The Art and Science of Cutting Back

Now, I’m not here to try and sell you on the purported health benefits of Kombucha. There’s plenty of Kombucha companies out there that will be more than happy to evangelize for ya. I’m in this game for the flavor. The kombucha I drink is generally homemade – my wife and I will juice a bunch of fresh citrus that we get from making bitters, then brew up some tea, and start feeding our little SCOBY bug that sits in the cabinet. SCOBY, by the way, is an acronym that means “Stable Colony of Bacteria and Yeast,” and yes, it’s a little disconcerting in the same way that a sourdough starter is creepily alive. But if you can get past that, maintaining a SCOBY allows you to make a batch of Kombucha whenever you start running low, and my favorite thing to do is to add flavored seltzer that I think will complement the flavor of the Kombucha, and then also add a few strategic dashes of bitters to round everything out.

If you’d like to make your own Kombucha at home, check out the following resources to get started!

• Beginners Guide To Fermentation: Kombucha Making – Pro Home Cooks

• How to Make Kombucha Tea at Home – The Kitchn

THE PROBLEM WITH MARATHON CLEANSES

For a few years now, I’ve been quietly skeptical about marathon cleanses like “Dry January” and “Sober October.” Whenever I see a rhyme or a catchy name being used to sell something to the general public, I’m immediately on alert. For me, It has all the charm and substance of a radio giveaway or Taco Tuesday. The rhyme seems like an excuse to do something that you could do any day or week or month of the year.

This is not to say that I have a problem with cleanses in general or large chunks of time spent not imbibing. I’ve done them myself, and I’ve actually tended to do them at times of the year that are not October or January. If nothing else, they’re interesting experiments that can teach you something about yourself.

But in this episode, the key point isn’t so much learning about yourself, but rather affecting meaningful and sustainable change in your lifestyle. Those are two related, but different things, and I think that trendy cleanse months are actually set up in a way that works against lasting change for a couple reasons. And here they are.

Wet vs. Dry Societies

First, they encourage an “all-or-nothing” mindset, rather than a curious or moderate mindset. This is particularly dangerous for me because I have a very “immoderate” personality. If I’m doing something, I’m doing it all the way. I’m going big…which means that the days and weeks following my month of sobriety are very probably going to be filled with very liberal drinking subsidized by the fact that I just martyred myself by taking a whole month off.

To me, this sort of forced privation generally leads to bad behavior with bad logic to back it up, and it reminds me of a conversation I had on the podcast a while back with author Mark Forsyth stemming from his book, A Short History of Drunkenness.

Mark draws a distinction between “wet” and “dry” societies and how they tend to act. In wet societies, there’s a little bit of drinking a lot of the time, and in dry societies, there’s a lot of drinking on a few key occasions. In wet societies, alcohol is no big deal, but in many dry societies, alcohol is taboo.

To be blunt, I’m a proponent of a “wet” or “Mediterranean” drinking culture precisely because it’s the sort of “moderating” influence I benefit from in my personal life. As an immoderate person, I aspire to moderation, which is why I tend to avoid “all or nothing” drinking cleanses. You might not be like me, which is fine. But I feel like coming out against Dry January is a bit of a faux pas in today’s cocktail culture, so I figured I’d back it up with some evidence.

What’s so Virtuous about Booze Fasts?

Now, the other reason why I’m not crazy about fad alcohol fasts is that they imply virtue without defining it. Clearly, if you take part in the monotheistic, capitalistic culture of winter holidays in the United States, then you’re probably going to be putting on a few extra pounds over Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and other festive occasions like Friendsgivings, holiday parties, and cookie swaps. That means, if you want to stay in shape, you’ve either got some preparation to do on the front end, or some atonement to do on the back end (and maybe a little bit of both).

So, is it a coincidence that Sober October and Dry January perfectly book-end this waistband-extending season? Probably not.

