How Many Attempts Does it Take to Quit Drinking for Good (Replay)

0:00Multiple quit attempts are common when you are trying to get sober, but how many tries does it take before it finally sticks? In this episode, I will cover the statistics on relapse rates and share all the data that I found on the number of quit attempts that it takes to stay sober for good. You'll learn about what makes sobriety more challenging and what you can do to make this quit attempt your final try. And before we dig in, I'd like to take a moment to say thank you to my sponsors who made this episode possible.

0:45Welcome back to the Sober Powered Podcast. I'm your host, Jill, and today we are talking about how many tries it takes for somebody to get sober. Most of the data on relapse comes from studies of treatment that are focused on people with

1:05Amanda McLoughlin: the most severe addiction problems. But we know that addiction is a spectrum. We have a lot of data on people who attend treatment, some data on people who get sober through AA, and not much on people who get sober through other methods. So that's important to keep in mind as we have this discussion. Addiction is described as a chronically relapsing disorder and many people believe that relapse is a part of recovery. According to 2014 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 58 % of people entering treatment have already been in treatment at least once and more than 50 % of people who leave treatment relapse within 90 days.

1:55Here are some other stats on relapse risk. And again, these are based on people who have received treatment. So people with the most severe addiction issues. So about 40 to 60 % relapse within the first year. And this number can even go up as high as 85%, depending on what type of group you're looking at. Between 40 and 80 % of people have at least one drink within the first year. So that could be considered a lapse or a slip to some and a relapse to others. In the second year, 21.4 % of people relapse. In years three to five, the relapse risk drops down to 9.6%. And after five years, the risk drops to 7.2%.

2:47So you may be thinking, wow, it's still 7 % after five years. but relapse risk will never drop to zero percent. This is about the same risk as a regular person in the general public has of developing a new problem with alcohol. So if you think about it, at about five years, your chance of relapse is similar to a person developing a problem with alcohol. So what prevents relapse? Being vigilant with your self-care, coping skills, and monitoring your lifestyle.

3:25Amanda McLoughlin: We need to develop confidence that we can say no to a drink in all sorts of difficult situations and that we don't need alcohol. I'm about to celebrate five years of sobriety and at this point I truly believe that alcohol has nothing to offer me. When I was struggling to quit and in early sobriety, I could not imagine life without it. So that's possible for you too. So here is some data that we have on the number of quit attempts it takes to be done for good. A 2005 study on about 1 ,200 mostly minority patients who attended publicly funded addiction treatment in the U.S. found that for those who make it to a year or more sober, they drank or used for about 27 years, and it took nine years from when they first entered treatment to when they quit for good.

4:23And these numbers are the median and not the average.

4:27Amanda McLoughlin: In the case of today's episode, the median is useful because an average can be skewed by high numbers. So the median is the middle of a data set. If you think about it with income, it might make more So the average income could be very high because of that top 10 % of rich people skewing the average. But the median income is a better value to use because if you arrange all the incomes from lowest to highest, the median is right in the middle. It isn't skewed by anything. A 2004 study looked at five-year follow-up data on 354 people in recovery who lived in New York City. Most had attended treatment and used peer support groups like AA.

5:1571 % had had experiences where they were one or more months sober, and 50 % had four or more periods of one or more months sober before they got sober for good. So basically, they took some breaks and then went back to drinking and took more breaks and so on. The gap between sober stretches was anywhere from one month to over five years. And two-thirds of the group went back to alcohol and other drug use for a year or more before quitting again.

5:49Amanda McLoughlin: And this is why it's really important not to test out your sobriety or to trick yourself into thinking that you can take breaks and dabble, because you never know if you'll get stuck back in drinking for over a year before you can get out again. I quit in 2017 for a week, and then I went back to drinking for two years. And then I quit for 90 days in early 2019. And then I went back to drinking for six months before I quit for good. So your dabbling could actually lead to six months or more of drinking and suffering. And a 2009 study followed 904 physicians that had attended treatment for over five years.

6:36Amanda McLoughlin: So during this five-year time period, 90 % of the physicians stayed sober. Of the 10 % that did not, only 18 % of those had multiple positive drug tests. So most of them had one slip and then got back on track, basically. socioeconomic status, whether you have mental health comorbidities, where you live, and how many opportunities you have, all influence how many quit attempts you will likely have to go through to be successful. And I'll also argue that with the doctor specifically, they likely had an understanding that if they continued to use drugs and alcohol, they would lose their medical license.

