How to quit anything: a field guide
Here's a resource guide for where to start and how to keep going, with 100s of recommendations, resources, ideas, tips, and more
This email is a very large resource guide for folks looking to change their relationship with a substance or behavior, whether you are addicted or simply unable to stop something; whether your goal is harm reduction, moderation, or abstinence; whether or not you’re part of an existing program; and whether or not you identify as being in recovery. It can also be used by anyone in a process of healing or transition looking to build structure or find direction.
This is coming to you a few days later than anticipated, but probably at the exact right time, since all it takes is about three days to completely lose your intention for what you 100% planned to do January 1st.
In recent years, it’s gotten popular to reject the January 1 quit date. And rightly so: the days are at their shortest, we are not supposed to be stretching and growing and changing, we’re supposed to be resting and wintering.
But we are creatures of habit conditioned to see January 1st as a fresh start and a promise, and lots of people have used it as a jumping off place to change something big—I know many, many folks with a January 1st sobriety date.
People make changes every day of the year; none is better than the other, more doomed or less doomed to succeed. What makes the difference is whether you keep trying. This is a long game, because it’s not just about quitting something, but addressing the conditions driving you to use it. So start whenever, honestly.
The trick is to just keep going once you do. 100% of the people I know that stopped drinking or using a drug or broke out of a toxic relationship pattern or overcame an eating disorder did so by failing and trying again.
Below you’ll find a comprehensive resource guide for how to quit something. It’s a compilation of my work over the past many years including almost every article I’ve written on addiction, along with resources, info, and recommendations, meant to help anyone looking for where to start, how to keep going, or how to come back to it.
Your goal can be quitting/abstinence or reducing harm/reducing use. You also don’t have to have a goal at all or know what you want yet. The point is to assist you stop doing something you can’t stop doing (yet), and also build a more stable, grounded, and regulated base to operate from.
Please add any additional resources, recommendations, tips, and the like in the comments.
A RESOURCE GUIDE FOR HOW TO QUIT (ALMOST) ANYTHING
A collection of very many things to help you overcome what you think you can’t. (Open to comments or feedback on inaccuracies or disparities or counterpoints or expansions and especially YOUR resources and favorite things—please comment.)
0. Before we start, what do I mean by quit anything? Drinking? An addiction? A bad relationship? 🍷📱🚬🧑🏻💻👩❤️💋👨💊🌲🛍️🤑??
You’ll find this is slightly geared toward folks trying to change their relationship with alcohol, but it’s applicable to anyone healing from trauma and struggling with addictions or habits they can’t break.
Don’t get caught up on the alcohol component. If you’re doing something that helps you in the short term but hurts you in the long term that you can’t stop casually or easily, or you’re in a healing season from trauma or relational trauma, you’re in the right place.
1. Where to start and what to do
The question I’ve gotten the most over the years, mostly from folks looking to quit drinking, is where to start and what to do.
Years ago, a designer I used to work with named Sarah Lidgus, along with her team, researched the process individuals go through when overcoming an addiction with alcohol, and identified six distinct steps: Ether (you don’t know you have a problem); Inkling (you start to consider you have a problem); Awareness (you know you have a problem, you have yet to do anything about it); Reckoning (you confront the problem); Rebuilding (you enter healing); and Outpouring (you heal enough to help others).
In other words, we don’t just go from addicted to sober, or from using something to being abstinent from it. The process is long and our awareness grows slowly. And we can stay in these buckets for any period of time—you could go your whole life knowing you need to change something you don’t end up changing, stuck in Awareness.
To come back to the question “Where do I start and what do I do?,” the answer is “You start anywhere, and you just keep going.” In most cases, it really doesn’t matter: as long as you keep pulling the thread and moving toward healing, you’re on the right track. Awareness comes in layers; often people start with one thing and that opens the door to the next thing.
Here are six suggestions of where to start/what to do:
Read a book. Here’s a list of 28 recovery related books.
Put yourself in the way of healing. This could mean starting a meditation practice, going to a new workout class, starting therapy, hanging out more with nourishing people, taking more baths—anything that feels healing, just do more of it. The idea is to add before you subtract, build a steady base, and create different coping mechanisms.
Find other people. You can’t do this alone; building safe relationships and attuning to safe people is core to healing. You can do this with a professional (therapist, pastor, yoga teacher), a support group like AA, paid support groups like The Luckiest Club, or that woman you keep running to in your new meditation class. The first person I talked to was my friend’s dad because he was in AA and the only sober person I knew. You don’t have to have a ton of people, and starting with one is perfect; but you do need to connect with safe people as part of your process.
