Why 75 Million Are Participating in Dry or Dryish January w/ Sunnyside Co-Founder Ian Andersen
Welcome back to Journey to the Sunnyside. I'm Mike Hardenbrook, and today I'm hanging out with Ian Anderson, one of the cofounders here at Sunnyside. And today we're talking about why over 75000000 people are jumping in on some version of dry or dryish Jan. 0 this year. We'll dig into what's driving this movement, some surprising stats, and why taking a break from alcohol, even if it's just cutting back, can make a massive impact.
Speaker 1:Ian's also sharing how Sunnyside's dryish January challenge makes it easier than ever to reset without all the pressure of going fully dry. So whether you're thinking about making a change or just curious about what it's all about, stay tuned for today's episode.
Speaker 2:This is gonna be a fun 1 because Ian is actually a really good friend of mine. We started out working together. He is just as much part of this podcast as I am. We started talking little over a year ago now, and he is responsible for greenlighting this project that we've been doing. And it's just been an amazing ride.
Speaker 2:So, Ian, thanks for coming on today.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be back. This is gonna be fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, you know, I didn't mention here that Ian is 1 of the cofounders here at Sunnyside. And we're gonna talk a little bit about his role here, some of the upcoming projects, what Sunnyside is really up to these days. And on my list of things that I have here is just to talk about who is Ian. So, Ian, I'm gonna be a little stupid and funny and say, Ian, who are you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I can definitely start there. Well, I I recorded a podcast with you already, a couple months ago, so I won't spend too much time here. In in that podcast, I I delve into a lot more of my background when it comes to how Sunnyside got started. But, I'm the cofounder of Sunnyside.
Speaker 3:I run growth and marketing, but obviously also a lot of other strategy and operations with my cofounder, Nick Allen. And I have a personal history with alcohol that is more related to my family. I lost my mom to alcohol when I was 11. I lost a couple of grandparents from alcohol related issues. And, in my sort of more recent generation, my my aunt struggled with alcohol significantly.
Speaker 3:So, growing up, alcohol was always had a complicated place in my life. And, I thought for a while, I would never touch alcohol just because it's sort of this scary thing that's impacting my family so much. But I did start dabbling in high school and found that I really enjoyed it, which worried me a little bit. And I think I went through a a pretty typical process that a lot of us do. I I had fun with alcohol in college, got out of college and got into sort of the tech workforce and found myself overdoing it, a bit in 02/18.
Speaker 3:I should say quite a bit. I mean, I'm I could be honest with myself. I was I I got to a point where I wasn't happy with how much I was consuming and I was, very sort of, high functioning. I mean, it it never impacted my work, but it started getting to the point where it was creeping in on my relationships and my ability to be present. And I didn't like that.
Speaker 3:So I I took a couple months off, started tracking my drinks. And from there, I I would say I became a much more mindful drinker just naturally. But then I found my way to Sunnyside, this project that Nick and I started four years ago. And since then, my whole perspective on alcohol has changed dramatically. And, I would say it starts with education, as as the foundation for me personally.
Speaker 3:And I think when you join Sunnyside as as a member, we help you get educated about alcohol as 1 of the first things as well as take simple steps toward habit change, like tracking your drinks. And talking about green lighting, this podcast. I mean, this whole podcast is 1 of my favorite projects we've ever done at Sunnyside and has really taken off. And the foundation of the podcast, the idea of it was to have a much better way to educate people than we've ever had about how alcohol impacts people, society, families, individuals, and just how we can make better personal decisions around alcohol. So thank you, mate.
Speaker 3:It's for picking us such as success.
Speaker 2:I love it. I I love the the more conversations that I have, the more normal your even though it's personal to you, the more normal and the more typical that you hear of this, You always think that, oh, somehow I'm different. You know, my relationship, maybe some some place went astray, and all of a sudden you think you're different. But the more conversations that I have here and the more interactions that we have with Sunnyside members and your own personal history and Nick's history, the other cofounder, and other people that are on the team, you start to realize that this is a very normal thing. And, luckily, 1 of the more normal things about it is that people are starting to become more mindful about it, that they actually wanna talk about it.