Here’s the landscape:

We’ve got a sober period before we go absolutely hog-wild on the turkey and stuffing at Thanksgiving (my personal favorite culinary holiday), then we have a 6-week period when we permit ourselves to break out rich and fattening recipes that are reserved for this very festive time of year, then we have a night when we get drunk and welcome in a new calendar year, and then we have another month of self-flagellation and (largely failed) attempts at New Year’s Resolutions. Because we’re disgusted with ourselves, and we’re going to make things radically different next year, we promise! We promise. It’s gonna happen this time.

And then it doesn’t.

In general, I’ve found that you get healthy the same way you get unhealthy, which is: little by little. And so measures that affect the small, everyday decisions you make tend to have much more meaningful effects than avoiding single, large-scale health events (like a calorie-heavy, drunken New Year’s Eve).

Enthymemes: What’s Left Unsaid

The bookended fast months on either end of November and December are marketed as what we might consider enthymemes, which are arguments that skip over one or more premises based on the assumption that cultural knowledge will reliably fill in the gaps.

Here’s a traditional example of an enthymeme:

• Premise: Socrates is human.

• Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is Mortal

What’s being skipped over here is the premise that all humans are mortal, but because we’re all humans, we intuitively understand this, so it’s not a major faux pas to skip over that little piece of unnecessary information. BUT what if I were to make the following case:

• Premise: Sober October and Dry January are healthy for you because they allow your body to detoxify itself

• Conclusion: Sober October and Dry January are therefore virtuous events to participate in.

Now, I would argue that the premise that’s missing from this conversation is that we do a lot of debaucherous things during November and December and explain them away with various excuses: tradition, religion, family, stress, etc.

And the reason why I have a problem with the virtuousness of a Sober October or a Dry January isn’t because they’re not good things to do, but because we’re ALL (COLLECTIVELY) pretending that they somehow absolve us of the need to moderate our intake during the holidays. I know none of these things are stated, but that’s the nature of enthymemes – something is always implied, and what’s being implied is almost always what you need to dig into if you want to get to the heart of the issue.

So to summarize, I’m suspicious of Sober October and Dry January not because I think cleanses aren’t in some way valuable, but because they’re engineered around our own cultural comfort with self-delusion and our perhaps misguided belief that the body can be balanced like a check book: 2 months of saintly behavior in exchange for 2 months of over-consumption.

p class=””>I remember once being told – after complaining about something – that it’s not very helpful to just complain. You need to offer up a solution if you’re coming to the table as an adult. So this past January, while I was listening to a lot of virtue signaling on social media about going dry,  I decided to start plotting my solution.

For me, it comes in the form of a daily personal accountability journal, which is not so much a journal as it is a checklist bounded by intentions. I’m going to describe it here and give you some rationales for why I engineered it the way I did.

You can look at a blank example of my journal by clicking this link.

How the Journal Is Set Up

It starts at the top with a date. This is useful because especially when you work from home or own a small business like I do, it’s easy to lose track of what day it is. I like the date. I think it helps keep things organized.

After that, I have what I call an “intention for the day.” This is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s a form of mindfulness practice in that it asks you to slow down and put THIS day in context with all the rest of the days. You take a little internal temperature check by asking, “how am I feeling about today?”, and then you can write down an intention that predicts what might lay in store for you while also making a plan for how you’ll handle it.

On April first of this year, my intention was simply: “Find things to enjoy amidst all the running around.” Clearly as I was filling out my daily accountability journal, I realized I was going to be running a lot of errands all over the city that day, and I wanted to make a conscious effort to locate some moments of calm or delight during an otherwise jam-packed day.

The day before that, the intention was: “Have a good podcast interview. Do good for the body.” Clearly, that day was less packed for me, so I decided to really emphasize a couple aspects of my day that I felt were important.

Because I have this journal-style checklist formatted on a single, 8.5” x 11” piece of paper, and because there’s very little other writing on the page besides check marks, the intention for the day is something your eyes will run across again and again when you interact with the sheet, so it’s almost like a little tuning fork that can remind you to reset if you’re starting to feel scattered. This is just one of the fun little affordances of this accountability tool.

After the intention, the bulk of the sheet is taken up by a checklist that I chose to split up into four categories: Circadian Health, Physical Health, Professional Health, and Family Health.

