Speaking of Psychology: Dry January: Why more people are taking a break from alcohol, with Richard de Visser, PhD

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called to add cancer warnings to alcohol labels. For many people, Dry January offers a chance try out a low- or no-alcohol life. Health psychologist Richard de Visser, PhD, talks about what’s driving public interest in Dry January and other “sober curious” trends; how temporarily giving up drinking can affect your mental and physical health; and how to succeed if you’d like to give Dry January a try.

Richard de Visser, PhD, is a professor of health psychology at Bright and Sussex Medical School. He has been working in the fields of health psychology and public health for 25 years. His research interests span a broad range of topics in health psychology, including sexuality and relationships; gender and health; alcohol use; use of health services; and cross-cultural analyses. He is lead or coauthor on over 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Kim Mills: It’s January, and for some people that means the start of a month with no alcohol. Dry January, which began in the U.K. in 2013, has become increasingly popular in recent years. The trend may reflect a broader surge of interest in living a low- or no-alcohol life. Sales of non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits increased more than 40% between 2021 and 2023. And fancy mocktails and non-alcoholic beers are an increasingly common site on bar and restaurant menus in the U.S.

So what’s driving this cultural moment? Why are so many people interested in cutting back their alcohol use or giving it up entirely? And what are the effects on people’s physical and mental health? Does taking part in Dry January tend to change people’s drinking habits for the long term or is it just a temporary change? And if you’d like to give Dry January a try, what advice do psychologists have to help you succeed?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Richard de Visser, a professor of health psychology at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the U.K. His research interests span a range of topics in health psychology, including sexuality and relationships, gender and health, and alcohol use. Since 2013, he’s been working with the group Alcohol Change UK, which originated the Dry January campaign, to study the effects of taking a voluntary temporary break from alcohol. He’s the author of more than 130 scientific papers and has been interviewed by media outlets including the BBC, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. 

Dr. de Visser, thank you for joining me today.

Richard de Visser, PhD: Thanks very much for having me on.

Mills: Can you start by telling us about the history of Dry January? Many people here in the U.S. have heard of it and maybe even participated in it, but they don’t know where it all started.

de Visser: So in the U.K., Dry January ran for the first time in 2013 and it was, as you mentioned in the introduction, it was run by Alcohol Change UK, which is a charity or a small NGO, that one of its missions is to change the conversation about alcohol. So they’re not an abstinence based organization. What they wanted to do was to think of a way in which they could help people to stop, pause, think about why, how and when they drink, and maybe give them some support that if they wanted to take a short break from drinking, they could do that. So they set up this campaign and it’s changed quite a lot over the last 12 years, in that originally there was a website where people could sign up and they would get some supportive emails and things like that. And over the years it’s changed so that now there are various iterations and improvements at the Try Dry app, which can be downloaded for mobile or cell phone use.

The content of that has changed, so it gives people supportive messages. It links into the website, so it allows people to chase up recipes and things like that. It allows people also to get the kind of messages that motivate them and it reflects, as you mentioned, it reflects a broader kind of change. So there’s actually a Dry July, which runs in New Zealand and Australia, has been running for slightly longer. So same idea, but you do it in the southern winter so it makes more sense. And there’s other campaigns. There’s a similar campaign in the Netherlands called IkPas. In two French speaking locations they seem to have got it even better by making it a February challenge. So the Tournée Minérale in Belgium and the Février Sans Alcool, which is run in parts of Canada, both run for 28 days in February. So that’s an even easier challenge than the other one. But the idea about the campaign is to get people in however that might work and for whatever reasons and to try to support people to take a dry month if they can, and also maybe to see if it does have a longer term effect on their drinking.

Mills: So how many people signed up to participate back in 2013 and how many are doing it now? Do we have any idea?

de Visser: Yeah, so these are the U.K. figures—there were about 5,000 people in 2013. It steadily increased after the first couple of years. It got a bit of publicity and a bit of support from a Public Health England, which was a government public health body. And then the numbers did increase and then they realized that it had a life of its own. So they really stepped back and let things run. And now there’s around about 150,000 people in the U.K. sign up every year and lots of people will join in from other locations.

