Don’t Count on Counting!    

Is counting the days since your last drink always the best way to measure success?

In some sober and recovery communities, counting alcohol-free days is an important tradition. One day becomes seven, seven becomes 30, then 100, a year, five years. Milestones are celebrated and the growing number can become a source of pride, motivation and accountability.

For many people, that works.

But what if it doesn’t work for you?

What if counting the days since you last drank actually keeps alcohol more firmly planted in your life? What if one drink can apparently wipe out hundreds of successful alcohol-free days? And what happens when a number intended to measure behaviour begins to feel like a measure of you?

Perhaps it’s worth asking whether we should always be counting.

What we count, we keep noticing

There’s a curious contradiction in deciding that you want alcohol to become less important in your life, while beginning every day by remembering exactly how long it has been since you consumed it.

Day 17. Day 48. Day 103.

Alcohol may no longer be in your glass, but it can remain very much in your consciousness.

For some people, that daily tally is motivating. For others, it may make alcohol feel like the opponent in an ongoing battle: something resisted yesterday, being resisted today and waiting to challenge us again tomorrow.

Rather than alcohol gradually becoming less relevant, we continue giving it a starring role.

That doesn’t mean counting causes us to think more about alcohol. There isn’t good evidence to make that claim. But it does give us an interesting question to ask ourselves: what effect does counting have on me?

If seeing the number rise makes you feel empowered and increasingly confident in your choices – great.

But if it feels as though you’re engaged in an endless tug-of-war, with alcohol permanently holding the other end of the rope – it’s time to rethink the practice.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to become extraordinarily good at not drinking. Perhaps it is to reach the point where drinking simply isn’t terribly important anymore.

One drink doesn’t erase everything that came before it

Imagine someone reaches 183 alcohol-free days and then, at a wedding, has a glass of champagne.

Tomorrow, what number are they?

Under a strict consecutive-day model, they’re back to Day One.

But are they really?

Those 183 days still happened. Their body experienced them. Their relationships experienced them. They may have learned an enormous amount about themselves, changed habits, navigated difficult situations without drinking and discovered that life without alcohol suited them rather well.

None of that disappears because they had one glass of champagne.

Interestingly, psychology has been wrestling with this very issue for decades.  In their influential 1985 relapse-prevention model, psychologists G. Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon described what they called the Abstinence Violation Effect: the response that can occur when someone who has committed to abstinence has a lapse and interprets it as a personal failure. Subsequent research has produced a more complicated picture than the original theory proposed, but self-efficacy — our confidence in our ability to manage our behaviour — has consistently emerged as an important part of relapse prevention.¹

For example, researchers at the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in Salt Lake City compared people newly admitted to inpatient alcohol treatment with people who had been abstinent for at least a year. Their study, published in the Journal of Substance Abuse in 1989, found that the longer-term abstinent group had significantly higher expectations of their own ability to maintain their chosen behaviour. The researchers suggested that treatment should address unrealistic standards as well as help people build self-efficacy.²

So perhaps it’s the story we tell ourselves after drinking that really matters.

A lapse can become: I’ve blown it. I’m back at zero. I can’t do this.

Or it can become: I chose not to drink for 183 days. Yesterday I drank. What can I learn from that, and what do I want to do next?

Same behaviour.

Very different story.

And perhaps the danger of the counter is that it can give considerably more psychological weight to the one day on which someone drank than to the 183 on which they didn’t.

Counting can turn progress into comparison

Once we have numbers, comparison isn’t far behind.

Someone is celebrating 30 days. Someone else has reached 300. Another person proudly announces 10 years.

These milestones can create wonderful opportunities for encouragement and shared celebration. But they can also invite us to locate ourselves on an imaginary ladder.

Someone else’s larger number can make our achievement seem smaller. Someone else’s smaller number can make ours feel more impressive.

Neither comparison tells us very much about how either person is actually living.

The person on Day 40 may feel wonderfully comfortable with their decision and rarely think about alcohol. The person approaching Year Five may still struggle regularly. Someone else may drink occasionally and be completely content with the relationship they now have with alcohol.

The number tells us only the number.

There is also emerging evidence that alcohol consumption alone may not tell us everything we need to know about recovery. In 2021, Professor Katie Witkiewitz from the University of New Mexico and colleagues examined outcomes from 146 participants in the New Mexico arm of Project MATCH, one of the major US alcohol-treatment studies. They compared participants’ alcohol use and psychosocial functioning three years after treatment with their outcomes ten years after treatment.

Their findings add an interesting twist. The groups with better psychological functioning at three years generally continued to have better psychological functioning at ten years, regardless of whether they were completely abstinent. Being abstinent at three years did not, by itself, predict better psychological functioning at ten years. The researchers concluded that non-abstinent recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder was possible and that measures of functioning deserve consideration alongside alcohol consumption when we think about successful recovery.³

That certainly isn’t evidence that abstinence doesn’t matter. The abstinent participants subsequently reported less drinking and fewer drinking-related consequences. Nor does it mean that moderate drinking is an appropriate goal for everyone.

It simply reminds us that one number cannot tell us everything about how well a person is doing.