Speaker 2:They actually say, hey. You know, I don't necessarily think that I have, like, this major problem, but I definitely am in a place that I wanna make a change. And, you know, I think that just normalizing that conversation is, really important these days.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I love that. I I definitely had this sort of trepidation around starting to make a change. So for example, when I took those three months off in 2018, there's the social situations that you get nervous about. Like, how am I how am I gonna tell people that I'm not drinking?
Speaker 3:Are they gonna judge me? Will my, wife or then partner, judge me? Will my will my brother who I like to drink with judge me? And, Mike, like, you could probably guess what happened. Nobody said a thing.
Speaker 3:I mean Yeah. Or if they did say something, they were like, oh, you look great. You look like you're you're you're getting healthier. What what's your secret? And, it really more or less becomes a conversation starter.
Speaker 3:To your point, I think most people who are drinking, we we find that actually the the data, we should always come back to the data. Forty nine percent of, US adults who drink alcohol in multiple studies have said that they wanna cut back on their drinking. But we've we found that around only ten to twenty percent do something about it. And, that just speaks volumes to the fact that, like, probably the person that you normally drink with on a Friday night is having that inkling too that they wanna get cut back, especially as they age into their later twenties and thirties and alcohol starts to impact us more. So, it's common.
Speaker 3:And at Sunnyside, we accept everybody. And, like, you will join a community of people exactly like you when you when you start, your Sunnyside membership and you'll feel, loved. You'll you'll feel the kindness and you'll feel no pressure to ever quit drinking, which just makes it a great community for anyone that wants to cut back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The welcomeness is probably 1 of my favorite parts about it is that all
Speaker 3:of a
Speaker 2:sudden you step into something, and it's just, hey. We're gonna make a change. We're gonna do some experiments. Doesn't have to be super serious. We're gonna, you know, start seeing the benefits and all celebrate together.
Speaker 2:And, you know, that small percentage of people that you said that actually do something about it, the good thing about this conversation that we're having right now is that it's even more normalized. It's Dec. 0 moving to Jan. 0, and people typically make their changes on the first of
Speaker 3:the year.
Speaker 2:And you showed me, this graph recently about the trend, about people that are actually wanting to make a change related to alcohol that it's actually growing. Why don't you talk about that graph?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. So what I think you're referring to is I I sent you some data around the term dry January. Yeah. And the search volume for that term on Google Trends.
Speaker 3:It's a really simple way to understand how things are sort of changing in consumer behavior and insights. As much as at Sunnyside, we would want every month to be like dry January where there's this, like, momentous event, in the country and in the world where people are like collectively thinking about Draculas. It it doesn't quite like that. And so in Jan. 0, The numbers that we see are that 75000000 US adults are going to participate in this thing called dry January.
Speaker 3:In 1 way or another, either they are going to commit to going fully dry or they're going to dabble in some way in improving their relationship to alcohol. Seventy five million US adults. And actually that was from a civic science report from analyzing cohort of data. And if we look at Google trends over the past five years or so, interest in Drive January has shot way up. It, like, doubled from, like, 2022 to 2023, and then went up rather significantly from 2023 to 2424.
Speaker 3:So we can estimate that about 75000000 us adults will partake in dry January one way or another in 2025. But we can also guess that it'll be higher than that this year, as the concept of taking a reset in Jan. 0 becomes more accepted and just more of a cultural movement, I would say. So that's the, that's the number that I was referring to. And, obviously at Sunnyside, we're gonna be ready for that and helping put the best system in place for people to get started if if they want to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the graph itself, I know it's we're talking audio here, so it's pretty hard to imagine it. But I when you when you posted the actual image, it was, you know, this trend that just, like, directly up into the right. And
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:If it's 75000000, refresh my actual, knowledge on The US. What percentage is that? Is that, like, 25% of the population?