That’s one of the great things about where everything’s available online now is that people can join from all over the place. But what we also know from parallel research is that general population studies show that around about 10 times as many people in the U.K. are trying to have a dry month, maybe they’re doing it under their own steam or maybe it’s something that they just do anyway in January.

So what we kind of know now is that if you think of the adult population of the U.K., maybe around about 50 million people, maybe about 70% of those are drinkers and we’ve got maybe 1.5 million people trying to have a Dry January. So it’s had quite an impact. And it’s interesting because over the years when we first did this and we did some interviews with participants and people would say—I told my friends, and they say, oh, Dry January, what’s that? And they said the whole thing would turn into some kind of discussion around what’s Dry January, why are you doing it? What can I do to try to make you fall off the wagon before the end of the month? It was seen as a bit of a challenge. And these days people come along and they say, I’m doing Dry January, and someone says—oh you too, whatever, tell me something new that I haven’t heard about before.

It’s really established itself in the kind of social media calendar, I guess. And that’s one of the things about doing it in January, it’s a time when people might say, I’m going to try to drink less, start the year with good intentions. This is a way of helping people to do that. So instead of people just saying, I’m going to exercise more and then just leave them to it, this is saying, I’m going to try not to drink, well, you can sign up, you can get some support, you can get some tailored support for you. There’s also the sense of doing it as part of a group, which is also really important. So instead of it’s “you versus alcohol in the world,” it’s you with a whole lot of other people who are also trying to give it up. And there’s lots of mutual support. So it seems to be really beneficial for the success of individuals, but also for the success of the campaign.

Mills: In the U.K., you’ve got quite an ingrained pub culture. Do you get pushback from that part of the populace?

de Visser: I think less so now than originally. And part of it is because I think of what you mentioned in the intro about the broader availability of non-alcoholic products and the fact that a lot of the large alcohol and spirit producers have recognized that and they’re now marketing to the different markets. So they realize that their market includes not only drinkers, but it includes non-drinkers and temporary abstainers.

In the first few years, there was a lot of resistance from a lot of the pubs. They were saying—and restaurants generally as well—they were saying, well, January’s already really difficult. People aren’t going out so much. They’ve spent all their money over Christmas. It’s a lean time of the year and you’re going to make it harder for us. And I think also for a lot of drinkers it was difficult because they maybe didn’t have the satisfying alternatives to alcohol. So people might think, well, if I go out somewhere and I’m going to be charged the same amount for a soft drink I might be for alcohol and maybe everyone else is drinking, it’s not going to make a difference maybe. But now people go out and they think, well actually there’s a good no alcohol beer, or I can get that nice cocktail, or I’ve learned from my friends or from the Dry January community what drink I can make at home that kind of scratches the itch for a mojito. So yeah.

Mills: So you mentioned a moment ago motivation. What motivates people to try this? What are the reasons that people give for joining in?

de Visser: Yeah, there are a lot of motives that people highlight. For a lot of people, they just want to have a reset. In some ways they think maybe December’s been a bit too moist and they think that, or it’s being steeped in alcohol, and they think maybe it’s a good time to have a break. So it might be a lot of times people say they just want to have a break. They may use terms like detox for example. They realize that having a bit of time without alcohol might be good for their physiology.

Sometimes people think, actually I drink a lot and I drink in these different situations, maybe I just want to learn how to say no to a drink or how to say no to the temptation in those kind of situations. Sometimes people do it because they want to raise money. So some of these challenges you can do it as a sponsored kind of event and some of them run largely, that’s the motivation.

And people might do it for the kind of associated health reasons. So they might do it to lose weight for example. And now a lot of people do it because of evidence of the other benefits, the psychological benefits that we’ve found from some of the research as well. So we’ve found that people who do take part do report things like better sleep. They feel that they’ve got better concentration because they’re linked into better sleep. A lot of them say they save money, many of them lose weight as well. So these are majority experiences that people who take part—around about half say they lose weight, around about 60% or so say that they save money, and it’s up into the 70% of people who say that they sleep better or have better concentration. And what’s good is having that evidence from sound research is that’s then used to feed back to encourage people to take part, saying if you take part, it might feel like you’re giving up something, but these are the things that you’ll get pretty soon after.

