19 tips to survive your first sober holiday

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I originally wrote this post, FKA 6 Tips to Survive Thanksgiving Sober in 2014, on a MegaBus traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The bus broke down for a few hours, long enough for us to order pizza on the side of the highway, and I made it into LA around midnight. I stayed up until three a.m. writing because I wanted every sober person waking up that morning to have this very important listicle.

2014, somewhere between LA and San Francisco

Since then, I’ve updated this article a few times, and it sits on a few different websites in different iterations. I thought I’d publish it here, updated a bit but also please note, this was originally written 8 years ago today. I added in links to some other things I’ve written and other people have written over the years about the holidays and recovery at the bottom. For those not “in recovery” I want to stress that most everything written for people who count themselves in recovery translates for those who do not. I wish I’d learned what I did after I quit drinking long before I did.

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19 Tips To Survive a Family Holiday Sober

This was originally written for Thanksgiving, but this truly can be repurposed for almost any event.

1. Decide whether you “have to” participate

The first thing to always and forever remember is you don’t have to go! You don’t have to host, you don’t have to travel, you don’t even have to get out of bed. If you’d just given birth, if you’d just had a cardiac event, if you’d just separated from your partner, these would be reasons you might not overextend yourself during the holidays. Same thing applies with sobriety. If it’s going to threaten your recovery, don’t do it.

2. Go into it knowing you are not going to drink

Drinking doesn't begin with drinking. As all actions do, it begins with a thought. A seed is planted in our mind, and our bodies carry out the action. If you're on the fence as you go in to the holiday about whether or not you are going to drink, you are planting the seed that you might, and therefore, setting yourself up for some major cognitive dissonance which then sets you up for having to rely on your willpower (in an already emotionally taxing state). “The strength to do comes from your undivided decision.” So start there. Make up your mind now by eliminating the option of drinking altogether and tell yourself you are not going to drink on this day, no matter what.

3. Envision yourself not drinking and remember “If you’ve been there in the mind, you’ll go there in the body.”

This one comes from the book The Secret (sorry). In it, Dr. Denis Waitley describes how he used Visual Motor Rehearsal to train Olympic athletes. He had them perform

their events in their mind, and visualizing their events fired the same muscles as did the actual physical performance. When it comes to not drinking during a stressful holiday or event, we can use the same practice. Take five minutes the day of the event, or the day before, and visualize yourself making it through without drinking. See yourself getting ready and doing a breath exercise, see yourself getting in your car and showing up, see yourself walking in and practice what you’ll say when someone offers you wine (“No thanks,” “No thanks I’m not drinking today,” “I really want a seltzer right now,” etc). If you’re at home cooking with your family or even by yourself, do the appropriate visualization going through the events. See yourself making it through cooking, eating, a game, a movie, or whatever events you usually partake in during the holiday that generally include alcohol, and see yourself doing it without imbibing. Watch yourself leave fully sober, get home, go to bed, even see yourself waking up the next day. Plan the whole thing in your mind, rehearse it, and when the time comes for the actual event, you’ll be prepared for it. You’ve done this before in your mind, and that is in some ways just as powerful as actually doing it.

4. Get excited about it!

Once you’ve made up your mind and done your visualization, get Very Excited about being sober for this holiday! Better yet, start visualizing yourself sober and drinking your NABOC (Non-Alcoholic Beverage of Choice) as everyone else becomes inebriated, and feel the sense of pride in your restraint or in the different choices you’re making for yourself. Imagine the extra slices of pie you can consume or whatever the hell it is you skimp on (I know this invokes diet culture and the idea that we have to “earn” our food but as someone who traded food calories for alcohol calories for years, this is real). Imagine how much better you’ll feel the next day! Imagine remembering the whole night, what it will feel like to not be hungover or sick with the long weekend ahead of you, and returning to work on Monday refreshed. Whatever benefits your seeking from this change—be it more self-respect, better sleep, wanting to get out of bed in the morning, wanting to live fully, wanting to live at all, more money more energy more love, more memory, etc.—get fully excited about reaping them and focus on that. Removing alcohol has like five drawbacks and a thousand advantages—focus on that.