7:23Amanda McLoughlin: That's a really strong motivator. The people that you surround yourself with also impacts your success. Maybe the doctors were surrounded by less people who struggled with addiction themselves. In my experience, I quit drinking while I was working in biotech. I didn't have any threat to my career, and the most that I felt like would happen with work is that I'd be talk to for coming off as lazy and unmotivated. I didn't know anybody else that struggled with addiction. It was just me. I knew some people that liked to go out and party occasionally, but nothing like what I was doing. And yes, I did get some pressure about why can't you just moderate when I quit, but my circle wasn't going to clubs, binge drinking, having house parties, hanging at breweries or doing other alcohol-focused stuff.

8:18Amanda McLoughlin: And that obviously impacted my success. Life in recovery surveys have been conducted in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, but only Canada looked at quit attempts. So shout out to the Canadian listeners. In the US, people spent on average 20.4 years drinking or using, and in Australia, 18.6 years before getting sober. So now this is the average and not the median, so it could be skewed by people that drank for 40 or 50 years. We don't know. The recent Canadian Life and Recovery Survey found that 51.2 % of people had no recurrence of alcohol or drug use after they quit. 14.1 % had one recurrence.

9:1319.4 % had two to five recurrences.

9:18Amanda McLoughlin: And 15 % had six or more before achieving stable sobriety. So most people, when they want to quit, they can quit without too much suffering. And also, not everybody identifies as being in recovery too, so these data may not be totally representative of everybody. A 2019 study published in Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research looked at about 2 ,000 people who had recovered from a significant alcohol or other drug problem from a national representative survey of about 40 ,000 U.S. adults. So in this study, the mean number of quit attempts, so the average, was 5.35 and the median was two. So the average, remember, is skewed by outliers and very high quit attempts for a small number of people.

10:13Amanda McLoughlin: So this is why we look at the median. And the median was only two quit attempts. They found that there was a high variability within the data, meaning that there are likely subgroups. And in my opinion, this could be subgroups of people who are lower on the spectrum, in the middle, and people who have severe addiction issues. Depending where you fall on the spectrum, it may take more attempts for you to be really done for good. People who had more quit attempts were also more likely to be Black, which if you remember the first study that I discussed about minorities, that study found that people generally spent 27 years drinking or using, and then nine years trying to quit after their first time in treatment.

10:59Amanda McLoughlin: People with multiple quit attempts were also more likely to have used support services before, especially peer support groups like AA, NA, Smart Recovery, or online peer support groups. and they were also more likely to be single. The people with more quit attempts also had a greater level of psychological distress once they were in recovery and there was no difference in quality of life, happiness, and self-esteem compared to people who had less quit attempts before getting sober for good. And important to point out too, these qualities are once they are in sustained recovery, not while they're trapped in the back and forth.

11:43So the thought is that the people with

11:46Amanda McLoughlin: more quit attempts may have a lot more stress in general and be more sensitive to that stress, and they may find recovery-related challenges to be more difficult. So if you remember from episode 249, alcohol sensitizes us to stress. So the longer you drink and the more back and forths you do, the more jacked up your nervous system gets. And that takes time to heal. And for recovery related challenges being more difficult, this could represent life circumstances and include things like getting out of debt, which those physicians from the earlier study may have been less likely to struggle with.

12:26Amanda McLoughlin: And it could also be stuff like changing your lifestyle, who you hang out with, what you do in your free time, finding purpose and meaning, and learning how to cope in healthy ways. 13 % of the group of 2 ,000 people, remember, reported zero prior attempts before quitting for good, and 34 % of these use some type of treatment or peer support. So this could reflect a more serious effort to get sober, where people with more quit attempts may take a more dry drunk approach to getting sober in their earlier attempts. I'm going to release an episode on dry drunk syndrome soon, so stay tuned, but this is when you remove alcohol, but you change nothing else and you don't do any work on why you drink.

13:17Amanda McLoughlin: It could also be called white knuckling it. A lot of times these people will do it alone because they don't think that they need any help. So if you white-knuckled it, it may only be a matter of time before you fall back into drinking, or if you take it seriously, that could be more representative of people who have accepted that they need to be done. People with zero quit attempts before they quit for good could also be those who could moderate most of the time, are more sober curious, or quit for health reasons. When they excluded the outliers, the number of quit attempts ranged from zero to eight, with most people being in the one to four attempts range.