Start working with your nervous system. A book with lots of tips and practices is 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction. Other things you can do to regulate: get enough sleep, stay hydrated, lower caffeine intake, take cold showers, do breathing exercises, try vooing and self-attunement practices (see video below), take hot baths, go on walks, hang out with safe people, snuggle with an animal.
Build a toolbox. Gather ten different coping mechanisms and write them down on a list that you keep within reach (see this article for suggestions and detailed instructions). You don’t want to be overwhelmed by a craving or emotion and trying to think of what to use to bring yourself back.
🚨Get help. Not everyone will need these interventions, but if you feel like this is beyond you—like you’re in trouble or need help beyond yourself—reach out for it because it’s there all around you. Help could be going to AA, hiring a therapist, talking to your doctor, outpatient therapy or outpatient treatment, rehab or medical detox, telehealth support (like Workit, Ria), an addiction psychiatrist. Help could be calling a hotline, or reaching out to something like the Wildflower Alliance for peer support. Help is just literally asking anyone for help, and the best part is people typically love to help.
2. A brief explainer on how to actually heal from addiction
Addictions are a secondary phenomenon—something we do as a response to underlying issues, sickness, oppression, and conditioning—that ends up becoming its own issue. To heal an addiction, you have to work with the root (what caused and keeps causing you to reach for whatever you’re reaching for) and the addictive process itself.
Both the root and the addiction touch everything—your relationships, structures, purpose, sex-life, diet, quality of life, biology, thoughts, all of it—and because they touch everything, you need an approach that can include everything. Which is impossible.
So we don’t try and do everything. We start with a few things and let that lead us to where we’re going next. I started by reading a book on alcohol. Then I found a therapist. Then affirmations and meditation and Kundalini and the science of addiction. Eventually I stopped drinking. It was not until 6 or 7 years later that I really started to work on my trauma.
Some people just walk into an AA meeting. Others into therapy. Some into rehab. Some into a library. And then it unfolds.
We find our way, stitching together what works, cobbled from resources we have to seek out, that over time weaves into something comprehensive and enduring.
This is a long resource for the sake of being comprehensive, not to give you a hundred to-dos. Choose a few things; be scrappy; throw things at it and see what sticks; don’t worry about missing this part or that part, and trust you’ll find what you need at the right time; trust the evolution of your process. You already got here reading this. You can trust you’re going to keep carrying yourself. (You can read about this in depth in my book, Quit Like a Woman.)
3. Take this free ⚡️ 8-day email course ⚡️ I made for you
8 Days to Subtle Change is an 8-day email course I made for paid members of this newsletter (if you’re already paid you should have received an email with a link; free subscribers, you need to upgrade to access; link is in the welcome email).
It’s a great place to start if you’re in the process of making any change, especially if you’re working with an addiction or gray-area habit. A super easy email course where each day you’re given an affirmation to repeat, an essay to read, and practices to do throughout your day.
If you don’t know where to start, this might be it.
You can also buy this 30-day audio program I made for Audible, 30 Days To a New Relationship with Alcohol, made for drinking but helpful to anyone making a change.
5. Look into trauma-informed outpatient therapy or trauma-informed programs for addictions
A few good ones:
Center for Motivation and Change (inpatient; outpatient; outpatient therapy; here’s my interview with the founder to understand their philosophy and approach)
Felt Sense Polyvagal Method (trauma-informed program for trauma and addictions)
Internal Family Systems (IFS) for Addictions (outpatient therapy; trauma-informed program for addictive behaviors)
Somatic Experiencing (trauma-informed therapy; this has saved my life)
If you know of a reputable, trauma-informed program you have direct experience with, please add in the comments.
6. Read one of these 28 recovery books 📚
A book is how I stopped drinking. A book is how I’m alive! Don’t underestimate what a book can do.
7. Read this (very old and slightly cute but still relevant) listicle I made in 2014 to help people do an “alcohol cleanse” (for alcohol but can be applied widely)
In 2014, before we were talking about alcohol the way we do now, CBS sponsored a 14-day no alcohol challenge, which was monumental. I wrote this guide to go along with it that probably just my mom read. It still holds up, plus there are great toolbox suggestions in here.
8. Start a 40-day practice of some sort
Commit to 40 days of meditation (use glo.com, Insight Timer, or Calm), or 3 minutes of breathing, or ten minutes of journaling, or 1 mile of walking, or a short yoga class every day, or art even. The point is to make a new habit and to challenge yourself to show up every day to something. It’s surprising what it can do for you. Set a low bar! If you’ve never meditated before, start with five or even three minutes. Three minutes a day for forty days is better than 30 minutes a day 3 or 4 times. If you like the structure of a program, try The Artists Way; May Cause Miracles; Make Miracles in 40 Days; The Alcohol Experiment; A Course in Miracles; 30 Days to a New Relationship with Alcohol (mine).