5. Think of it as veganism but with alcohol

I found it so helpful to think of my choice to not drink, especially around the holidays, similar to my choice for years to not eat turkey. That it wasn’t something I had to do, or something sad or some kind of punishment for all my bad deeds, but that it was a really powerful choice I was making for myself that I had some hubris around because of my perceived moral high ground (I do not recommend this! but still worth mentioning, if it helps you, you’re allowed to feel superior for a minute?). I knew when my cattle ranching uncle paid too much attention to my Tofurky that it was about him, and I knew that when anyone said weird stuff about my sobriety, that was about them too. It’s of course not the same thing, but thinking about not drinking alcohol the same way you might think about not eating meat can normalize it, help you think of it as a powerful and proud choice, and expose the extra stuff built into this particular choice because of how fucked up our ideas about alcohol are and how scared everyone is of being addicted to it.

A friend of mine, a lifelong vegan, told me once that sometimes he has bad meals as a result of his decision to abstain from meat eating. Sometimes they only have lettuce, he said, but that doesn’t change his decision or make him wobble, it only strengthens it. A reminder to soften your expectations of early holidays without booze: sometimes you’ll have a bad meal, a bad experience. But let that solidify your decision, not weaken it.

6. Get your toolbox ready

Creating a sobriety toolbox is a really helpful practice that keeps us prepared; in moments when we’re really pressed (with anger, sadness, craving, discomfort), having five to ten practices or items (tools) at the ready can help us manage our energy. Come up with a list of five things that help you manage stress, keep you happy, and in your peace, and make sure to have them handy. None of these things below are going to act in the same way a glass of wine will so don’t expect that; the point is to learn to reach for different, healthy coping mechanisms when we’re in distress, each of which have some different sensory interaction, so that we learn to associate different smells, tastes, sounds and feelings with stress relief. Think of behaviorism or operant conditioning: you'll have the same cues that make you want to drink, but you switch out the means to complete the cycle. Again, get these items written down in a short list, whatever your five or ten things are, and when you’re in a state where you’d usually use alcohol, reach for what’s on that list.

Lavender oil or peppermint oil. When I feel overwhelmed or on edge or disconnected or even depressed, I place a drop on my hands, rub my palms together, cup my nose, and inhale deeply a few times. Instant mood change. The smell of lavender for me is essentially the smell of calm.

4-7-8 breathing. This is a fast, effective way to ground yourself and calm yourself. There’s a video tutorial linked, and the basic instructions are inhale through your nose for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, exhale through your mouth for eight seconds. You can do this a few times or for a few minutes.

10 deep belly breaths. First, you need to learn proper breathing if you don’t know it. Here’s a great, simple tutorial that will help you learn to direct your breath to your belly and up through your lungs, making full use of your lung capacity and therefore bringing the parasympathetic nervous system online. (I can’t recommend enough it’s worth learning how to properly breathe.) Anytime you feel overwhelmed or in craving or like you might say something you’ll one day regret, take ten long deep breaths (try five in, hold for one, six or seven out, through the nose).

Backpack meditation. I used a lot of quick, three-minute meditations in early sobriety. This one can be done in a bathroom stall, and helps with over-stimulation and anxiety.

Soothing Tea. I carry kava kava tea and a bedtime mix with me.

Playlist or specific songs. Throughout early sobriety it was Players Holiday for me. Find a song or a playlist that reminds you of your intention, something that can snap you into a different vibe.

Hot lemon water. This is my go to nourishing drink to center myself.

People. I have a list of people I can call for support. If you know you’re going into a situation that will test you, let a friend or two know you’ll need support and ask if you can call them ahead of time.

7. Be prepared for family shit and other people shit

Here’s four practices to deal with other people’s shit.

1. Remember what anyone says to you or how they act towards you is almost never about you. It's about them and their perception of the world, their judgments, their story. Your reaction to them, however, is about you. Keep focus on that. It's the only thing you have control over (that and you can just never be around these people but that’s a more extreme option).

2. Think of every relationship as an assignment. Most of this is excerpted from my book, but this specific practice—of thinking as the people who get under my skin the most as my spiritual teachers—has been one of the most freeing. (page 264, Quit Like a Woman)

   “Every person you meet—be it for a minute or a lifetime—is placed there by design, part of the universal plan to give you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, in order to grow into your potential; to show you the parts of yourself that you have forgotten to see or have refused to see; to build you into the most beautiful, kind, forgiving, loving version of yourself, one encounter at a time.