And I may be getting ahead of myself, but that’s one of the things which helps to explain why a lot of people carry on with the reduced alcohol intake afterwards, because they’ve experienced personally and bodily and psychologically some of these benefits which are much more immediate and recognizable then maybe advice from a physician about how your liver’s going to look terrible in 40 years down the line. What we know from psychology and learning and training in lots of areas, if there’s immediate and repeated feedback, it’s much more likely to have an effect than if it’s really delayed towards the end. So people, it’s not to say that people don’t find it difficult to start with, but pretty soon after stopping they start to recognize some of these effects and the things that don’t cost them any money, they cost a bit of effort, but people are sometimes surprised at how much better they feel and that can encourage them to keep on going.

And another point I should say, so going back to the initial question you asked, is around about one in six of the participants that complete the surveys at least say that they’re doing this because they want to completely give up alcohol. So they use this supported month as a way of kickstarting that, of developing the skills of trying to set something in motion which they then want to carry on with. So there’s a real range of motivations.

Mills: And do they report back over time as to whether they have continued to abstain?

de Visser: Yeah, so we’ve done studies, the longest we’ve been able to manage is a six month follow up. So what the typical design of the research that we’ve done has been to get people right at the end of December just before the challenge starts, then to come back to people in the first week of February and then to come back in August. So six months down the track, and there’s a real drop off in participation because people just, they’re not thinking about it anymore. You send them emails and they’re just not interested. But there are a number of people who say that, so we know from the surveys we ask people where they’ve taken part before and we ask them in which years there are a number of people who come back every year and do this. It’s almost like their yearly reset. But there are plenty of people, there’s plenty of anecdotal reports that people that say, well, I started off like this, I did it for a month. I thought, well let’s see if I can make it to the end of February. And then Easter’s coming and they say, well, I normally give up something for Lent, for example, or they don’t, but they think maybe I can give up something for Lent. And suddenly it’s suddenly the idea of abstaining and this challenge is something they can complete is apparent to them. It’s something that wasn’t maybe there before. So they keep going and then it’s the thing then people make it through the summer and they think, okay, I’ll keep on going. And before they know it, a year’s rolled around.

But there’s been less attention that’s been given to that from our side of things because that’s not really a main kind of motivation, it’s not about a full-time abstinence kind campaign. So yeah, there’s less evidence, less hard evidence on the long, long, long-term effects in terms of an abstinence. But we know that a lot of people do start off with that motivation and we know that a lot of people cut back in their drinking so they’re drinking less when it comes to August.

Mills: So you mentioned people reporting that they sleep better for example. Are there other mental and physical health changes that they report after a month of abstaining from alcohol?

de Visser: Yeah, so there’s the sleep that I mentioned, people report having more energy and better concentration and these are things where we tend to use a fairly simple self-report measures. I mean there’s questions about the validity of these measures, but what we’re doing within subjects pre-post measure over time is at least we can assume that unless there’s a systematic variation in people’s reporting, this might be a bit technical, but because we ask people to use the same standard measure and we’re only comparing them against themselves, any change, the extent to which affects a real change is questionable.

But we find—maybe the simplest thing to say is that people say the sleep is better, they feel like their brain is working better because they’re concentrating better, they have more energy. There are those things about weight loss as well. There are other studies, these are studies, not ones that we’ve done but by other people, have done these physiological studies where they will take smaller groups of people and will do blood tests for example and measure different parameters. And so they measure things like after a month without alcohol levels of liver fat and blood cholesterol and blood sugar are reduced as well. So there are noticeable physiological and psychological effects that come from just a month not drinking.

Mills: Is there any kind of a rebound effect for some people where after Dry January is over they get back to drinking with a vengeance in February?

de Visser: There’s some evidence that happens for some people. And I should say, I guess the caveat as well is to say that there’s a message that goes to people when they sign up, and this is one of the things I think is important about signing up and the value of that is if people come in and they’re thinking they’re quite heavy drinkers and they think that this is going to be the way in which they can control their alcohol consumption, they’re given messages that they should actually be looking for something else and ideally supported assistance to withdraw from alcohol. Because what would be not advised by anyone really, for anyone who’s addicted or dependent on alcohol would be to say just try by yourself if you can get yourself off the alcohol. We know that’s not going to be a successful approach.

