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

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's January, and for some people, that means the start of a month with no alcohol. Dry January, which began in the UK 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 Draw 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 DeVisser, a professor of health psychology at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK. 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. DeViscer, thank you for joining me today. Thanks very much for having me on. Can you start by telling us about the history of dry January? Many people here in the US have heard of it and maybe even participated in it, but they don't know where it all started. So in the UK, 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's 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 pores, 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 changed quite a lot over the last 12 years now we're up to. Originally there was a website where people would 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 of 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.

There's actually 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 is other campaigns. There's a similar campaign in the Netherlands called ICPAS. In two French-speaking locations, they seem to have got it even better by making it a February challenge. So the Tony Mineral in Belgium and the Faruizure-Ju-Az al-Kor, which is run in parts of Canada, both run for 28 days in February. So that's not even easier, 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 try month if they can, and also maybe to see if it does have a longer-term effect on their drinking. So how many people signed up to participate back in 2013 and how many are doing it now? Do we have any idea? Yeah, so these are the UK figures. There are around about 5,000 people in 2013. It steadily increased. After the first couple of years, it got a bit of publicity and there's 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 kind of had a life of its own. So they kind of really stepped back and let things run. And now there's around about 150,000 people in the UK sign up every year. And lots of people will join in, you know, from other locations. That's one of the great things about, you know, 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 UK 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 UK, 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 said, 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? You know, what can I do to try to make you fall off the wagon before the end of the month? It seems 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, 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 is 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, you know, 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, 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 up. And there's lots of mutual support seems to be really beneficial for the success of individuals, but also for the success of the campaign. In the UK, you've got quite an ingrained pub culture. Do you get pushback from that part of the populace? 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-apholic products and the fact that a lot of the large alcohol and spirit producers have recognized that, and they're now marketing to that, 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 all of the pubs. They were saying, and restaurants generally as well, they were kind of saying, well, January is 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 alternative to alcohol. So people might think, well, if I go out somewhere and I'm going to be charged the same amount for soft drink because I might be for alcohol and maybe everyone else is drinking, it's not going to make a difference, maybe it's a bit. 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 itchita. So, yeah.

So you mentioned a moment ago. motivation. What motivates people to try this? What are the reasons that people give for joining in? 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 been, you know, steeped in alcohol, and they think maybe it's a good time to have a break. So it might be, a lot of times, as 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 would 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. 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, popular, 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. So around about half, so they lose weight, around about 60% or so, so they save money. 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 feedback to encourage people to take part. If you take part, it might feel like you're giving up something. But these are the things 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 than maybe advice from physician about your liver's going to look

terrible in 40 years down the line. What we know from psychology and kind of learning and training and shape and behaving lots of there is 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 completed 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 kick-starting that, of developing the skills, have finally set something in motion, which they then want to carry on with.

So there's a real range of motivations. And do they report back, over time as to whether they have continued to abstain? Yeah, so we've done studies. The longest we've been able to manage is a six-month follow-up. So 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. We send them emails and they're just not interested. it. But there are a number of people who say that they, so we know from the surveys, we asked people whether they've taken part before and we asked them in which years. There are a number of people who come back every year and do this. It's almost like the yearly

reset. But there are plenty of people, there's plenty of anecdotal reports of 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 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 and from the arc or change perspective, because that's not really a main kind of motivation. It's not about a kind of full-time abstance kind of campaign. So there's less evidence, less hard evidence on the long, long-term effects in terms of an abstinence kind of focus thing. But we know that a lot of people do start off for that motivation and we know that a lot of people cut back in their drinking, so they're drinking less when that comes to August. 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? Yeah. So there's the sleep that I mentioned. People report having

more energy and better concentration. And these are things where we just, 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, you know, pre-post kind of measure over time is at least we can assume that unless there's systematic variation in people's reporting, that might be, because 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 it reflects 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,

trading better, they have more energy. There are those things about weight loss as well. There are other studies, not 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 trying to keep. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets.

They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza.

Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365. have copilot.com slash work. 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? 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, the given message is that they should actually be looking for something else and ideally kind of 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 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 to 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. Around 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 they've got these skills to resist

that, well, they understand their alcohol consumption a bit more. And the other roughly 40% of people drink less at the six-month kind of 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. 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 a dampish January? 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 because 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, 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 kind of catch up the things. And then in the middle of January, when they've got no money, their friends haven't anyway, they'll do this. And that's, 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, adstander 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 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 is 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, you know, nobody loses in that situation. I've heard you say that trying dry January is not a good idea for people who have an alcohol use disorder or physical dependence on alcohol. Why is that? And for those people, what should they be doing in January or at other times? Yeah. I mean, if people know that they are

