A lot of us say stopping alcohol is important, then try to fit it around everything else. We wait for work to calm down, the social events to finish or life to become less stressful.
But there will always be another deadline, dinner, holiday or difficult week. So if sobriety only happens when nothing gets in the way, it may never get a proper chance.
Putting sobriety first doesn't mean doing nothing else
It doesn't mean walking away from work, refusing every invitation or making sobriety the only thing we talk about. It means we stop making decisions that make it easier to keep drinking and harder to stop.
We don't take the late meeting and then use the pressure as a reason to drink. We don't keep alcohol at home in case we have a hard day. We don't agree to something that puts us straight back into the same routine without thinking it through.
Alcohol may already be coming first
This can be hard to admit because from the outside, we may look responsible in every other part of life.
But the evening is arranged around drinking. Dinner happens when it suits the first drink. Plans are avoided if they interfere with it. Work gets pushed through because alcohol is waiting at the end. So alcohol may already be coming first. It just doesn't appear in the calendar under its own name.
A clear head makes the other decisions easier
When alcohol isn't changing our sleep, mood and judgement every day, we can see the rest of life more clearly.
We may realise a work problem needs action. We might see that we're exhausted, that a relationship needs attention or that we're spending our evenings in a way we don't even enjoy. Sobriety won't solve those things for us. But drinking makes nearly all of them harder to solve.
We don't need to earn it
High performers are used to treating rest, food and personal time as things that come after the work is done.
We can treat sobriety the same way: something we'll focus on once we've met every other demand. The thing is, we don't need to earn the right to stop doing something that is hurting us.
Putting sobriety first may simply mean asking one question before we commit to something: will this pull us back towards the same drinking pattern?
What putting sobriety first might look like
Sometimes it will be leaving an event early. Other times, it will be eating before we get home, ending work when we said we would or not having alcohol in the house.
These choices may look small. Together, they stop us building the day around the moment we usually drink.
We aren't putting life on hold for sobriety. We're stopping alcohol from deciding how we spend so much of it.
— Brent