We find that some people, around about 10% of people, report drinking more after Dry January, and that tends to be, it’s much more likely to be the people who try to make it through the month and don’t make it through. And that is also more likely among people who are the heavier drinkers to start with. So it does—not surprisingly, it’s a more difficult challenge for the heavier drinkers. They’re the ones who are less likely to make it through the month and the people who don’t make it through the month are the ones who are more likely to report some kind of rebound effect.

But it’s still a majority, it’s only about 10% of the sample that does that. About half of the sample goes back to drinking pretty much as they were before, but they also feel more in control of their drinking and say that they’ve got these skills to resist that or they understand their alcohol consumption a bit more. And the other roughly 40% of people drink less at the six-month period. And that’s a combination of drinking on fewer days per week and-or drinking less on the days when they do drink. So they’re either deciding to have more dry days rather than a dry month, or they’re having slightly drier drinking days as well when they’re doing that.

Mills: What about people who just intentionally drink wines or beers with a lower percentage of alcohol, is that participating in what I’ve heard called ‘damp-ish’ January?

de Visser: There’s lots of different ways to think about reducing alcohol consumption. So obviously doing a Dry January is quite a drastic change for people. It means not drinking and it may also require socializing in different locations which aren’t alcohol infused kind of areas. So some people think that what might be better for them is doing a two-week period—I have a really good friend who he and his partner do a 10 dry days in January. Every January they get through Christmas, they have a bit of catch up of things and then in the middle of January when they’ve got no money and their friends haven’t anyway, they’ll do this. And I mean it does tie into that idea about when is an easy time to do it, when’s an easy time to think about maybe drinking a bit less. So people could do that. People could do a shorter abstinent period or people might say things like, I’m going to drink on fewer days per week—so I won’t drink during the week but I’ll only drink on the weekend.

That can be one way to cut things back. That’s fine if it works for someone. People might say, I still like to drink because I like to have a glass of something with my lunch, with my dinner or when I’m watching a film or a sport or whatever it might be. And in those cases someone drinking a 0.5% beer instead of a 5% beer or drinking a low alcohol wine instead of a 12% alcohol wine, that’s another way to reduce the alcohol intake.

And I guess the thing that sits behind a lot of this stuff, as you know there’s increasing evidence that the safest and healthiest amount of alcohol to consume is probably none and anything above that is, can be harmful. So any way that people can find that works for them to reduce their alcohol intake is fine. I think Dry January isn’t for everyone, it’s not designed to be, and a lot of people might find it difficult, but if they can find another way to reduce their alcohol consumption or feel like they’re more in control of their drinking, then they could try that and if it works for them then nobody loses in that situation.

Mills: I’ve heard you say that trying Dry January is not a good idea for people who have an alcohol use disorder or a physical dependence on alcohol. Why is that, and for those people, what should they be doing in January or at other times?

de Visser: Yeah, I mean if people know that they are or suspect they might have an alcohol dependence or addiction, I mean the thing they should really do is to seek professional help. First of all some kind of assessment of their drinking, what the health effects might be as well, because sometimes they may be unaware of the health impact it’s having, so getting some of the information through, whether that’s blood tests or whatever it might be, could be there. But talking to a health professional about that would be a starting point that’s there.

The reason why it would be not advised for someone to try an unsupported attempt at kind of just cutting out alcohol completely would be that the problem’s with, one, about managing some of the physical effects of withdraw some of the psychological effects as well. And I think in those cases—and what we know from some other context as well is if people try to do that and find it very difficult, the likelihood that they’ll then return to drinking and potentially drinking in harmful ways and also psychologically feeling like, well I can’t do it, there is no hope for me, that can be reinforced and that’s not a great way to start. So some people need more support and help than others to make these changes.

And for people who are drinking a bit less or already feel a bit more in control of their drinking, something like Dry January might work because it’s about building on the confidence and the kind of skills that they already have. For people who are starting off from a point where they already feel like they’re not in control of their drinking and they’re having trouble already managing their alcohol consumption or there are already negative effects of alcohol consumption, it probably makes sense for them to talk to someone else about what they could do, what the alternatives might be, and not to try an unsupported attempt to detox, effectively. We wouldn’t recommend that for any other addictive substance. We wouldn’t say to anyone, just try by yourself, don’t come to me or don’t get my advice beforehand. In those situations you’ve got to think about making sure that someone knows what the potential benefits might be, but also what the consequences could be of an unsuccessful attempt and why that support is really helpful. And it may mean as well there may need to be some kind of pharmacological help to deal with some of the withdrawal symptoms and manage those kind of unpleasant kind of aspects of withdrawal for those people who are heavy drinkers.