I start with Circadian health because this is going to be the first thing you fill out in the morning in that it refers to your behavior the previous night. The data points here are: bedtime before 10:30, Wake up before 6:30, and Zero day on Previous day. These are the hallmarks of a healthy sleeping routine: A reasonably early bedtime, a solid amount of high quality sleep, and a reasonably early wake up time.

• 64 oz of water consumed – that’s a half gallon.

• 1 large serving of vegetables (salad or assorted cooked)

• Full serving multivitamins (I use Vitamin Code for men)

• 3+ mile run or 5 mile hike

• 100 push-ups

• 20 mins stretching

• 20 mins meditation

• Gym Workout (which, for obvious reasons hasn’t been a super viable option recently)

In the professional health category, I have:

• Read 10+ pages or 1 major chapter of an important book

• Write, record, or schedule a podcast (or make major progress)

• Generate, sell, or fulfill a meaningful amount of inventory

• Send 1-3 emails you’ve been putting off

Lastly, in the family health category, the list items include:

• Do something thoughtful for (or fun with) my wife

• Provide meaningful exercise and/or training for the dog

• Do 2 daily chores or 1 major project around the house

That is a complete rundown of the list. As you can tell, it’s stuff that’s important to me – you might have a completely different list. But the question remains: how is this a tool to cut down on drinking?

How to “Game-ify” Productivity and Cut Back on Drinking

Well, in order to “gamify” this list a little, I assign point values to each item according to how important or difficult they are to accomplish. So for example, most of the time-consuming exercise stuff counts for 2 points, whereas the easy stuff like vitamins and water drinking counts for 1 point.

At the bottom of the page, I have an end-of-the-day tally with a key that ties the point count to a number of allowed drinks. So for example, less than 10 points equals no drinks, 10 – 14 points equals one drink, and 15 points or more earns me 2 drinks.

Finally, the very last item on the sheet is another kind of intention. It simply asks: What am I drinking to celebrate? This is another mindfulness and gratitude exercise that makes the process of making a drink a bit more special and reminds me to really savor it, rather than mindlessly guzzling.

So now that you know what my daily accountability journal looks like – in all its simplicity – let me tell you about some of the psychological and physical levers that I’m pulling to try and make a healthier lifestyle.

First off, if you’re trying to cut back on drinking, it seems like you probably like drinking, so why not use it as a high value reward for getting things done? We do this with the dog – for certain types of treats, like ice cubes or carrots, he’s mildly motivated, but with others, like salmon skin or chicken gizzards (gross, I know), he’s your guy; he’ll do anything you want. So it makes sense to try and reward yourself with something you REALLY like. If you want to use something different for your reward, go for it! This process is extremely customizable, so use the reward that you think will work best for you.

Next, there’s something about having a physical list in front of you that you have to interact with a number of times throughout the day that keeps you much more on-track than a digital list or an app on your phone. This checklist is part of my physical workspace. I print out a sheet first thing in the morning, record my circadian health and my daily intention over coffee, and then check back in with it 5-10 times throughout the day. For example, if I need a break from, say, writing a podcast episode, I’ll stand up, grab the checklist, and see if there’s something I can knock out in the meantime, like a set of pushups or one of those 2 daily chores I need to knock out. This frequent exposure to the many bite-sized tasks you want to get done every day really allows you to keep yourself honest and not put them off. So I highly recommend printing off a physical sheet that will have a real presence in your daily routine if you want to get the most out of it.

You’ll also notice that my list is filled with 3 basic types of items:

• things that are easy to do, but also easy to let slip through the cracks (like water, vitamins, full serving of vegetables, daily chores),

• things that are important to do but easy to fall behind on (like getting consistently good sleep, staying on top of podcast scheduling and sales),

• things that take some time but have an oversized impact on quality of life (like exercising the dog, doing something thoughtful for or fun with my wife, and getting a major dose of exercise each day).

