Many people decide to give up drinking for dry January. Spending a full month living a sober lifestyle can be a good way to assess your own feelings about alcohol and determine whether it’s time to moderate your drinking throughout the rest of the year. Some people even realize that they strongly prefer sobriety and choose to give up alcohol entirely.
If you’re embarking on your own sobriety journey during dry January, you might be seeking some motivation to stay the course. Picking out a few great books on this topic can help you navigate the month! Need a few titles to add to your reading list?
Here are some book recommendations to check out this January.
Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough
Cyndi Turner provides a new perspective on recovery in her book Can I Keep Drinking? Most treatment programs require participants to be totally abstinent from alcohol.
However, Turner explains that strict sobriety may only be necessary for the six percent of the population who are alcoholics. Others can learn to enjoy alcohol in moderation. Knowing this may encourage more people to seek treatment rather than avoid asking for help.
This book includes checklists and quizzes like the “How Do I Know If I Can Keep Drinking?” quiz to help people assess their relationship with alcohol. Readers can learn the positive and negative indicators that will demonstrate whether they are good candidates for drinking moderately. Turner also includes tools to help readers create their personalized moderate drinking plans.
The Sober Diaries: How One Woman Stopped Drinking and Started Living
Author Claire Pooley was struggling to balance her high-pressure job as a managing partner at a major advertising agency with her family life. She left her job to focus on her family instead. Yet it was difficult to cope with the transition. Pooley began gaining weight, experiencing symptoms of depression, and drinking more than a bottle of wine per day to deal with her emotions. When she began Googling “Am I an alcohol?”, she knew it was time for a change.
The Sober Diaries tells the story of the year Pooley decided to quit drinking and subsequently received a shocking breast cancer diagnosis. She shares her own experiences while giving readers the tools they need to evaluate their own drinking habits and explore the questions they have about living a sober life.
The Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness, and Change Your Life
In The Naked Mind, author Annie Grace explores the role of alcohol in our culture. Grace analyzes this issue from psychological, social, neurological, and economic perspectives.
She delves into the root causes that explain why people drink. By diving into the root of the issue rather than discussing symptoms, Grace helps readers alleviate their psychological dependence on alcohol so that they can stop drinking or simply drink less. She breaks down the myth that alcohol is a vital, pleasurable part of life.
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice Not to Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
When Holly Whitaker decided to quit drinking, she found that most mainstream recovery programs were geared to the emotional needs of men. Moreover, there were few resources specifically developed for women and other people from marginalized backgrounds.
She also began reflecting on the many ways that the alcohol industry specifically targets women. Alcohol abuse is insidious within our culture, and Whitaker set out to make a change.
In Quit Like a Woman, Whitaker describes her own unique path out of addiction. She outlines her journey towards creating a sober community for people who did not feel served by the traditional recovery model. She also shares some resources she established to help people identify the roots of their addiction and break the cycle.
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Are you interested in staying sober through dry January and beyond? Therapy can help. Reach out to us today to discuss your options for scheduling your first session.