Every January, several million people give something up for thirty-one days, tell everyone about it, and then hold a small internal review at the end to find out whether they passed.
It works, as it happens. The evidence is decent. But it's worth being honest about what it is, because the framing is doing something odd — and if you've ever finished a Dry January feeling vaguely like you'd been marked, that's why.
Where it came from, which is a better story than you'd think
Dry January isn't ancient and it isn't a wellness invention.
It started with one person. Emily Robinson gave up drinking for January 2011 to train for her first half marathon. She later joined the charity now called Alcohol Change UK, talked about the experience, and in 2013 it launched as a formal campaign with about 4,000 people signed up.
It's since become one of the most successful behaviour-change campaigns in Britain, with millions saying they intend to take part each year. The term was registered as a trademark in 2014.
There's also precedent: Finland ran a "Sober January" as far back as 1942.
The evidence is genuinely good
This is where a snarkier article would fall apart, so let's be straight about it.
Alcohol Change UK's research has found that six months on, around seven in ten participants were still drinking less riskily than before, and close to a quarter of those previously drinking at harmful levels had moved into the low-risk category.
That's not nothing. A month-long break that changes behaviour half a year later is a good return on a fairly small ask.
So: it works. Fine. Now the interesting part.
Why it feels like an appraisal
Look at the structure of the thing.
It has a fixed term. It has a pass/fail condition. It has a public declaration at the start and a report on outcomes at the end. There's a tracking app. There are badges. People announce their results.
That's a performance review. You've set yourself an objective, made it visible to your manager — who is also you, and who is not a generous manager — and scheduled the assessment for the 31st.
Which produces the failure mode everyone recognises. Two drinks on the 14th at a birthday, and the month is now "ruined," so the sensible move is to abandon it and start again in February, which never comes. That isn't a fact about alcohol. It's what happens to anything with a binary pass condition.
And then the other one: February 1st. The reward for completing the review. People who take a month off frequently drink more in the week after than they did in December, which is not a moral failing either — it's the shape of the container.
Four ways to do it that aren't a review
If the break is what you want, keep the break and delete the assessment.
- Don't announce it. The declaration is what creates the audience, and the audience is what creates the pass mark. Tell nobody. See what happens.
- Count up, not down. "I've had four drinks this month" is information. "I have 19 days left" is a sentence being served.
- Pick a boring month. January is the hardest possible month to do this in — it's cold, it's dark, it's long, everyone's broke, and the entire internet is talking about it. February is shorter and nobody's watching.
- Don't set an end date at all. The end date is the entire problem. It's what makes February 1st a finish line rather than a Sunday.
What's actually worth knowing
If health is the reason, the health information is available and it's not seasonal. The World Health Organization's position, published in The Lancet Public Health in January 2023, is that no level of alcohol consumption is safe, and alcohol is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 carcinogen.
That's true in March. It's true in August. A thirty-one day observance doesn't change it in either direction.
Which is either an argument for taking it more seriously than one month a year, or an argument for not treating January as an exam. Both readings are defensible.
Neither of them requires a badge — which is roughly why Differ* arrived without a challenge attached to it. No tracker, no streak to break. On any given evening, January or June, you might want something that isn't a beer and isn't a glass of water, and you'd rather that not be a statement about your year.
Not every choice deserves an explanation.
Sources
- Alcohol Change UK, "The Dry January® story."
- TIME, "The Origins of Dry January."
- Marketing Week, "How Dry January became one of Britain's most enduring behaviour-change campaigns."
- World Health Organization (4 January 2023), "No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health."