Mills: Do you have any advice or tips for people who are trying to do Dry January? You mentioned apps. Are there other supportive things out there that people can access that will help them get through the month?

de Visser: Definitely. I think as I said before, I think we have about maybe for every person who registers officially for Dry January, there’s may be 10 times as many people who were doing an unofficial Dry January and that’s just in the U.K. What we found once we did recently where we looked at those who had signed up for Dry January, compared them to other people who were trying to cut down their alcohol intake through other ways during January. And what we found was that people who signed up for Dry January were twice as likely to make it through the month without drinking than those who just tried by themselves.

So registering officially does seem to increase the likelihood that someone will make it through the month and that has benefits, one just because psychologically it’d probably feel a lot better to an individual to say, yes, I made it through the month. But also the people who make it through the month without drinking feel more in control of their drinking. They experience more of the health and psychological benefits and they’re more likely to be cutting down the drinking later on. So registering officially is quite useful because it means that you tie into then a whole network of support. There’s the information that comes through emails and through the app and those kind of things. There’s also the sense of belonging to a kind of community that’s there and the community support that’s available seems to be really important. People share recipes for alternative drinks. People also share stories about how they manage difficult situations or what they say to their friends who are pushing them or nudging them to have a drink and those kind of things.

And another benefit that comes from it is if when people do register, they can sign up to get emails or get regular prompts through the app as well. So every day you might or every week or depending on how frequently you want them, you can get a message of support from them. It might say, well done, you’ve made it through another day. What’s also changed over the years is instead of the feedback just being about how much alcohol people have in drunk is people can now choose which kind of messages they want to get. It could be how many drinks they’ve not had compared to usual, but it could be how much money they’ve saved or how many calories they’ve not consumed. And depending on what motivates people when they’re coming into this, are they thinking about saving money, losing weight, or just feeling more in control, those messages can be tailored to meet the motivational or the motives that will best influence that person.

So again, it’s like in a lot of different areas, if we can find out what motivates the individual and give them feedback that ties into those motives, it’s much more likely that that will seem relevant. So people can choose how frequently and what kind of messages they want to get to support them. And what we’ve found, to go back to the point, what we’ve found is that people who make more use of the support are much more likely to make it through the month than people who just try it by themselves.

Mills: And what about developing a circle of friends who will go into Dry January with you? Is that something that you recommend? Does that work better?

de Visser: I think it’s one of those things that varies little bit. I mean we’ve looked at that, we’ve looked at how many, a lot of people do sign up with someone else. It could be a work colleague or a family member or a friend. That seems to be less important than some of the other things like using the supports available. But for some people it can be quite important. So we look across the board, it might be the case that there are people who really would only do it if it was with someone else. If that’s what gets them started, then that’s great to go for them. There’s not any need to do that. We don’t have any really strong evidence that it makes it much more likely.

But of course I guess the issue there is that you might have some people who do it without a buddy I guess, and non-drinking buddy who don’t want to. And there are some people who maybe would benefit from that support but aren’t able to get it. So it’s a little bit difficult because you also can’t have, it’s a difficult thing to measure properly because we don’t know how many of the people who are doing it solo would like to have a buddy that they’re doing it with as well. But that can be one thing. If people think that that would help them, then that’s probably worth trying. If they do that as well as signing up to the website or using the app as well, they’re getting the best of all worlds because they’re getting the support and whatever the motivation from—because it could also be the motivation not to be the person who caves in or gives in.

And we find that in other areas as well. I know that say in the U.K., the National Health Service stops smoking services have a range of things. Some are individualized and some are group and some are buddy systems and it’s really about thinking about what works for each individual. If I were a smoker, I’m not, but if I were a smoker, the idea about going to a stop smoking group would be something I’d run away from. I’d much rather try it out by myself. But there are a lot of people who’d say I couldn’t do it unless I were doing it with other people. And so it’s important to think about and that’s why I think that the content but also the range of different formats of support has really changed. That’s one of the things that’s happened over the years with Dry January is it’s recognizing there are a lot of people who come into this for a lot of different reasons and rather than trying a one-size-fits-all approach, people can tailor to some extent what they’re doing. A long way round of getting to your question about doing it with someone else is it really depends if people think that it might help them. You can give it a try and if not, there’s no kind of sense that they’ll be missing out necessarily if they don’t do it with the buddy.