Speaker 3:I had I had this somewhere. I just, yeah, I just had this. So I think it's about, yeah, I think it's 25% of The US population. I we can pull it up somewhere else. But, Yes, I believe it's about 25% of The US population.
Speaker 3:So, and for folks that are in like the 25, 20 1 to 30 age range, I think it's, even higher than folks in the later age age ranges. So it seems to so show a really high motivation for sort of the younger generations that already have, sort of a newfound relationship to alcohol, sort of a healthier relationship to alcohol act like, really getting motivated around this this month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's pretty crazy. If you think about it, if you're at a party or whatever and you're having drinks and, you know, it's the holidays, of course, people tend to let loose a little bit. But if you look around that party, chances are if if there's even just 10 people in the room, there are gonna be a couple people in that room that are thinking about Yeah. Doing something in Jan.
Speaker 2:0 to change their drinking.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So we have dry January. And here at Sunnyside, we do something called dryish January.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:So if anybody is not familiar with what that is, why don't you inform the audience here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks. So before we get into dryish January, which I think is pretty obvious what we're doing there, but we'll define it more precisely. I think it's worth giving a shout out to dry January, the formal campaign. So dry January was started by alcohol change UK, many years ago.
Speaker 3:And it was a it was a movement for people to sign up to upstate from alcohol in the month of Jan. 0. And it's really picked up, like, global attention at this point. That's where the term dry January comes from. It comes from this nonprofit called alcohol change UK.
Speaker 3:We love we love everything that they do. At Sunnyside, we started our dryish January challenge about a year and a half after we had started Sunnyside. And we had a lot of data on the motivations of people that were coming to Sunnyside. And we know now that what we set out to do at study side was to create a system for changing your relationship to alcohol that was focused not on perfection, but on progress. It was focused on moderation and mindfulness and not sobriety.
Speaker 3:That's what we wanted to build. We wanted people to have this front door to start making a change to their relationship to alcohol. Because all of the other systems that we saw out there were really focused on sobriety and tracking sober streaks. And for Nick and I, that didn't feel right. As people that were still drinking and had sort of rebuilt our relationship to alcohol and weren't ready to quit, we knew that we weren't the only people in that boat.
Speaker 3:So we set out to create this sort of moderation mindfulness approach. We interviewed our members and we found that ninety six percent of people that joined Sunnyside are drinking substantially less after ninety days. But something like, ninety two percent of them still drink alcohol. So with that stat in hand, we found that we actually had, we have found something that spoke to a huge swath of people that drink up the ones that wanna make a change, those forty nine percent, but don't wanna quit. And so when we wanted to approach our dry, dry Jan.
Speaker 3:0, we said it didn't feel right to make it to call it dry Jan. 0 for us. That that wasn't didn't really fit our, our mission. So we called it dry ish Jan. 0.
Speaker 3:And what we do is we just we simply make it easier than ever to sign up for Sunnyside. When you sign up for the dry ish Jan. 0 challenge, you are given, I think 5 options now on how you want your challenge to look in Jan. 0, you can go fully dry, which is pretty classic. Obviously you can cut your drinks by 50%.
Speaker 3:You can taper your drinks by 30% over the course of the month. We have this 1 where you can, Not drink on. Week nights. And so it'll make you fully drive Monday through Friday. And give you the option to have a couple of drinks on Friday and Saturday.
Speaker 3:What this does is it kind of gives you the chance to experience stacked dry days in a way that you might not have done in a long time. But also enjoy a little bit of imbibing on the weekends. So you might want to still enjoy those social drinks. And there's another, the final plan is simply just fully customize your, your plan. What this does by giving people options is it just removes the stigma even more.
