There is a different life than the one your wine-sipping, margarita Tuesday, beer-with-the-guys self is currently living, hiding just on the flip side of your current reality.  And it’s different, harder, and better.

Here’s why.

Many people in your life are not as interesting as you want to believe they are.

This sounds like a downside, but it’s not.  Once you take off the beer goggles and are forced to see clearly how much folks are not actually bringing to the table, you move on and find better things.  And you stop feeding the illusion that good enough is working and stop enabling the slow, passive demise into ordinary.

You are swollen.

Inside and outside.  Maybe you know it, but maybe you don’t.  Your body is processing a bunch of poison on a regular basis and it fluffs up your face, leaves your joints sticky, and ensures that your feet look like sausages in your stilettos at the end of the night (pro tip – sober night out equals slim ankles).  Sure, there are empty calories to grapple with, but more than that, you are forcing your body into systemic inflammation and that affects everything over time and encourages injury and disease.  There is a smaller, more agile, less painful you underneath there.

Exercise is easier and more rewarding than you think it is.    

Because odds are good you can’t stay hydrated well enough to make your machine hum well under the kind of sweaty strain that powerfully cathartic exercise brings.  If you aren’t sweating hard enough several days a week to need replenishing, you are missing out on a lot of powerful fun.  If you are, you can’t afford the hydration tax alcohol brings with it.

Your digestion is jacked.

That gluten allergy?  Lactose intolerance?  Special diet helps but not quite?  Alcohol puts a fabulous strain on your digestion.  You might be shocked at how quickly some of those issues go away once you give the grown up juice a break.

You are going to get cancer and die, slowly and alone, probably ugly crying.

Here’s the deal:  Your body is insanely well designed to protect you from poisonous crap.  But, if you throw too much poisonous crap at it, you will hit Critical Poisonous Crap Mass (CPCM) and shit will go off the rails.  What gave you that cancer?  Stress?  Petrochemicals?  Unwashed broccoli? Answer: Whatever the last shit you threw on the poisonous crap pile was.  You bumped it over and the needle went into the red.  It almost doesn’t matter what it was.  So if you want to save bandwidth for poptarts and hair dye, lower the overall load.  And switch to organic lotion while you are at it.  That shit goes right from your skin into your bloodstream.

Beer goggles are informing your self-concept.

The dulled out perception you have of you isn’t accurate.  You are brighter and more awesome than you experience.  In fact, the whole world is brighter and more awesome than you are experiencing.  But you are also dulling your awareness of ways you could be a whole lot better, more attractive, smarter, and generally more you, which will make you – and the world – even brighter.

Depression is a waste of humanity.

Alcohol feeds depression – and not just a little.  While you may feel it in an evening of drinking, the effect is even more real over time.  If you aren’t waking up excited about life most days (everyone gets a day here and there), you cannot afford to be drinking.  The world needs you.  And you deserve to feel alive and well.

Drinking is expensive.

Go out to dinner some night and drink only water.  Look in the mirror at your face when you get the bill.  Now go to the grocery store and don’t buy any wine or beer.  Look in the mirror at your face when you get the bill.  Now sponsor some orphans or something.

You have a lot more time than you think you do.

If you drink almost every evening, you are losing a chunk of every night of your life.  You aren’t exercising.  You aren’t fully, genuinely engaged with your family.  You aren’t learning, dreaming, or doing things that need to be done in productive ways.  You’re throwing away hours of life every single day.

There are a lot of delicious liquid things you are missing.

Have you ever had a shrub?  Well, turns out they are super trendy right now and taste kind of like a fancy salad dressing soda.  I’m not necessarily recommending them, but wouldn’t it be a shame to miss out?  Then after your shrub, order a Rachel’s Ginger Beer, hot tea, kombucha, milkshake (it brings all the boys to the yard), organic soda, coconut water, or good old-fashioned apple juice.  They are delicious.

It’s ordinary.

Let’s grab a beer.  Boy do I need a drink after the day I had.  I brought you a special bottle of wine.  Drinking is what everyone expects socially.  It makes people uncomfortable when you don’t drink and that breaks the cycle of the expected.  It changes the conversation.  It invites different activities.  It forces genuine connection.

You are missing life.

When you drink to relax, you turn off the signals that are trying to tell you that you are out of balance.  When you drink to socialize, you accept things you might not be able to stand otherwise, allowing them to continue.  When you drink to find inspiration or express emotion, you exile the profound, beautiful, and painful experiences to a different version of yourself, and keep the realization of these things from being an integrated part of your sober self.  You are dulling life and slowing its progress, avoiding the work and freedom that comes from finding ways through discomfort.

Start now.  You don’t have to never drink again.  You don’t have to make any commitment at all, ever. Just drink something different tonight and maybe again tomorrow if you want.  Try that shrub.  Challenge yourself to interrupt the habit.  Let your body rest.  Save a little cash.  Let life get brighter, happier, and more genuine.  Get rid of what doesn’t make sense in the bright light of clear-headedness.  Wake up excited.  Eat cheese again.  Life is better than you remember it.

Thoughts?  Please leave ideas, comments, rants of your own below…