Mills: Now since Dry January started, are you seeing a decrease in alcohol consumption overall in the U.K.?

de Visser: Yeah, I mean it’s difficult to say what causes what and what’s part of the broader kind of change. I think at the broader level, I think the idea about having a dry month or something like that has spread a bit more broadly and there are things, there are other campaigns, other parallel things. So I also do some work with meat-free Mondays, which is a charity that aims to reduce meat consumption. They do it by having one meat free day per week rather than a month. There is a campaign that runs here called Veganuary, which runs in January, which is try to give up meat in the month as well. And I think there’s more of an awareness of maybe a slightly more questioning kind of view about things that were previously seen as being quite alternative and small minority kind of interest or activities like not eating meat or not drinking. They’re not perceived as being so unusual now.

And I think there’s also, there are these kind of positive feedback loops in a way. And that the more people start talking about it, the more people will start trying it out. The more people try it out then people talk about it more and then people talk about it not being kind of ways, which isn’t that odd, but it’s kind of like, oh, there’s another person that’s like that. And I think that the kind of context or the landscape, the consumer landscape has changed as well. So 13 years ago, 12 years ago, if you were doing Dry January, there would be fewer alternatives for you to have in terms of places to go and products to buy or drinks to make at home. And now there are dry bars, there are mocktails made in lots of different places.

You see it not just in Dry January, you see it through the year now. There’ll be on the board, there’ll be, we tried this mocktail we’ve got or whatever it might be. So it’s not contained to that time or space or those unusual people over there. It’s like anyone could do this at any time. And you see a similar thing with the dietary kind of things as well. Ten, 15 years ago it might be, okay, what’s the one vegetarian option on the menu? And now you see lots of different things and we see it more broadly in the U.K. as well. There are fewer young people who are drinking in the U.S. and other similar cultures. There are those changes, there are fewer people drinking alcohol in the same way that there are fewer people who are eating meat or there are more people who are reducing their meat consumption at least. And at the same time the producers and marketers of these products have realized that if they don’t literally and metaphorically cater to those needs, they’re going to be missing out on some kind of slice of the market.

So like I said, there’s that positive feedback loop I think whereas more people do it, so there are the products that are available and because the products are available, more people think that it’s a feasible alternative and so on. You have these kind of positive feedback loops, I guess.

Mills: Is anybody looking at those products? I mean I know a lot of them. There are many, many more on the market now. Originally like non-alcoholic beer was disgusting, but now there’s a lot of non-alcoholic beer that tastes pretty good. And I’m just wondering do we know what’s in these products? So sure you’re not consuming alcohol anymore but you’re consuming something else.

de Visser: I’m not too sure about that. About the content of the products. I mean I think it is the thing, you see similar things with sugar-free products and people think, well what is the alternative for sugar? Is that longer term, is it better to eat the sugar or not? Or what’s the alternative to eating dairy butter compared to some other synthetic kind of product that’s not an area of expertise. And I don’t know, that’s one of the things that makes me think whether they’ve got time, within now and the next survey we’re doing, to add a question in asking people about are they concerned about or are they thinking about the content the other products.

Mills: Now, is there other research you’re doing in the area of alcohol consumption and what are the questions that you would like to answer?

de Visser: I guess there are two big groups we’ve got. One is the people who are interested in changing their behavior already or they’re motivated to change but they don’t know how to do it. And what they need is the support and advice to carry on with that. How many people will start and try certain things and then maybe come back to where they were and come forward? What are the processes of change? And within that, what are the identity change processes that happen there as well? When does someone stop identifying as a drinker for example? Or when do they call themselves something else? When does someone change their definition of themselves? And it does tie in a little bit to some of the stuff you think about some other abstinence programs as well, about people defining at the start of the behavior change process, they define themselves in a certain way, either as an identity they’re trying to move away from. So if you take the 12-step kind of things about saying I am an alcoholic and so I therefore have to do things differently. So the identity is really fixed as an alcoholic and they behave in certain ways either to recognize that and say therefore I have to do these things so I don’t engage in alcoholic behaviors.