Speaker 3:Like dry January is already the moment in which seventy five million US adults are going to make a change with alcohol. But we know for sure that a lot of people that take a dry commitment to Jan. 0 do a fail. And our data It's not super scientific, but we find that most people fail within the first seven to ten days. That shouldn't be a surprise.
Speaker 3:You make it through your first seven days, you attempted to go out to a bar or something like that. We also know that a lot of people that do dry Jan. 0, If they're just kind of like white knuckling it or using willpower or aren't really talking to friends about it. It's just kind of this private journey. The, a lot of them slingshot back to old behavior and patterns come Feb.
Speaker 3:0. So. Sunnyside's approach is lower the stigma by making it not just all about being dry, but also when you sign up for dry as Jan. 0, you're naturally signing up for Sunnyside, which is I'm proud to say now sort of a scientifically proven method for helping you change your behavior around alcohol. And you'll, you'll get access to our amazing community of like minded people that are giving and getting motivation.
Speaker 3:You'll get access to our peer coaches. If you want it, you know, that's always optional. Tons of education and resources, tracking and planning tools. And when you commit to dryish January for thirty one days, you will get locked into Sunnyside. And what we hope is that you see so much benefit with Sunnyside that you stick with the stick with it in Feb.
Speaker 3:0. And actually we have a stat from, a big analysis we did from a previous cohort that said. 92% of our participants said that they're going to maintain lower consumption going into Feb. 0. Which is phenomenal.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's, that's the only thing that matters for us is that we not only help activate you toward healthier habits, but that we help you put a system in place for maintaining those habits over time. I know a ton of people are going to say, and I hear this all the time. I don't need an app to track my drinks. I can use Google spreadsheets, or I can just use an Excel spreadsheet. That's fine.
Speaker 3:Like just do that if that's all, if that works for you. But it's not really a system in place to fall back onto. And it doesn't provide community and coaching support. It doesn't provide education and it doesn't provide scientifically proven habit change, techniques like tracking and planning, time boxing, pre commitment, and, sort of conscious interference, which are some topics we go into in other podcasts or or, blog posts even. So My pitch is if you're on the fence about dry Jan.
Speaker 3:0, because it sounds hard or you don't think you need an app, try dry as Jan. 0 with Sunnyside because you have options. And I promise you, you're going to see results that are going to motivate you to stick with it in after
Speaker 2:Jan. 0.
Speaker 3:You you'll be you'll definitely love being part of that community.
Speaker 2:1 of the things that I love about dry as Jan. 0 is that we all tend in in Dec. 0 to overdo it. So we're overdoing it. We're pulling it all the way to 1 side, and then we step into dry Jan.
Speaker 2:0, which is the polar opposite. And so you have 1 of 2 scenarios. Basically, you might wait make it that first week like you just said. And then because you you're almost on this slingshot from 1 side to the other, you you fail and you say to yourself, well, better luck next year, which doesn't set you up for the whole year. You already feel like you stepped into 2025 with kind of a failure, or you white knuckle it all the way through the month.
Speaker 2:But then as soon as Feb. 0 hits, it's like, alright. Now I'm gonna let loose for the rest of the month, and then all of a sudden you're back to where you were maybe in Dec. 0 or in Nov. 0.
Speaker 2:And for all of this, when you make make these adjustments, you don't wanna make them for the short term. You wanna make them for the long term.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's do you see that being the impact that driest Jan. 0 is really having as an impact on long term habit change around alcohol?
Speaker 3:I mean, I I absolutely do. So the the stat that matters most to me is that, like I said, ninety two percent of people staying that they're gonna stick with, they're going to maintain their healthier habits into Feb. 0. But we have, we have, we had some analysis that we had to do on our side to understand if these challenges, because we, we don't normally run dry as Jan. 0.
Speaker 3:We do sober ish Oct. 0 and we do dry as July 0. And we've been playing around with other challenges. Like the, the idea is give people a thirty one day health challenge to just make it easier to approach that topic of alcohol. Right?
