How to Have Fun Without Alcohol





One of my fears about getting sober was that life wouldn’t be any fun without alcohol. When I first quit drinking, I was bored out of my mind. I sat around my apartment for hours doing nothing but thinking about how badly I wanted a drink. I didn’t even have the attention span to sit around and watch TV. Yet now, over five and a half years later, I’m still sober, and I’ve built a life packed with more fun than I ever had as a drunk. So, how did I do it? How do you escape the boredom and learn to have fun sober?For me, it started with a key shift in expectations: Instead of looking for ways to enjoy my old interests without booze, I started looking for new interests altogether. To give a simple, concrete example: I often hear newly sober people say that they like to go out to bars every night and that they’d like advice on how to keep having fun at bars without drinking alcohol. It might be possible to keep having fun at bars without alcohol, but it sure would be a lot harder. To add to that, it would also create a lot of unnecessary temptation. Instead, why not come up with a new nighttime activity? You could take up Dungeons and Dragons, join a sober bowling team, or enroll in night classes. When you’re sober, these are going to be more fun than a bar, and they’ll help keep you away from the craving-inducing sight of alcohol. I have to admit that my life as a drunk wasn’t so fun in the first place, so let me share another example for those of you who don’t have such active night lives: I used to love surfing Netflix for hours on end every night. My basic, daily routine was to get home from work, start drinking beer, and watch Netflix until I was tired enough to go to sleep. It wasn’t the most exciting life, but in my drunkenness, it was good enough. Binge-watching TV was fun for me. After I sobered up, I suddenly realized that hours of Netflix just couldn’t hold my interest. It wasn’t fun at all anymore, it just felt like a…