14:00Amanda McLoughlin: There was no association between number of quit attempts and age, sex, educational level, or household income. Also interesting, the age that you started drinking or using did not impact the number of quit attempts in this study. But it was found that people who had depression and anxiety had more quit attempts. So it seems like all of these factors, including depression and anxiety, being single, being a minority, increase the quit attempts slightly. And I don't want you to think that you are completely doomed and you shouldn't even try. The data showed that people in these groups had one to five quit attempts where the rest of the people had one to four.

14:46Amanda McLoughlin: So it didn't increase quit attempts by an extreme amount. So what is an actual quit attempt? Because you may be feeling bad about yourself right now because you've had 100 quit attempts and the median is two from this study. So we will discuss this more after we take a quick break to say thank you to one of my sponsors.

15:13Amanda McLoughlin: In my opinion, a quit attempt is different from being trapped in the back and forth. Most of us, we say that we want to quit and then we never make it out of the withdrawal period, which is the first two weeks. I said I wanted to quit drinking a hundred times, but then I drank that same night. That's not actually a real quit attempt. A quit attempt is when you're serious about being done and then you take the appropriate steps to be done. This looks like getting support and being consistent with it, getting the alcohol out of your house if possible, doing the work to navigate triggers, changing your environment and the way that you spend your time to support staying sober and other things like that.

16:00Amanda McLoughlin: It's hard to know when you're not in a real quit attempt until you look back at it later on. And I would just start by asking yourself what your intention is and be honest. is your intention to cure yourself, to moderate, to drink again someday, then that's not a real quit attempt. So you also have to want to quit. I think that I am on my first quit attempt right now, even though I quit for seven days and 90 days before, but those were breaks where I always knew I would drink again. So I can't really count that as a quit attempt when I was trying to moderate. And I know so many of us beat ourselves up for how many times we've tried to quit.

16:46But you have to ask yourself, were those real quit attempts? Or were they moderation attempts? I think the difference between a real quit attempt and trying to moderate or cure yourself is how you think about it.

16:59Amanda McLoughlin: I've said I'm never drinking again probably a thousand times. But I never meant it. I meant I am so frustrated with this life that something has to change here, but I won't stop drinking to change it. Quitting drinking does not fix everything, and it is usually a difficult experience, and that's why many of us don't succeed when we try at first and we have to do multiple breaks. A 2018 study looked at quality of life, self-esteem, happiness, and psychological distress changes when someone quits drinking in the first five years and then in the first 40 years. And they found that in the first five years, there was a significant drop in self-esteem, quality of life, and happiness during the first year, followed by increases in both.

17:57Amanda McLoughlin: Psychological distress increased in year one too, but then it steadily decreased. And from looking at the data, it looks to me like it decreased up until around nine-ish months, and then it started turning back around and increasing. Psychological distress is a state of emotional suffering characterized by symptoms of depression, like loss of interest, unhappiness, and desperateness, and symptoms of anxiety like restlessness and feeling tense. So as you can imagine, this can interfere with our daily life and make the first year very difficult. I'm not saying that you're going to be distressed for a year.

18:41Everybody is different, but you will experience some discomfort. And like I said in episode 248, we can't stay

18:49Amanda McLoughlin: comfortable and get sober. When we remove alcohol, we are faced with all of the problems that alcohol has caused in our lives or the pre-existing problems, along with no way of coping with anything anymore. Whether you intended to or not, you likely used alcohol as a shortcut to feel how you want to feel, to not feel at all, or to be comfortable in situations that made you uncomfortable. and this can feel totally overwhelming for us because we don't have any healthy coping skills yet. It's easy to turn to sugar, other substances, even ones that you don't think are that bad, food, yelling at the people around you or working too much, all to try to disconnect from your emotions and this is just with day-to-day stressors too.

19:42Amanda McLoughlin: We also have to learn how to deal with unexpected, highly triggering situations. If you listened to last week's episode, then you learned a bit about emotion intensity. While you're learning to cope, you're probably going to feel tired from putting so much effort into it and from dealing with all of your stress and emotions when you're not used to doing it. But I promise you, it is not going to require this much effort all the time. Other factors that influence how many quit attempts you may have and if they're successful include your workplace culture, who you spend your time with, socioeconomic status, mental health, and how many opportunities you have.

