won’t be vocalizing it on the internet. I’ve said my piece. All six updates: 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 8 months, 10 months, and now this one will remain available and are representative of the truths and ebbs and flows of my will, determination, and understanding at the time they were written.

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