Side Effects Of 100 Days Without Alcohol
3K dollars, 3 extra days, 9 articles and 2 launched side projects.
In December 2015 my doctor told me to stay away from alcohol for a while.
My consumption wasn’t more than most of my peers: going out about one night per week in addition to a few occasional mid week beers.
Naïve as I was, I didn’t think this kind of consumption affected much more than my wallet and my weight. And especially not areas like sleep quality, general productivity and energy throughout the week.
However, I could not have been more wrong. So in this article I’d describe what happened.
Note: This is not to moralize over peoples alcohol consumption. It’s simply a description of the effects I noticed by not drinking for three months.
1. Economy
The first thing I noticed was the economical benefit.
It turns out that money I spent going out at night was what kept me from ending up with a surplus at the end of the month.
Now I’m left with around 1K USD each month, which have piled up on my bank account to around 3K USD.
2. Sleep
Another striking effect has been my sleep cycle. I used to go to bed between 11-12 pm at night, and get up at 8 am, after snoozing for about 30 minutes.
This rhythms has shifted an hour backwards: I now go to bed between 10-11 pm and I get up at 6.30 am— without snoozing.
In other words: my days have become at least 30 minutes longer.
This means that cutting out alcohol adds up to an extra day every month, (15–18 hours of awake time).
Another peculiar thing I’ve noticed is that Monday mornings now feel like every other morning, and not slightly depressing as they used to be. So that Monday morning blues was actually a side effect of alcohol, not of starting a new week.
3. Productivity
Getting up at 6.30 am gives me a 1.5 hour block of free time before I go to work. This has been the secret sauce in my productivity boost these three months, as I’m able to sit undisturbed and either write articles or code on my side projects.
Here’s what these morning sprints have resulted in:
Writing
I’ve written nine Medium articles, which have gotten a total of 300K views and 100K reads, while my following has grown from a couple of hundred to 1.5K.
Becoming this visible on Medium has a few other positive side effects: people reach out to you to get advice, offer paid writing gigs, help you out or just say hello. All of which are pleasant gestures.
Coding
As for the coding part, I’ve been working on two side projects during the mornings, both of which have helped me improve my knowledge of backend development.
The first one is Datasets.co, which is a site for sharing and discovering machine learning datasets. I did play around with this project before I quit drinking, but did the majority of the work in December & January.
My second side project is called BugRex.com, which my friend Andreas and I built during weekend hack in February. Version 2.0 will be released soon and has mostly been built between 6.30 and 8.00 am in weekdays before work.
BugRex aims to make coding less frustrating, by connecting struggling developers with domain experts over chat, so that they can get help on their issues immediately.
4. Work
When it comes to my professional life — I work as a frond-end developer at Xeneta — I haven’t noticed any overall increase or decrease in my productivity.
But there has been one striking effect, which undoubtedly pays positive dividends: I no longer get acute sleepy.
By acute sleepy, I mean that feeling of hardly being able to keep your eyes open; when you’re so sleepy you simply have to get out of the building and go for a walk to wake up again. This happened an a weekly or bi-weekly basis before, while it has just magically stopped after I quit alcohol.
5. Health
Regarding my health, two positive things have happened: My cholesterol has gone down to normal levels, and I’ve lost weight.
I’m not sure how much, as I didn’t weight myself before I quit, but it’s at least a few pounds, which has happened despite not exercising any more than I used to.
6. TV Series
As I go to bed earlier, I normally don’t have a time to watch Netflix or HBO in the evenings, so my TV series consumption has sinked drastically.
However, when you’re forced to cut down on watching TV series, you’ll most likely start cutting in the bad end.
I‘ve still found time to watch Making a Murderer and will definitely follow Game of Thrones S6. However, I’ve skipped stuff like Narcos, The Man In The High Castle and other series that didn’t really tick.
7. Social
Up until now, it has probably seemed like all effects have been positive. However, that’s not the case. I’ve also lost something by not drinking, as it’s not particularly fun to go out to party anymore. It’s ok for an hour or two but then I get tired and head home.
So I’ve been cutting down on going out on Saturday nights, which again results in seeing less of some of my friends. This is a definite downside.
During some part of life this negative effect would probably have outweighed all the positive ones, but that’s not the case now. So my overall experience with not drinking has been positive.
Got any experiences on this subject yourself? Feel free to share them in the comments below :)