Speaker 3:Like instead of saying come to Sunnyside to drink less or like change your relationship to alcohol, come to Sunnyside to challenge yourself for thirty one days and see how it impacts your health, your health. Come in with a curiosity, and a willingness just to try something out. We looked at the data and it turns out people that join for a thirty or thirty one day challenge have exactly the same benefits and see exactly the same sort of retention and engagement as people that come in normally. So that's to say that if you come in motivated around your general health and wellness, you will most likely see you'll most likely love the benefits of drinking a little bit less so much that you will stick with it. So the data shows us that, Yes.
Speaker 3:Coming in for dry Jan. 0, you will stick in, you will stick around for the long term. I mean, It's it's great for us. Like you'll become a study site member, even if that wasn't your intention, because you're gonna love what it, what it feels like to, to see those benefits. But I gotta, I gotta actually address something very specific that you said.
Speaker 3:My little secret is I think when I usually start dry January, I don't start, I might not start until like the because a lot of people might have gone out on New Year's Eve. And so they might not be and they might do like a hair of the dog the next morning. I'm not condoning that. It's a terrible idea. But this is 1 of the biggest drinking days of the year.
Speaker 3:And a lot of people are going to have fun on Jan. 1. And so the cool thing about dry ice January is you don't have to start on Jan. 1. We're going to keep the challenge open for people to sign up all the way through like Jan.
Speaker 3:10. And so join anytime between the now and Jan. 10 or so, and you can still reap the rewards. You don't have to lock in on Jan. 1.
Speaker 3:So, if you're feeling that stress coming out of the holidays and you don't feel like you can quite commit on Jan. 1, but Jan. 5 rolls around and you're feeling like you're ready to come in and make a change, like, it it doesn't matter. The the community is still up and the challenge is still there.
Speaker 2:I think the best thing I like about it is that you get to choose your own measure of success. It's Yep. When it comes to dry January, it's very prescriptive. It's thirty days, and if you don't do it, you actually didn't succeed in that challenge. But this 1 is not only that you get to choose a little bit of flexibility, but you get to actually choose what the measure of success is.
Speaker 2:And because your habits around alcohol are very personal and everybody has their own goals, and so to just have a 1 size fits all, this is the only way that you can adjust your habits in Jan. 0 is by taking thirty thirty one days off or or maybe you try something different.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, this this is just like it's fundamentally important to us at Sunnyside is that we make Sunnyside as accessible as possible, as inclusive as possible, and don't shame people if they don't hit those targets. Like I said earlier, it's about progress, not perfection. Actually to to kind of, dig a little deeper on that. We do have data around this.
Speaker 3:Like, what what do people actually commit to? So what we see is that, about 68% of people commit to the fully dry plan. That that was bigger than I expected, but I, I get it. It's because it's called dry Jan. 0.
Speaker 3:So like you're, you're probably feeling more motivated than ever to within the year to just like, say, okay, I'm gonna go for it. So 68% commit to going fully dry. 32% choose 1 of the non dry plans. We called it they're to this trend called damp Jan. 0, two years ago.
Speaker 3:And now I hate that term, but, we'll call them, like, the dry plans and the and the damp plans.
Speaker 2:It's not my favorite either. I've heard that that 1.
Speaker 3:It's not my favorite. Give it a give it 2, and we'll have a new trending term, in alcohol health. What is zebra striping or or, or intermittent High intensity
Speaker 2:high intensity, binge drinking, was it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. High intensity is, like, the intense binge drinking.
Speaker 2:Intense binge drinking.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll have a new term in a couple of months.
Speaker 2:Or as I used to call it, a 6 pack.
Speaker 3:Just a 1 to 2. I know. I know. We we should do an episode on high intensity drinking, actually. I think that'd be really, really helpful for people.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we saw a 68 commit to going fully dry, 32% commit to a damp plan. But we wanted to understand, okay, if you commit to a fully dry or you commit to a non fully dry plan, what is the actual outcome? What are the outcomes? What are the benefits?