   We call the people who love us—those who build us up and affirm us, those who make us feel safe and seen and special and important—our people. And we call those who nail us and bring out our worst—our enemies. Pema Chödrön defines a good spiritual teacher as someone who can see through us straight to all the places we so desperately try to hide from the world. She says we seek out these teachers in order to work with people who will challenge us to fulfill our highest potential. In this way, Pema says, our enemies—or those difficult people we encounter—are exactly like our spiritual teachers. They bust us in the places where we need to be busted, so that we may grow in the places where we need to grow.

   The people who see through me or don’t like me, and the people I judge as idiots or monsters, now represent delicious opportunities to file away another piece of me that holds me back from my potential. If my anger is roused, I examine that anger. If my intolerance is inflamed, I dig deep within for compassion. If I feel unworthy or disregarded or invisible in someone’s presence, I claim my inherent worth. If I am made to feel like a fraud, I discover the parts of me that aren’t true. If I find myself judging people, I look inward to find out what judgments I hold against myself. And if I’m judged as something I’m not, I practice not giving a shit about what other people think, returning to only what I think, which is all that matters anyway. This doesn’t mean I love this process; anytime I encounter someone who challenges me in this way I typically hate the experience. But it does mean on some very basic level that I’m grateful for the difficulty, for the challenge, because my deepest lessons and growth haven’t come from the easiest situations and relationships, they’ve come from the hardest ones.

   When you start to think of it this way—as every person existing for the sole purpose of furthering your growth—it no longer feels like the world is out to get you, but rather that it’s trying its best to help you realize your full potential.

3. Be a witness. After one particularly trying holiday in early sobriety where I completely lost my shit and fought with my family, I sat in my therapist's office completely wrecked, exhausted, defeated, sobbing. Asking when does it get easier? I had worked so hard, I had come so far. How could it still be this messy and further, how could I have regressed so much and gotten triggered so easily? She looked at me, huge beaming smile, and said "congratulations. You just clearly witnessed not only everyone else's behavior, but your own. What a gift. Now let's do something with it." Recovery is typically coupled with increasing awareness, and that awareness, while it can make real clear what’s not working, also allows us to see things as they are, and make different choices. If you act in a way that makes you feel really terrible, or in a way that feels like a departure from from how you want to act or meant to act, it’s helpful to remember that the ability to see it and your part in it (and other’s parts in it) is actually healthy. While things may be raw for you, and while your family dynamics might not be caught up with the changes you have made, give yourself a break on being perfect. Just take care to witness and observe, and then you can adjust the next time around based on what you learned.

4. Set major boundaries. You don't have to engage in every conversation or relationship; you have to first and foremost take care of yourself and your path. Your oxygen mask on first especially in early sobriety. When a conversation starts going down a path you don't want to, remember you have the power to disengage, excuse yourself, change the subject, or even say "I'm not going to have that conversation." When a relationship is doing more harm than good, take a break from it. Your wellbeing, your health, and your sobriety are your responsibility, and before you can be anything to anyone else, you have to create the space and the choice for you. Some incredible books on boundaries exist now (they didn’t when I got sober). I recommend both Set Boundaries, Find Peace and The Book of Boundaries, stellar and different books on setting and maintaining boundaries.

8. Treat yourself after!

To start: Extreme self-care is beyond important, especially in early sobriety and especially during the holiday season where our eating habits change, we might be traveling, out of our routine, and possibly engaging in stressful relationships. Stay hydrated, take baths, do some breath work, keep your meditation practice, set aside time to journal, read nourishing texts, eat good foods, relax. But giving yourself something to look forward to after it’s done is also a really good practice. Reinforce the good you are doing by giving yourself a distinct and tangible reward after the holiday. Book a massage for the weekend, buy a new tube of lipstick, take yourself to a movie, set time aside to read a book you’ve been wanting to, or allow yourself a few hours in your pjs watching shitty TV. Decide what it is now, and decide when you'll do it, and put it in your calendar as something to look forward to after.

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Articles + media to support recovery through the holidays

A round-up of some other helpful articles. If you have a favorite resource—book, article, podcast, practice—for managing the holidays without drugs and alcohol, please add it to the comments.

How to not regress into your 17 year old self at Christmas (Recovering, formerly Hip Sobriety)

The Ultimate Guide To Get Through Your Holidays Sober (The Temper)

17 Tips For a Sober Thanksgiving (The Temper)

How to cope if you are spending this holiday season alone (The Temper)

The Holidays (HOME podcast)

8 Questions To Ask Before Going to a Holiday Party (Everyday Health)

The holidays can be insufferable

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