Drink Free Days, how did I do in 2021?

I wrote a post a year ago about the important of taking days off drinking throughout the year, not just during ‘Dry January’, ‘Stoptember’ or ‘Sober October’.

In that post I mentioned I’d started counting how many drink-free days I took that year (albeit only from June onwards).

Well, I carried on counting.

In fact I counted right through 2021. And now seems like a good time to share with you how I did.

I totted up 155 dry days in total. Here’s how they were distributed throughout the year.

January	15
February	25
March	17
April	12
May	8
June	10
July	10
August	11
September	9
October	9
November	16
December	13

The figure is February is particularly high because I broke my arm, and spent a week in hospital followed by a spell on some pretty full-on painkillers and antibiotics. That kept me off the booze whether I liked it or not.

But overall I’ve managed to keep to what I regard as a pretty good level of drink-free days spread throughout the year.

And this doesn’t mean I’ve compressed a year’s-worth of raging into the remaining days, either. Plenty of those — most, even — were nights where I had only one or maybe two drinks at home.

Working alongside the drinks trade means there can be pressure to drink all the time. Someone always has something they want you to taste. So I feel like it’s especially important for me to make sure I have regular days off. But the truth is that everyone can benefit from taking a more measured approach to how much, and how often, they drink.

Do you know how often you had a drink-free day last year? And are you happy with that, or would you like to do better this year? Let me know in the comments.