Speaker 3:Is it is it so much better that you commit to dry versus non dry? So we found that the dry group again, this is just, this is signing up for the fully dry plan. I'm not actually saying these people were fully dry for the month. The dry group saw a 61% alcohol reduct 61% reduction in their alcohol consumption. The non dry group saw a 22% reduction in alcohol consumption during the month of Jan.
Speaker 3:0 compared to their baselines. Both of those are significantly higher than a, somebody that did not come in for the challenge who just came in on the regular path on Sunnyside. So what we see is that coming in with the motivation to commit to a plan has a major impact on, your drinking behaviors within the month. Clearly committing to a full fully dry plan has a higher impact, but that's pretty self fulfilling. So we don't need to necessarily get all scientific about that.
Speaker 3:If you're going to commit to fully dry, you probably are in a more healthy, you're probably in a better mental state to try to actually go fully dry. But then we, we looked at We asked everybody regardless of the plan that they started on, because I, it felt important to me to not get too stuck on which plan you committed to. We asked people what were the benefits that you saw, after dry January and the results were awesome. So eighty three percent of people experienced fewer binge drinking days. I love that stat because binge drinking days are the ones that really cause us to let alcohol kind of get away from us.
Speaker 3:It makes us feel really bad the next morning. And it, it feels like a habit that can be hard to break. So eighty three percent of people feel or binge take a day. So that's money. Eighty percent saw felt a sense of accomplishment.
Speaker 3:That's great. So like, if you're going in for a new year's resolution reset, feeling a sense of accomplishment after a thirty one day alcohol reset is going to help you really set your Europe off on the right foot. But this list goes on 78% gained more control over there taking 73% saved money, 64% ex experienced more energy and focus, sixty three percent slept better. Sixty percent improved their rental health. Fifty nine percent had a better overall mood.
Speaker 3:And there's some that I there's some a little lower on the list, but still pretty important for a lot of people. About thirty percent said they lost weight within thirty one days. That's amazing. Usually it takes longer to see that from sort of alcohol reduction. Thirty percent noticed better skin.
Speaker 3:So you see across the board, taking a break in Jan. 0 has massive benefits, to your mental health, your physical health, and sort of the your drinking behaviors. And the so drink drinking less is usually, like, the top in the top 3 new year new year's res new year's resolutions. Right? I think it's it's probably, like, drink less, workout more, eat eat healthier.
Speaker 3:What we find and what we know to be true of just intuitively and from the results like this is that drinking less benefits every other 1 of your new year's resolutions. By drinking less, you will improve your diet by drinking less. You'll be more, more motivated to work out. So I'm not saying it's like the silver bullet of. Nearest resolutions, but I kind of am.
Speaker 3:I mean, like it's it removes a bunch of distraction and noise in Jan. 0, and it's going to make you feel incredible to, to then stack up other habits that you've been, you've been thinking about. So. I kind of do think it's the silver bullet, to be honest, taking a break in Jan. 0, not, not quitting drinking necessarily, but just even signing up for a plan like sunnysize dry as Jan.
Speaker 3:0 is gonna help every 1 of your areas some health of all this in Jan. 0.
Speaker 2:I think it's the ultimate cheat code, to be honest, especially when you're talking about, like, eighty three percent of people reduce binge drinking. So I think most people can relate. It's the nights when you overdo it. Those are the ones that you really remember. It's not the, okay.
Speaker 2:I had 2 glasses of wine on a Wednesday even though that wasn't planned. Yeah. You might feel a little bit bad about that. But if more than 8 out of 10 people are saying that they're reducing those nights when they overdone it, they probably had a really difficult next day and beat themselves up. If you remove that, I think that that is just such that is the ultimate cheat code.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you'll come into Feb. 0 with that sense of accomplishment that is it's hard to quantify. It's gonna really set you up for, like the rest of the year, I think. When I take a thirty day thirty day break from drinking, which I try to do, like, once a year, if not more, The first week can be really hard if you've been fed up in a pattern.