The first set of things represent easy wins. I can rack up lots of points quickly by doing these easy, little tasks (most of which involve consuming something). So after a 10 second dose of vitamins, I get a point. I feel productive, and I just made sure that it wasn’t going to slip through the cracks that day. The more you check off, the better you feel, which makes you more motivated to tackle the harder-to-accomplish tasks.

Maybe for you, vitamins aren’t where you want to focus. But maybe it’s flossing, or something else like that you consistently fail at. Doesn’t matter – just make sure you have a sprinkling of easy wins on your list, and you’ll be off to a great start.

How to Make the Most Out of Your Journal

Now, I will say that if you use this approach seriously, you’re probably going to end up making some structural changes or acquiring some tools that enhance your ability to get things done. In my case, I decided that I finally wanted to bite the bullet and get a FitBit to help track my sleep quality and exercise. I also decided that I needed to get some books heading my way if I wanted to read more, which meant a trip to Amazon and browsing the DC library’s online offerings.

So since starting this daily accountability practice, I’ve been supplementing my circadian and physical health metrics with data from the FitBit, and also tending a growing list of books that I want to read. These things were not in my life before the list, so they’re minor structural changes, but changes nonetheless.

A couple last things that I want to mention here:

First, one of the most valuable things about this list is that if you get a week or two worth of sheets and go through them, you can really quickly identify those things you consistently crush, and also the list items that you tend to avoid. So for example, if, six months down the road, I realize that I haven’t missed a single day of taking vitamins, maybe that means it’s officially burned into my brain that I need to do that, but I’ve done a comparably awful job at prioritizing stretching or meditation. Well, maybe in this case delete the vitamins, and incentivize the meditation by making it worth more points. If you assign it a higher value, then you’re more likely to give it your attention.

This leads me to one other important piece of advice: make sure you give your list some time for refinement. When I first started doing this list, I was drinking a gallon of water each day, twice as much as I drink currently. And honestly, it wasn’t worth it. I spent my entire day running to the bathroom to the point where I was being less productive as a result. I wasn’t feeling any health benefits from my gallon of water, so I ended up dialing it back. I’m much happier with 64 oz, which is your standard 8 glasses a day. Also, as my wife and I started doing more hikes with our dog, I was able to make the connection that – a 5 mile hike with lots of elevation change was giving me just as much exercise as a 3 mile run, so I made that item more flexible. And the great thing about doing one of these hikes is that it counts for 2 points worth of exercise, as well as a point for exercising the dog and a point for doing something fun with my wife. So by simply giving myself options like the run OR the hike, I can decide which is going to be the best option on a given day. I’m not saying you should make all your tasks stackable like this one, but it’s kinda fun when you can make progress on multiple items at once. A more trivial example of this might be taking vitamins while eating salad for lunch and drinking water while reading a book. I can do all four of those things pretty much simultaneously and not at the expense of one another.

How I Benefitted From This Process

Since picking up this daily accountability practice, I’ve definitely been more mindful in my day-to-day activities. I’ve made really great progress on the sleep front, which was something I used to be good at before starting a small business, so it feels nice to start correcting a part of my life that has definitely been neglected in recent years. And for me, having this list is an almost fool-proof antidote for boredom because if the question is: “what should I do now?” Chances are, the accountability journal probably still has a few boxes that need to be checked.

I want to reiterate that I chose this approach precisely because I have an immoderate personality and I wanted to work a sense of routine and moderation into my life. In French, the phrase for “I am happy” is “je suis content,” “I am content,” and contentedness, I think, is a difficult thing to achieve in general, let alone during a stressful pandemic. This contentedness is exactly what Sober October, Dry January, and the orgastic holiday period in between stand in opposition to. You’re always vacillating between extremes rather than locating and sinking into the rhythms that make every day happy and productive. So to sum up the mission of the daily accountability journal, it is to build healthy practices into your life so that eventually they become part of who you are and to design your day around things that will make you happy and help you achieve your goals.

For me, the goal was cutting back on drinking, but I’m sure you could use this approach to affect lots of different types of change in your life.

I’m Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik. I hope this was at least a little bit helpful in thinking about booze fasts and other ways to drink smarter and healthier. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you again soon.