20:25Amanda McLoughlin: Your mental health can increase or decrease your number of quit attempts. If you have depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, disordered eating, or any other mental health condition, then you have to learn how to manage that along with living life sober. So this adds an extra layer of emotional work when you try to quit. Everyone who has ever mentioned their work to me has always said that their industry has a big drinking culture and most do. But if you work a high stress job like a lawyer or doctor, if you work in industries that involve a lot of partying like tech, finance, entertainment, or hospitality, or if you work at a startup in any industry, then you probably have an extra boost of drinking culture.

21:18Amanda McLoughlin: That could involve regular happy hours and feeling like you have to go or your job will suffer. When I was working in biotech startups, we had a ton of happy hours and they even kept alcohol in the kitchen, stocked at all times because we had so many happy hours. It will be hard to go to these things without drinking in the beginning because we want to fit in and be like everybody else. But eventually if you keep at it you'll realize that this comes from confidence not from alcohol. Who you spend your time with also impacts the number of quit attempts. If you're surrounded by a bunch of people who are drinking and using drugs, then it's going to be in your face.

22:03Amanda McLoughlin: You may also get peer pressure and people asking you to just have one. And some cultures have alcohol deeply ingrained into their celebrations too. Similarly, your friends and what they spend their time doing impacts you too. Are you used to going to the club or the bar all the time? That makes it more difficult to stay sober. Think about where the healthy people who don't care about drinking hang out and then go hang out there. And if you can't find any, then join a sober community and that will get you around people who will be supportive of your goals. Also, the more money you have, the more you can afford things that support your recovery like therapy, coaching, treatment, online communities, gym memberships, sober retreats, and some hobbies that cost money.

22:55Amanda McLoughlin: Lower socioeconomic status and having less opportunities brings extra stress. People that live paycheck to paycheck spend time worrying about the bills and that increases their baseline stress levels. So that could result in them having to work multiple jobs or live somewhere that doesn't feel very safe or comfortable, making it more difficult to not check out with a drink. And I do want to give a gentle reframe for some people, not all. We all have different financial priorities and usually these priorities are for instant gratification things and not for things that are good for our quality of life.

23:42Amanda McLoughlin: For example, a gym membership, therapy, supplements, or healthy food all feel expensive, but ordering Uber Eats, getting drunk at the bar, or impulse purchases on Amazon all feel like a necessary expense or like we deserve it. Really, it should be the other way around. And I am speaking from personal experience. I am the Uber Eats queen. I'm trying to give up the title here, but nobody else wants it. So I am with you. I am not criticizing you. But if you're drinking a bottle of wine a day and you're trying to do it cheap, then that could be like$10 a day or$300 a month. And that's only if you're drinking at home.

24:34If you go out drinking once a week, that could easily jump to$500 to$700 a month. Imagine if you go out multiple times a week. I don't know what you were doing. Drinking alcohol, the amount that we like to drink is really expensive. So as I've spent more and more time sober and doing the work, my priorities have started to change.

24:57Amanda McLoughlin: My husband and I have saved a ton of money just from me getting sober. And it's not just the money that I spent on alcohol. It's the comfort purchases, the food that we have to buy to try to cure our hangovers, or that one time that I had to go buy the same pair of boots that I bought a few days earlier because I got drunk, threw up on them, and ruined them. Now I prioritize spending money on things that support my mental health, fitness, sense of calm, and things that will form a memory, not just a temporary comfort. And I wouldn't say that we're lucky, obviously, because we're not. But if you're struggling to get sober and you need support and you do not have the finances, well, this podcast is free, so keep listening.

25:51Amanda McLoughlin: But please also go to AA and work with a sponsor. That is free. And we're really lucky that free help is available because with many issues, free help is not an option. Being able to work with a sponsor one-on-one and have that accountability all for free is pretty awesome. So how many quit attempts does it take to finally quit drinking for good? Well, it's different for everyone. It seems to be between one and eight attempts with the median being about two. And remember, these are serious quit attempts where you actually want to quit drinking, not where you want to take a break so then you can moderate someday.

26:38If you're struggling and you still feel

26:40Amanda McLoughlin: like you want to moderate, even though you know that you can't, more support helps with this too. Not everybody is going to have that rock bottom moment that gets them to acceptance and makes it click, but more support can help it click for you. So get some more support, make your next quit attempt really count, and I will talk to you next week.

27:13Thank you.