Speaker 3:The second week actually, what I find is the second week is probably hardest, but that's why we have Sunny Side there for you. So you have the motivation and the community and the system in place. By the third and fourth week, you're probably gonna be feeling so good about drinking less. You're gonna probably, commit to drinking a lot less in Feb. 0 or just extending your dry Jan.
Speaker 3:0 streak. And in sight side, we actually have the ability for you just to jump into another thirty day, challenge if you if you want to.
Speaker 2:I love the the analogy that just played in my head. So as you said, like, 1 of the top goals for people, 1 would be workout more, 1 would drink less. But if you think about it, you don't you can't go to the gym in Jan. 0, workout all in Jan. 0, and then give up the rest of the year and just not go to the gym at all.
Speaker 2:And the same thing
Speaker 3:has been
Speaker 2:kind of approached with this. Like, you can't just show up for thirty days, put in your work for thirty days, and expect for the rest of the year to work out the way you want it to. It's about putting in those reps and doing doing the consistency on something that's actually doable. Because if you go to the gym and you just, like, lift all the heavy weights and and go every single day and you're there for hours, you're gonna be sore. You're gonna be painful.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna wanna ever go back. And I think with using sort of those parallels, you can draw some lines and say, okay. You know what? Maybe when it comes to alcohol, I need to be more realistic
Speaker 3:when it
Speaker 2:comes to that as well.
Speaker 3:I I love that. I think it makes me think of we kinda touched on this a little bit, but there's, like, a actual word of caution, I think, for people jumping into dry Jan. 0 without actually thinking about it too much, which is that slingshot back in Feb. 0. If you white knuckle it in Jan.
Speaker 3:0. And you don't actually kind of take Jan. 0 to consider why you might drink the way that you do, or look at triggers, educate yourself on alcohol, talk to people that are in the same boat. I actually think without those pieces, without that system in place, The odds to slingshot bad are real and actually can be pretty dangerous. I mean, we're talking about binge drinking a lot here.
Speaker 3:And like, I think a lot of people without the proper tools in place risk binge drinking in that February,. And it's absolutely not what we want people to do. We want you to come out of Jan. 0 feeling empowered, educated, motivated. And with the tools in place to, like, okay.
Speaker 3:If you were fully dry in Jan. 0 and you wanna have a drink in the put a plan in place, think about how to do it mindfully, and and you'll have I think you'll have way more odds of success. If, if you just have a good system in place. Again, like if it's not SunnySide for you, I recommend a spreadsheet and a friend. And I think those 2 things, you have that community aspect with the friend and you have the, the quantified tracking with with the spreadsheet.
Speaker 3:And maybe listen to a podcast, take Journey to the Sunny Side. Those 3 things, education, community, and tracking, all without paying for Sunny Side. If that's if that's what you wanna do, I highly encourage that. But try not to white knuckle it. Try not to focus just on willpower, and you'll you'll have way higher chances of success in Feb.
Speaker 3:0.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you can have a little bit more fun in Jan. 0 as well at the same time. But, you know, the thing about that is in in my research and my own personal history, when I would do these thirty day challenges and, yeah, I could do them and make it thirty days, but I really did kind of drop off and go right back to where I started. So it really didn't set me up, and I was just like, oh, well, why did I do all that?
Speaker 2:And then as I got into the research, it really goes down to habits need to be changed and replaced with something new. This could include drinking in moderation that you set and plan for anywhere between eighteen and two hundred and fifty six days depending on the complexity of habits. And the habit generally for alcohol is assumed somewhere in the moderate to the moderate to complex habit, which throws you around somewhere in, this loose ballpark of sixty to ninety days. That doesn't mean you have to do a challenge for sixty or ninety days. But if you do something that seems sustainable during that time and not totally go back in the other direction and sustain sort of this moderation or this mindful drinking approach beyond Jan.
