Throughout the month, your body can experience some amazing benefits from abstaining from alcohol. Improved hydration and better sleep can increase your productivity and daily well-being. Your liver, stomach, and skin will also benefit from not consuming alcohol. According to Dasgupta, the best people to practice dry January and stay dry all year round are those under 21, not just for legal reasons.
Excessive alcohol consumption can lead to systemic inflammation or long-term inflammation throughout the body. Taking a break from drinking for 30 days or more can reduce factors such as joint pain, headaches and body aches, according to Scheller. In fact, alcohol consumption can cause arthritis by increasing joint inflammation. Additionally, alcohol can dehydrate you and contribute to headaches.
Since alcohol is often made with inflammatory ingredients, such as sugar and wheat, and mixed drinks often include added sugars, stretching with sobriety also helps avoid these additional triggers for inflammation. When you stop drinking, your liver can devote more time to its other 500 vital functions. After a month without drinking, liver fat can be reduced by up to 20%, significantly reducing the risk of liver cirrhosis or fatty liver disease. Non-alcoholic rosé is the perfect way to maintain that sober lifestyle without sacrificing the unique and refreshing flavor of rosé.
Let's review the timeline of what happens when you stop drinking, divided into simple bite-sized chunks. Quitting alcohol will no longer be an impossible challenge to overcome once you have a month under your belt. Because alcohol is a depressant, it can disrupt the sleep cycle by slowing down the nervous system. If you have problems with binge drinking, making the decision to stop drinking for a month is no easy task.
Depending on the physical dependence you're dependent on, you may start to notice symptoms just a few hours after you've consumed your last alcoholic beverages. Whether you're facing the challenge of not drinking alcohol (hello, dry January) or thinking about reducing alcohol consumption in general, your body can experience some real changes when you stop drinking. When consumed, alcohol is used as the main source of fuel instead of glucose from carbohydrates or lipids from fats. After 48 hours, many people may become discouraged because they don't see any results from not drinking, other than not having a hangover and remembering what happened the night before.
Some men find it difficult to change the habit of having a drink in their hand at 6 p.m., so they first change what's in their glass. They found that the average amount of beverages that participants consumed weekly decreased significantly, as did the number of days a week they drank. If you feel that your alcohol consumption is out of your control or you regularly binge drink despite your best efforts, you could benefit from more structured help to stop drinking. While it's not a guaranteed magic bullet for cancer prevention, when a person abstains from alcohol for a long time, the risk of developing these types of cancer is markedly lower in the long term, according to Wirtz.
As we enter into a new year, many people are rethinking their drinking habits - there's no better time than now to delve into the science and ask experts what really happens when alcohol is removed from the equation for a month (or more).
