Sober and Missing Out: How to Shift Sober FOMO

Sober and missing out is one of the most common feelings in early sobriety and one of the most misread.

What sober FOMO is

Sober FOMO is the belief that not drinking has taken you out from the social and emotional experiences everyone else is still having.

It usually starts specific. I miss the team bonding after work. I miss clubbing until morning. I miss the nightcap after dinner with friends. I miss the champagne glass on New Year's Eve. I miss the weekend trips, staying up by the fire with beers until sunrise.

Then it stops being about alcohol and becomes a statement about your life. I don't have enough friends. My life is boring.

Why the thought gets stronger every time you fight it

The most reliable way to keep a thought alive is to try to push it out.

Daniel Wegner's work on ironic process theory, first published in 1987, showed that people instructed not to think about a white bear thought about it more often than people given no instruction at all, and more often again once the instruction was lifted. Suppression requires a monitoring process that keeps checking whether the unwanted thought has appeared, which ironically keeps the thought active.

Craving research points in the same direction. The Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire, set out by Kavanagh, Andrade and May in Psychological Review in 2005, describes how a brief intrusive thought about a drink only becomes a real craving when you elaborate it: picture the glass, imagine the taste, run the scene. The elaboration is what sustains the desire. A thought you refuse to engage with fades on its own.

There is also the matter of what your attention is trained on. Field and Cox reviewed the evidence on attentional bias in addictive behaviors in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2008 and found that alcohol-related cues capture and hold the attention of heavier drinkers and that this bias tracks with craving.

If you spend your evenings thinking about the glass of wine you are not having, you are keeping alcohol at the center of your attention.

What is happening in your body in the first weeks

The benefits of quitting alcohol arrive earlier than most people expect. They are usually missed because the change itself is disruptive enough that you don't always notice them.

• Sleep. Alcohol shortens the time it takes to fall asleep and then degrades the rest of the night. A 2013 review by Ebrahim and colleagues in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research found that alcohol suppresses REM sleep in the first half of the night and increases fragmentation and wakefulness in the second half. Sleep architecture starts to reorganize within the first weeks without alcohol, which is why energy tends to return quite quickly.

• Morning anxiety. Alcohol enhances GABA, the brain's main inhibitory signal, and suppresses glutamate, the main excitatory one. As it clears, both rebound in the opposite direction. That rebound is the low-grade anxiety and restlessness of a hungover morning, and it starts moving back towards normal soon after quitting.

• Measurable markers. A 2018 study by Mehta and colleagues in BMJ Open followed moderate to heavy drinkers through one month of abstinence and recorded improvements in insulin resistance, blood pressure, and liver fat. Survey research on Dry January participants led by Richard de Visser at the University of Sussex found that a large majority reported better sleep by the end of the month, and around two thirds reported more energy.

Five steps to shift your attention

The trick is to shift your attention to the gains instead of the losses. Here's how to do it:

1. Start one sober weekend morning deliberately. Pick a morning when you would previously have been recovering. Wake up and give it more attention than usual, noticing it step by step.

2. Run a check through your body. Stretch. Open the windows. Notice that the brain fog is gone, that nothing hurts, and that you are not beginning the day already behind.

3. Go outside with nothing to accomplish. Ten minutes is enough. Just go for a walk without a goal. Unstructured attention makes it easier to observe your own state instead of managing it.

4. Say the sentence to yourself. This is who I am now, and I feel pretty good. I am in it, not numbed. You can also think about the version of you who would have woken up after drinking the night before.

5. Say it out loud to one person. Tell someone close to you that your mornings are getting better, that you are sleeping well, or that food tastes better. Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher published research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004 on what they called capitalization: sharing a positive experience with another person produces benefits over and above the experience itself, particularly when the other person responds with interest. Spoken to someone, it stops being a private thought and starts to feel real.

Why the feeling fades

About six months into my own sobriety, I learned to take whatever was starting to work and multiply it. My energy came back, so I started running. Running felt good, so I started hiking. When I noticed my patience had grown and that it gave me more emotional space, I built a community and took on new hobbies.

There is a name for this. Fredrickson and Joiner described upward spirals in Psychological Science in 2002: positive states broaden the range of behavior a person is willing to attempt, and the broader behavior produces more positive states. Behavioral activation, one of the better evidenced components of depression treatment, works on the same principle. Action first, feeling second.

The further I went, the fainter the feeling of missing out became.

Common questions about sober FOMO

How long does sober FOMO last?

For most people it is loudest in the first four to eight weeks and thins out over the following months, though it can return around specific events such as New Year's Eve, holidays, or a wedding. It tends to fade as your attention finds good things to focus on.

Is it normal to feel worse before feeling better?

Yes. After years of the same pattern, your system reads the change as a threat. The physical improvements often arrive in the first weeks while the emotional adjustment takes longer, which is why people report feeling better in their body and unsettled in their head at the same time.

Do I have to stop going out?

No. You can go to the party, sit around the fire, stay up late, dance, travel and celebrate. Avoiding every social setting tends to reinforce the belief that sobriety costs you your life.

What if my friends only ever meet in bars?

Then the useful question is whether you want to be the one who suggests something else. Many people find that alcohol-free events give them a second social circle.

The trick with repetition

Whatever sentence you repeat most often is the one you end up believing, and your mind is not fussy about whether that sentence is accurate or not.

You can still go to the party. You can be present for all of it without the drink. The difference is that you get the Sunday morning too. And that is a pretty good deal.

Stay Sober // Stay Cool

Monica