9. Listen 🎧 to a podcast—here’s some of my favorite recovery ones
I’m out of date on this one and know there are so many now (and plenty of good ones I know of and didn’t mention). Share your favorite in the comments.
10. Find (and interview) a therapist 🔎
Here’s a worksheet on how to find the right therapist (includes a few tips on finding low cost options) and a worksheet on how to interview them. It’s older and recently updated, and quite comprehensive, but does not include newer things like psychedelic therapy and integration (here’s a resource for that) or CPTSD.
11. Join a support group
Join a mutual aid or support group like AA or Recovery Dharma, or any 12-step group, or groups like this online one for ADHD and addiction education and support, or a paid support group like The Luckiest Club. Add your recommendation below.
12. Consider trying medication (MAT, Medication Assisted Treatment) (alcohol, other addictions)
Medication is one of the more underutilized tools for recovery from certain addictions, especially drinking. Here’s an article on naltrexone; an article on how GLP-1’s change drinking and spending behaviors; another on GLP-1’s and addiction; “Why a promising treatment for alcohol abuse is barely used”; Katie Herzog wrote a book about her success with MAT called Drink Your Way Sober; this article: “Weightloss Drugs Saved Me From Alcoholism”. It’s worth looking into and see if it’s right for you.
13. Work with a sobriety coach (alcohol) or look for online sobriety programs and organizations
I recommend Whitney Combs and Andrea Shaw because they were trained in the program I created and I worked with them professionally and directly know how good they are at their jobs. Otherwise, I’m a little out of the loop on these options now, but there are very many of them out there, just Google “Sobriety coach” (or look on Instagram TikTok, IDK, I am old now).
You can also look at Annie Grace’s program, This Naked Mind; Jolene Park‘s coaching program and directory of her certified coaches; The Luckiest Club’s meetings and courses; She Recovers events and retreats and coach directory; there’s so many programs, events, coaches, retreats now for folks looking to make a change with booze, I’m sure I’m missing some—please add your recommendations if you’ve got them.
The Teetotal Initiative is amazing, a free organization that organizes events, outings, and more for folks in recovery (started by a former Hip Sobriety participant!)
14. Consider the impact of hormones, CPTSD, and neurodivergence
Hormones, trauma, relational trauma/CPTSD, and neurodivergence all have significant impacts on addictions and compulsions.
I’ve been exploring the intersection/web of CPTSD, the fawn response/addiction feedback loop, neurodivergence, hormones, and addictions in a series called “After Quit Like a Woman.” You can click that link to find out more. So far I’ve published 6 pieces in the series; more are coming in early 2026.
If this is relevant to you (or partially relevant) here's a booklist I put together. Learning about how these things impact me and my recovery has been massive.
15. There are so many resources now, TikTok and Instagram accounts and Substack Newsletters and Reddit threads and social clubs all dedicated to the topics of harm reduction, quitting, recovery, and/or sobriety.
I am out of the loop on these! But there are so many folks now putting together aspirational and educational content and support groups and all kinds of stuff that we didn’t have back in the dark ages before internet sobriety culture.
For newsletters, Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM of the Perfect Hunger Substack has put together a list of almost 200 sobriety newsletters called SoberStack, you can find it here. I personally really love Carl Erik Fisher’s work and recommend his newsletter Rat Park.
The remainder is an aggregate of articles I’ve written, podcasts I’ve recorded, resource guides I’ve put together, etc.
16. Links to 42 articles and resource guides I’ve written (or podcasts I’ve recorded) on recovery, quitting, sobriety, addiction that are here in this newsletter
17. Listen to the 119 episodes of the HOME podcast (hosted with Laura McKowen)
From 2015 to 2018, I recorded 119 podcasts with my friend Laura McKowen—a woman who was also in recovery and in AA when we first met, and therefore an alien to me—about our experiences of getting sober and into recovery in our mid-thirties, and all the many tangential subjects. These are old, often cringe-inducing, potentially out of date episodes that might not have aged well, and also I recently read the comments for the first time and apparently lots of people hated me, and I am now thinking maybe leave this bullet out. But it’s also a record of two people getting sober and all they went through, and lots of conversations with other people about that very thing, and it’s helped lots of people, and I would not be here with all I know now without being there with all I knew then.
18. Or listen to the 20 episodes of the Quitted podcast, on quitting, I did with Emily McDowell
In closing: there’s a lot you can do. So much. Too much! So just do anything, really. Do anything; start somewhere; you’ve got this. ⚡️
If I missed anything, please add it in the comments!
Upgraded but no emailed course link? 🙏
Thank you for this. Today is, hopefully, my last Day One. I needed this today ❤️