MANSFIELD — Chris Dingess wasn’t trying to give up drinking. When she decided to forego alcoholic beverages for a month, she viewed it as a reset.
“I just intended to scale back, take a break,” said Dingess, a sales and marketing director in Mansfield.
Last year, Dingess decided to do “Dry January” — a trendy health challenge to give up alcohol for the first 31 days of the year.
It wasn’t as hard as she expected. In fact, she felt so good she challenged herself to go 100 days. Then six months. Finally, she rang in 2024 with a year of sobriety under her belt.
Dingess said she has no plans to sample a beer anytime soon. In fact, she’s joined a growing number of people who are re-examining their alcohol consumption.
For some, being “sober curious” merely means cutting back or giving up alcohol for a period of time. For others, it’s a permanent change.
Richland Source spoke to several area residents who have chosen to go alcohol-free. Some did so simply for the health benefits. Others went cold turkey in an effort to change bad habits or to support someone else in their attempts to give up drinking.
They all said they never expected to be alcohol-free forever, but have since embraced sobriety.
Social worker Lindsay Coulter said she gave up drinking in 2018 to support her husband and save their marriage.
“I never really intended to be 100 percent (alcohol free), nor did I initially think it was going to be a lifelong commitment. But here we are,” she said.
“My husband and I have different motivators, but for each of us it has definitely gotten easier.”
‘It’s just kind of empowering’
Brad and Cassie Runkle are the parents of a 4-year-old and owners of ab0v. Bottle Shop, a locally-based online retailer that sells a variety of non-alcoholic beverages.
“I struggled with alcohol for awhile in my 20s. As I got into my 30s, postpartum depression, the pandemic — I was just having a really hard time not drinking,” Cassie said.
The couple launched the company after going sober last year. They said they both feel healthier and more energetic after making the switch.
“I lost 15 pounds pretty quick, which was pretty exciting,” Cassie said. “I feel more clear, I sleep better.”
Cassie said she thinks she’d feel mentally and physically weighed down by an alcoholic beverage now. Her husband agrees.
“We used to take Prilosec every day for acid reflux,” he said. “We stopped taking them when we stopped drinking.”
The Runkles aren’t the only ones who have experienced physical and mental-health benefits from abstinence.
Dingess said she gets better sleep and is less bloated now that’s she’s no longer drinking. She also feels more clearheaded and less anxious.
“Nobody’s gonna look at me and think I’m any different than I was a year ago. But I can tell on the inside,” she said.
“My confidence is different. My energy levels are different. The way I approach things is different. It’s just kind of empowering.”
The Runkles say not drinking has forced them to reinvent how they unwind at the end of the day.
“One of the biggest challenges though, was rewiring our brains to not include alcohol in our daily routine,” Brad said. “We’ve had to kind of train our brains to get creative and say ‘Hey, let’s play a board game.'”
Cassie said the couple now has more time and energy to try new things together.
“It’s really enriched our relationship,” she said
‘There shouldn’t be a social stigma around not drinking’
Dingess said she can comfortably socialize with peers with a glass of water in hand, but it wasn’t always so easy.
After Dry January was up, she began to worry what people would think.
“When I first decided to take a break, that made me want to be very private about it because I did not want the stigma,” she said.
Dingess said she’s become more outspoken about her choice to not drink because she wants to help dispel the myths about sobriety.
“If someone wants to give up alcohol, that doesn’t mean that they hit rock bottom. It doesn’t mean that there was a life-altering situation happening,” she said.
“I’m not on a kick to get people to stop drinking. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s just, ‘If you don’t want to drink, then you don’t have to.”
Coulter said she sometimes gets frustrated with the way others view sobriety.
“I feel sometimes like my sobriety is actually a kind of rebellion,” she said. “Nobody truly respects sobriety. It’s constantly called into question, things constantly need to be re-stated.
“Alcohol is different from other substances because we always seem to have to explain to everyone why we don’t use it. It seems like people feel entitled to know the reason why someone chooses to turn down alcohol.”
Her advice to others who may be struggling with sobriety is to be self-aware.
“You have to watch your triggers and stay away from places and people that don’t enable your sobriety,” she said.
The Runkles said one of the biggest myths they hear about sobriety is that it’s boring.
“I feel like it’s so ingrained in our culture, ‘You’re just no fun if you don’t drink’ and that’s totally not true,” Cassie said. “You do not need alcohol to have fun or be yourself.”