Perhaps the more useful comparison isn’t between our number and somebody else’s. It is between the life we’re living now and the life we want to live.

When does the test finish?

Day counting can also create another question:

What number is enough?

Thirty days? One hundred? A year? Ten years?

At what point have we passed?

If every day contributes to a sobriety score, alcohol may begin to feel like a test that is permanently underway. And if drinking means returning to zero, situations involving alcohol can take on disproportionate significance.

A birthday party isn’t simply a birthday party. It’s a test.

Dinner with friends isn’t simply dinner. It’s a test.

A wedding, holiday or work function becomes another opportunity either to protect the number or lose it.

For some people, particularly early in changing their drinking, avoiding certain situations may be exactly what they need. There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself while you’re finding your feet. For someone with alcohol dependence or a history of serious alcohol-related harm, abstinence may also be an important treatment goal developed with appropriate professional support.

But eventually we might want to ask whether our alcohol-free lifestyle is making our world larger or smaller.

Are we avoiding an event because we genuinely don’t want to be there — or because we’re frightened our number won’t survive it?

The goal surely isn’t simply to become highly accomplished at avoiding alcohol. It is to build a life in which alcohol occupies the amount of space we want to give it.

When a number becomes part of our identity

Perhaps one of the more interesting questions is what happens when the number stops simply measuring days and starts contributing to how we see ourselves.

High number: good.

Low number: bad.

Counter reset: failure.

The language surrounding alcohol can already carry considerable moral baggage. We talk about being clean, falling off the wagon, slipping up, being good and starting again.

Numbers can unintentionally reinforce that moral hierarchy.

At one end can sit shame: I couldn’t even make it to 30 days.

At the other can sit superiority: I’ve been sober for six years.

But neither shame nor piety tells us very much about whether somebody has built a healthier and more satisfying life.

And importantly, not everyone who successfully changes a problematic relationship with alcohol adopts an ongoing “recovery” identity.

A 2023 nationally representative UK study led by Professor Ed Day at the University of Birmingham surveyed 1,373 adults who reported having overcome a significant alcohol or other drug problem. Just over half — 52.4% — currently identified themselves as being “in recovery”. Almost 29% said they had never adopted that identity, while another 19% had previously considered themselves in recovery but no longer did.⁴

Similar findings emerged from an earlier nationally representative US study led by Professor John Kelly of Massachusetts General Hospital. Among 1,995 people who reported resolving a significant alcohol or drug problem, 45.1% identified as currently in recovery, while 39.5% had never identified that way and 15.4% had previously done so but no longer did.⁵

That doesn’t make a recovery or sober identity unhelpful. For many people it can provide meaning, community and support.

It simply tells us that there isn’t one identity everybody must adopt when they change their relationship with alcohol.

Nor does there need to be one number that proves they’ve succeeded.

Maybe freedom is a better measure

There is nothing inherently wrong with knowing the date you last had a drink. It can be useful. It may be personally significant.

And if counting your alcohol-free days makes you feel proud, motivated and increasingly confident in your choice, keep counting.

But you don’t have to count.

You don’t have to psychologically erase months or years of progress because you had a one-off drink. 

You don’t have to compare your number with somebody else’s. And you don’t have to spend the rest of your life proving, one day at a time, that you can resist alcohol.

Perhaps instead of focusing on how many days we’ve had without a drink, we could ask:

“What has changed in my life since I decided I wanted alcohol to play a different role in it?” 

That journey may include experimentation. There may be lessons, adjustments and changes of mind along the way. For some people, it will lead to lifelong abstinence. Others may develop a different relationship with alcohol.

None of those experiences need erase everything that came before them.

So, if counting motivates you, keep counting.

If it feels like an ongoing test you’ll never quite get to pass, consider letting go of the importance of the number.

Ultimately, perhaps the only counting that really matters is knowing that you can count on yourself to choose the healthy practice that works best for you.

References

Marlatt, G.A. & Gordon, J.R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors. New York: Guilford Press.

Ross, S.M., Miller, P.J., Emmerson, R.Y. & Todt, E.H. (1989). “Self-efficacy, standards, and abstinence violation: A comparison between newly sober and long-term sober alcoholics.” Journal of Substance Abuse, 1(2), 221–229.

Witkiewitz, K., Wilson, A.D., Roos, C.R., et al. (2021). “Can Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder Sustain Non-abstinent Recovery? Non-abstinent Outcomes 10 Years After Alcohol Use Disorder Treatment.” Journal of Addiction Medicine, 15(4), 303–310.

Day, E., Manitsa, I., Farley, A. & Kelly, J.F. (2023). “A UK national study of prevalence and correlates of adopting or not adopting a recovery identity among individuals who have overcome a drug or alcohol problem.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy, 18, 68.

Kelly, J.F., Bergman, B., Hoeppner, B.B., Vilsaint, C. & White, W.L. (2018). “On being ‘in recovery’: A national study of prevalence and correlates of adopting or not adopting a recovery identity among individuals resolving drug and alcohol problems.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 187, 197–204.

Disclaimer: Perspectives articles reflect the views and opinions of their individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of NoLo Life. They are published to encourage informed, open discussion about alcohol and its role in contemporary life.