Speaker 2:0, then it can then become a learned habit that incorporates into your life long term.
Speaker 3:I love that. K. I I wanna, kinda build on that for a second. So the ninety days, we have I have to that's, like, inviting me to talk about the study again. For those that didn't hear, our data was used in a study that showed demonstrated Sunnyside's approach was statistically significant to reduce weekly alcohol consumption by 33% after ninety days.
Speaker 3:Which is incredible. Like not a lot of other systems can say that. And it was primarily looking at our SMS interactions. So, yes, you'll see big benefits joining but if you really wanna mix, long term habit change, stick with Sunnyside for three months, the data proves it. But I also, like I said, I think it's hard to imagine people starting dry January seeing results and not stick with Sunnyside.
Speaker 3:I, you also talked about other hobbies, I think, in that last bit that you said. And we actually have some interesting data from a past again, from the past study dryish Jan. 0 study. We asked people what they did to replace their time That they would typically spend drinking, which is pretty cool. So 47% said that they spent their time reading or practicing additional learning.
Speaker 3:47% said fitness and exercise. 35% said cooking and meal prep. 33% said spending time with family. And then you have video games, whole improvement, crafts, and creative activities, meditation, journaling. So taking time off your drinking is your brain is gonna be eager to do something different.
Speaker 3:And the the good news is that the data shows that you're gonna be filling your time up with really, really high quality, sort of, fulfilling activities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you get to sleep better too.
Speaker 3:Oh, hell yeah. That's my that's my top motivation these days. I'm not even kidding for for drinking less than just having a healthy relationship with alcohol. It I I need my sleep as I get older.
Speaker 2:A % I'm with you too because you can't you just can't function without it. And, unfortunately, when you're younger, you'd somehow are able to pull it together and function without it. And we were just talking about this before. You know? I'm traveling in Europe and just the jet lag alone.
Speaker 2:If I wanted to toss in too many drinks on top of it, I don't even know what I'd do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I know. A few people are also talking about I was feeling hungover this week and I had it had a single drink, and my sleep was being impacted by something. So yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, if if you're feeling if you're listening to this and you're feeling like your rest and recovery has been a little lacking, again, I mean, we've made the pitch already. Like, check out dry Jan. 0, dry is Jan. 0, and then you you'll see the results.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And anybody that's listening, if they wanna check it out this upcoming Monday, might or have already released them, did 1 on sleep to answer 1 of our best member questions to talk about that. So even in Jan. 0, if we wanna moderate, some quick tips would be just to keep your quantity, lower, of course, but then also give yourself that buffer of three to four hours before going to bed in your last drink. And that should be able to allow you to, you know, have a little bit of fun or enjoy, that drink that you're wanting to in the evening without totally disrupting your sleep.
Speaker 2:That's So, Ian, so if anybody wants to join this upcoming challenge, the dry January challenge, is there any more details that they should know or where they should go?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So headed over to sunnyside.co, our website, and you'll see a banner there to join the dryish January challenge. You can also go to our Instagram account where we will have a link in our bio. And, yeah, that's really it. Of course, you can search for Sunnyside dry dryish January, and you'll you'll find it, there as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But we'll get the banners up on the homepage. We'll make it as easy as possible.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. So anybody that wants to join, whether or not you wanna go fully dry or choose your own plan, you get to choose that at Sunnyside. And, as always, it's fun sitting here talking shop and laughing a little bit with Ian. So, Ian, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I love it.
Speaker 1:And that wraps up today's episode. Big thanks to Ian Anderson for today's conversation and everything he does here at Journey to the Sunnyside. And if you're feeling inspired to make a change this Jan. 0, head on over to get.sunnyside.cobackslash January to get your 2025 started in a positive way. And as always, thanks for tuning in to Journey to the Sunnyside and cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
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