Or you could do something else, which is saying I’m a non-drinker even before you’ve given up completely. But the aspirational identity is the non-drinker. So you use that as the target to move towards. And this goes right back to the cognitive dissonance stuff as well is about if you define yourself in a certain way and the ideal self that you are projecting towards other people is something, is a particular version of yourself, and you’re not quite there, two things could happen—you change the identity, but you’ve just said that that’s valuable. So the other alternatives, you change the behavior and the lifestyle so that it matches that identity as well. So I think it’s goal setting isn’t that and thinking about steps that are there and how can we find ways that work for different people at different steps along the way.

The second group of people is the people who aren’t currently motivated to change their behavior and thinking about what would it be that would help, that would motivate them to change their behaviors. How do we get, “I’m quite happily drinking too much” people into, oh maybe I’m drinking too much, maybe I need to do something about that. And that may be a little bit more difficult because a lot of the timeframes of the different alternatives are quite different. Yes, there may be some kind of benefit in the future from changing my drinking behavior, but right now I quite enjoy it and it’s an important part of my social life and I live in a culture where drinking happens. The cost to me personally and socially might be too great. So how can we use that kind of information?

And I think what we’re—going back to the Dry January thing, I think what we’ve kind of found, which has been useful, is rather than giving the messages which are the long-term health effects, is to say actually you may not believe it, but you’ll actually feel better quite soon and in quite a range of different ways. If you try something, why not give it a try? And even if you go back to drinking, drinking a bit less, then that’s a benefit that’s come from that. And I think the thing that’s interesting about that is that it is that embodied experiential kind of learning that has a much stronger motivating effect than the prospect of better health, which also lies alongside the prospect of worse social life. So that’s what people might see. So it’s a really difficult way to think about what motivates people, what would motivate them to change their behavior and how can we identify the things that would really help them or encourage them to take that first step that might let them see something different.

Mills: To close, a personal question: Do you abstain in January?

de Visser: No comment. No, no, not in January. I have done a dry month before. So after first doing the research, the first time I contacted Alcohol Change UK—so the backstory to this is that I contacted them in 2013 when it was first running saying, are you doing any evaluation of this? And they said, well, we’re a small organization, we don’t have the resources for that. And I said, well, I can do something small and small scale first of all, but using the resources they have, if you are able to send links to online surveys to people, we can do that quite easily. And then that was the start of what turned into a very productive relationship and mutually beneficial.

And when we started off, it was interesting because the person who started up—Emily Robinson who’s no longer there—she was doing something earlier where she was being sponsored by people to train and run a marathon as a fundraising thing, as often happens. And she thought, this is strange, I really like running. Why are people sponsoring me to do something I enjoy? They should be sponsoring for something that would be really difficult. And then she was thinking, well you could do this thing and maybe she’d heard of Dry July, maybe you could do something like that. But she hadn’t done it either. It was really interesting.

So every year we’d chat about these things and she’d say it’s already awkward because you have these events where you have these meetings and people say, oh, how’s your Dry January going? And she’d have to say, oh no, don’t worry about me. How is yours going? And I’d do the same thing, how’s Dry January? I said, oh, it’s really busy, it’s really good. Are you trying to deflect things? But having those, I thought, okay, I at least need to try it and do it. So I have twice, I’ve done dry months at different times of the year. And it is interesting then to do it almost in secret, like not saying to people this is what’s happening, not having that kind of thing. Because a lot of people also say Dry January, it’s great because I can say to people I’m doing this change, but it’s only for January. And people’s friends as well say, oh great. So we’ll have you back in February then we’ll get the real you back in February. So I I’m not doing Dry January, maybe next year.

Mills: Alright, well, Dr. de Visser, I want to thank you for talking to me today. This has been really interesting.

de Visser: Thanks very much. And enjoy the rest of your dry or not-so-dry January.

Mills: Thank you. You can read more about psychologists’ research on Dry January in the January issue of APAs magazine Monitor on Psychology, go to www.apa.org/monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.