or suspect that they might have an alcohol dependence or addiction, I mean, the thing they should really do is to seek professional help to, one, first of all, some kind of assessment of their, of their drinking, what the health effects might be as well, because sometimes they may be unaware of the health impact is having. So getting some of the information through whether that's, you know, 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 problems with one about managing some of the physical effects of withdrawal, some of the psychological

effects as well. And I think in those cases, and what we know from some other contexts as well, is if people try to do that and find it very difficult, the likelihood that they will then return to drinking and potentially drinking in harmful ways. And also psychologically, you're 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 tri-gary 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 they're 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, girlfriend, 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 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. Do you have any advice or tips for people who are trying to do dry January? You mentioned apps or there are other like supportive things out there that people can access that will help them get through the month? Definitely. I think, as I said before, I think we have about, you know, maybe for every person who registers officially for dry January, there's maybe 10 times as many people who were doing an unofficial dry January. And that's just in the UK. What we found in one study we did recently where we looked at those 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 official. does seem to increase the likelihood that someone will make it through the month.

And that has benefits one just because psychologically it would probably feel a lot of 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 things. There's also the sense of belonging to a kind of community that's there and the community to 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. Another benefit that comes from it is this, 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 haven't 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.

So there's, and what we've found, to go back to the point, what we found is that people who make more use of the support are much more likely to make it through the month than people who don't who just try it by themselves. 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? I think it's one of those things that varies a 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 that 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, you know, 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, a 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 know, you also can't have, it's difficult thing to measure properly because we don't know how many of the people are doing it solo. We'd like to have a buddy that they're doing it with as well. So it's, 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 their support and whatever, the motivation from the, 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 UK, the National Health Service, Stop 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've 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, you know, and that's why I think that the content, but also the range of different formats of support has really changed. That's one-a-jointed over the years with dry January, just 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. So a long way around 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, buddy.

Now, since dry January started, are you seeing a decrease in alcohol consumption overall in the UK? 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, you know, 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 aim to, you know, kind of reduce meat consumption. They do it by having one meat-free day per week rather than the month.

There is a campaign that runs here called Vigannuary, which runs in January, which is trying to give up meat in the month as well. So I think there's more of a sense, more of an awareness of maybe a slightly more questioning kind of view about things that were previously seen as been quite alternative and small, you know, 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. People talk about it more. And then people talk about it not being kind of ways which are. isn't that odd, but it's kind of like, oh, there's another person that's like that. And I think the kind of contextual 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 it home. And now there are dry bars, there are mocktails made in lots of different places.

You know, you see it not just in dry January, but you see it through the year now. They'll be on the board. There'll be, you know, we try this mocktail. 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. You know, 10, 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 UK as well. There are a few young people who are drinking, you know, in the US and other similar cultures. There are those changes. There are fewer people drinking alcohol in the same way. There are few people who are eating meat. well, 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,

you know, 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. 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-alcohol beer was disgusting, but now there's a lot of non-alcoholic beer that taste 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. I'm not too sure about that, about the content of the products. I mean, I think it is the thing. It's often you see similar things with, you know, 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.

I don't know. That's one of the things. That makes me think whether they've got time within the next, between now and the next survey we're doing to put a question in asking people about, are they concerned about or are they thinking about the content of the other products? 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? I guess there are two big groups we've got.

One is the people are interested in changing their behavior. already. Well, 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 go 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 to 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 your cognitive dissonant stuff as well, is about if you define yourself in a certain way and the ideal self that

you're 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 matches that identity as well. So I think it's goal setting, isn't it? 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 motivate them to change their behaviors. How do we get the 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 kind of quite different, you know, 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've, 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. 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've identified the things that would really help them, we're encouraging to

take that first step that might let them see something different. To close a personal question, do you abstain in January? No comment, no. No, I guess. Not in general. I have done a dry month before. So after first doing the research, the first time I contacted I called Change UK. So the backstory to this is that I constantly.

contact 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, you know, small and small scale, first of all, but using the resources I have, if you can, if you're 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. And there's a

fundraising thing, as often happens. And she thought, this is strange. I really like running. Why are people sponsoring 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 chat about these things, and she'd say, that's already awkward because you have these events or you have these meetings and people say, oh, how's your dry January going? And she'd have to kind of say, oh, no, don't worry about me. How's yours going? How's dry January? I said, oh, it's really busy. It's really good. Are you trying to

flip things? But having those, I thought, okay, 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 kind of 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, on doing this change, but it's only for January. You know, and people's friends as well say, oh, great. So we'll have you back in February then. We'll get the real new back in February.

So I'm not doing dry January, maybe next year. All right. Well, Dr. DeViscer, I want to thank you for talking to me today. This has been really interesting. Thanks very much. And enjoy the rest of your dry or not so dry January. Thank you. You can read more about psychologists' research on dry January

in the January issue of APA's magazine Monitor on Psychology. go to www. APA.org slash monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for those of you who want to know more about psychology and the work of APA, you can join us as a supporter. You don't have to be a psychologist.

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