It’s now been a full week since those New Year’s Eve parties, and if you’re participating in Dry January, now is a great time to think about how well it’s working for you—if it’s working at all. Dry January definitely has its health benefits, but it can also backfire for some people. Let’s dig in to the pros and cons.
Quitting cold turkey isn’t always safe
For moderate drinkers, quitting alcohol is pretty straightforwardly beneficial (subject to caveats we’ll discuss shortly). But if you drink enough alcohol, often enough, going cold turkey can actually be dangerous.
Alcohol withdrawal can cause a variety of health issues, ranging from the inconvenient (headaches, mild diarrhea) to the severe (seizures, hallucinations, electrolyte imbalances that can affect your heart) to life-threatening.
Kelsey Rower, assistant director of nursing at Diamond Recovery Group, told me that recovery patients sometimes have more severe withdrawal symptoms than they expect because “they aren’t truthful about the amount they drink, or they may not realize themselves.” She recommends talking to a professional if you’re not sure whether going dry is going to be safe for you. A doctor or a recovery specialist can help, or consider calling something like the SAMHSA hotline.
Make sure to pay attention to your mental health
As long as your body is ready for it, cutting back on alcohol has well-understood health benefits. Your liver begins to repair damage, you sleep better, and you may even notice benefits to your gut health, immune system, and other bodily functions.
But the mental health benefits don’t always follow. If you just quit drinking without changing anything else about your life, you may find that you socialize less, or that you’re missing a coping strategy that you normally use to deal with stress. Rower says she’s seen TikToks where people decide a few days in that Dry January is too hard to be worth doing.
