6 Ways My Life Changed in My First 30 Days Sober

The first 30 days of my sobriety were full of ups and downs. From day one, my decision to give up drinking changed everything. For over a decade, booze, and activities involving booze, had comprised so much of my life; so, it should have been no surprise that its absence would spark such widespread evolution. And yet, I never expected it.

I went from being hot all of the time to having a well-regulated body temperature.

Two years ago, my family spent Christmas in New York. After a boozy dinner, followed by some club hopping with my siblings and local friends, we returned to the rental apartment for one of those infamous alcohol-induced, coma-like slumbers. An hour or two after I’d passed out, I woke up covered in sweat. The room I’d fallen asleep in, built for industrial sleeping capacity, was arranged to include three double beds and one single bed; each of which was occupied. I reached up above my head and opened the window positioned behind the bed I was sleeping in. As 40 degree air began rushing into the room, I grabbed the corner of the duvet cover, bundled up, and fell back asleep. I woke up hours later, head pounding, to my sister angrily inquiring, through chattering teeth, what the hell was wrong with me.

When I was drinking, I felt unusually warm all of the time. Every night I’d crank up the A/C and run the fan on the highest setting and would still wake up sweating. No matter the time of year or the temperature in the room, I ran hot; and, after years of operating like this I just assumed it was my body’s natural state of being. Turns out, it very much so was not.

My dreams became intensely vivid and I nearly always remembered them.

I’m not one for holding court and regaling others with tales of my dreams from the night before. In fact, I’ve been known to share my indifference toward dreams, my own or otherwise, widely as to ensure no one mistakes me for a captive dream-sharing audience.

However, I couldn’t help but take up interest in my newly vivid and thrilling dreams. For the first time in years, I not only could recall my dreams upon waking up, but they were lively! As time went on the especially vibrant and intense dreams faded, but even now, a year and a half later, I always recall them.

Crying came more easily and more often than before.

In high school, before I’d started drinking, I would cry all of the time. A combination of teenager hormones and my mere existence as a highly sensitive person resulted in a free-flowing stream of feelings and tears.

One of the unexpected side effects of alcohol was the relief it provided from my over-feeling mind. Another unexpected side effect was how over time, that relief bled into when I was sober as well. The feelings were all still there, but they were rarely being felt or expressed. Throughout my drinking career, the large majority of my crying occurred once I’d crossed the threshold of blacking out. Once I quit, I began to actually experience all of those emotions that had been repressed for so long. And experience I did. Happy, sad, frustrated, tired — during those first two months of sobriety every feeling, no matter how feeble, seemed to culminate in a strong cry.

Memories long forgotten were liable to pop up at any time.

Morning and night, whether I was reading, watching TV, showering, walking, or conversing, lost memories would play back. Drunken regrets followed me into sobriety and threatened to derail the process of healing.

I suddenly craved being outside.

I quit drinking at the end of July in Florida — peak heat and humidity season; and yet, I couldn’t stay inside. Every day I felt compelled to lie in the sun, or go for a long walk, or simply drink my coffee on the patio.

One unusually comfortable day, as I laid on out in my back yard, Armchair Expert playing through my headphones, I gazed up through the green and lush branches reaching across my yard, over me. Driven by an intrinsic impulse, I paused the podcast and pulled the AirPods out of my ears. As I listened to the birds chirp and inhaled the distinctly summer scent of sweat, sunscreen, and slightly damp grass, I felt a sense of peace that the outdoors had never given me before.

My newfound free time led to new (and old) hobbies.

Admittedly, not all of my newly freed up time was spent engaging with hobbies old and new. Need I refer you back to the “feeling everything, all the time.” But, as I reclaimed the evenings previously spent with a bottle of wine and the TV, and the Friday nights spent in dark bars and vodka sodas, and the Sundays spent with bottomless mimosas that turned into all-day bar hopping, I began to remember all of the ways I used to enjoy filling my time. I started writing again, I tried (and failed at) gardening, I walked often, I played board games in the evenings when my husband was home and I curled up with a book when he wasn’t.

I didn’t just have more time to kill, I was genuinely interested in the world around me again. For the first time in a decade, I felt actively engaged in my life.