3 Ways I Find Calm Without a Glass of Wine
Exploring an alternative way to ‘feel the feelings’, marking this year’s Alcohol Awareness Week (6th - 12th July 2026)
My last ever drink was a pint of beer at Venice Airport. August 2018. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was it for me and alcohol.
I wasn’t drinking because life was a party. I was drinking because I was numbing out. I’d been carrying a kind of sadness for years that I didn’t really know how to face, and a glass of wine (or three) was the easiest way I knew to switch it off for a while.
I took what was meant to be a year off. I joined a community of people doing the same thing, and watching them build genuinely brilliant lives without alcohol... it lit something in me. What if, instead of reaching for a drink every time things felt hard, I actually learned some other way to cope? Because if I’m honest, at that point I didn’t really have one.
That first year changed almost everything. I saved a stupid amount of money. Bought my first car in eight years. Lost four stone. Started cycling to work instead of getting the bus. Finally saved a deposit and bought my first house after nearly twenty years of renting. And somewhere in there, I met Matt, who is now my husband, after years of relationships that just... didn’t work.
Here’s the bit nobody really warns you about though: when you take the alcohol away, you don’t just lose the hangovers. You lose the rose-tinted glasses too. Friendships, jobs, relationships, they all came into view in full technicolour, and some of what I saw was uncomfortable. Overwhelming, even. I missed the buzz, that loose, free feeling of letting your worries go for an evening. I did not miss the highs and lows, the shame, the regret of one drink turning into five.
So I had to find something to put in alcohol’s place. Not one big dramatic fix, just a few honest, ordinary things I could lean on instead. These are the three that actually stuck.
1. I learned to sit with what I was avoiding, properly
Talking therapy and CBT did a lot of the early heavy lifting. Alcohol had been my crutch for not feeling things, and once it was gone, I had to actually feel them. That’s uncomfortable work, but it’s also where the real stress relief came from, not from numbing it, from understanding it. Meditation became part of that toolkit too: a way to notice what was coming up without immediately needing to fix or flee it.
2. I moved my body instead of medicating my mind
Cycling to work instead of taking the bus sounds like a small thing. It wasn’t. Movement became one of my main tools for nervous system regulation, a way to burn off the restlessness that used to send me towards a glass of wine at 6pm. These days it’s running too. There’s something about a hard run or a long cycle that does what alcohol used to promise and never quite delivered: it actually lets the tension go.
3. I found sound, and sound found me
This one came later, but it’s become the biggest. Sound therapy gave me a way to access that same loose, letting-go feeling I used to chase with a drink, without the comedown. Lying under a blanket of gong and crystal bowl sound, breathing slowly while everything else falls away... that’s relaxation without the regret. It’s no accident that so many of the people who come to my Friday night sound baths at Old Glossop Scout Hut are looking for exactly this: a different way to unwind at the end of a long week, one that doesn’t involve a hangover the next morning.
I think a lot of us know, somewhere underneath it, that alcohol isn’t really helping with our anxiety or our stress. But we’re told from every direction that it’s simply what you do: to celebrate, to commiserate, to mark the end of a day or a birthday or Christmas. So we never quite get the chance to find out what else might work.
I’m not going to pretend giving it up was easy, or that everyone needs to. But if you’ve ever wondered what’s actually underneath that nightly glass of wine, or whether there might be another way to switch off, those three things, talking it through, moving my body, and sound, are what got me there. Seven years on, they still do.
If you fancy trying the sound bath route for yourself, I run regular sessions in Glossop and across the Peak District, including our Friday nights at Old Glossop Scout Hut. No experience needed, just bring yourself and a blanket.
