4 Years Alcohol-Free: Benefits, Savings & Why I Quit!

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the show and I wanted to share with you what I've learned from 1460 days sober. I'm just going to check that's the right number because I don't count the days anymore. But yeah, calculated it. Yes, four years, 1460 days. Four years sober, no alcohol. Now why do I want to share this with you? Well, I'm not sharing this with you to say you have to stop drinking. I'm not sharing this with you to say alcohol is the biggest evil of all in the world. But I'm going to share it with you because the journey that it's taken me on, the different outcomes and results in my life and health have been phenomenal. And if I had kept drinking the way I was then, I know life would be very different. Now. Look, I grew up in Northern Ireland. I probably had my first drink at like 13 or 14. I was probably drinking, binge drinking around 16 and then from there onwards some pretty consistent heavy drinking. And as an adult into my 20s and 30s, drinking a beer a night or know, four or five nights a week, I'd have a couple of beers on the weekend, it'd be quite a bit more. And so for a lot of people this would be probably labeled as somewhat normal. Just a couple of wines or a wine a night or, you know, a bottle of wine on the weekend. But what I started to realize was I wasn't in great health. This is four years back. I didn't have a lot of energy. I had those afternoon slumps I was a little bit foggy in my memory and attention to detail. The thought of standing on a stage and having to tell stories, that would just be daunting. So I definitely had some performance issues. And you know what? Personally, it was affecting my relationships as well. You know, just, you don't have as much energy, you don't have as much motivation when you have a few casual drinks. As I say, I'm not here to shine the light and say, please never drink again. That's not what I'm trying to say. But I want to be honest and just share that this journey has been a very interesting one. So if I go back 1,460 days ago, my partner Caroline said, hey, I'm going to do one year, no beer. I thought, what's that? That sounds terrible. And she said, look, it's one year of no alcohol. And it was kind of in the middle of COVID And she said, look, most nights were like sharing a bottle of wine. And maybe many other people in the world were doing the same in Covid. I don't know. But we both didn't feel good and we knew it wasn't really that good for us. So I said, look, good luck, go for it. I don't think I can join you. And, you know, being someone who's very social, who did a lot of kind of social events and business events, you know, hosting people drinking, was part and parcel of that. I also seen it as a reward for a long day or a de stressor or a good way to kind of relax the flow and increase social connection. Had all these ideas about what alcohol was, and I slept on it. And the next day I woke up and I thought, well, I was very quick to justify why I shouldn't drink alcohol. And let's face it, we live in a culture where alcohol is everywhere and everyone just does it and it's the cool thing and it's the normal thing. It's actually quite abnormal. I was chatting with a friend recently and he was like, james, isn't it interesting that alcohol is pretty much the only drug in the world that you get berated for when you quit it? You know, you quit crack cocaine, everyone's like, high five. Well done. You quit heroin. Everyone's like, that's awesome. Good job. But when you quit alcohol, people are like, no, no, no, no, no, don't leave the tribe, please. You're shedding a light on me now. And I feel bad about drinking. People don't like you to leave the tribe. We live in a tribal mentality. And when we drink together, we share that together. But when someone says, no, no, I don't drink often, it makes the other people feel a bit unusual, disconnected. It makes them question their relationship with alcohol. So I knew that I had to do it and I started kind of thinking, well, why? I'm a big believer in why do we do the things we do? So why should I give up alcohol for a year? I was looking at my year ahead and I had big events and I was hosting Prime Minister and had a mastermind group that I was running, and I were going to fly on a helicopter and land on the snow up in the remarkable mountains and have some champagne at the top. And I thought, this is a bad year to be doing alcohol free. But again, there was these justifications. So I said, you know what? Why would I do this? Well, why? One, I want to live longer. Two, I want to live better. And I wrote all these things down. Three, I want to actually look at my body and be a bit more attracted to my own body. Four, I wanted to be here when my son's older and maybe he has children and I can actually engage and run and explore the world with my grandkids. I wanted to avoid ill health. I don't know about you, but I hate going into hospitals now. If you work in a hospital, you probably are just used to it. But for those of us who don't spend a lot of time there, it's not a fun place to go often. It often means we're sick and we're in need. I want to avoid that. And I know that if I reduce my alcohol intake, it would make a big difference. So the next day I said, caroline, look, we've got a bottle of gin in there and a bottle of wine. Next 24 hours. I don't want to waste that. Let's get that drunk and we'll start tomorrow. So the very next day, a big hangover I started one year, no beer. And first couple of weeks actually were pretty challenging. And I was looking for substitutes a lot. So the company T2, and I don't get any kickbacks or royalties from them. I drunk a lot of tea too, as did Caroline. We went through a lot of Heineken zero zeros. And then we started looking for other zero beers. There's a great local one here in New Zealand called Tiny. It's a hazy ipa, really cool by Garage Project. Again, no royalties commissions or ambassadorships with them. I just enjoyed it. But after three or four months, I really started to see a switch. And I'd done 30 days before. You probably have as well, I imagine. And I said, I can take it or leave it with alcohol, but I'd never really done it much longer. Three and a half to four months in, something clicked. I felt a massive injection of energy. I felt a lot of momentum. I started thinking about this. If one day a week I had three or four drinks, I know the next day I wouldn't be a hundred. So if that's just one day a week where I'm 80%, 70%, let's say I'm hungover slightly, that actually equates. If you go out across the US 52 days a year, that's two months a year where I'm suboptimal. Now, I don't know about you, but mediocrity is not very appealing. If mediocrity is your thing, great. It's not what I aim for. I don't enjoy and sometimes I do things that are very mediocre, but I don't want to sit there. And I knew that if I stuck with alcohol, I would continue to be mediocre. And so I kept at it five months, six months. And actually I got this cool little app. I'm going to show you this. It's called the sobriety calculator. Right. It's pretty cool. So I don't know if you get. For those that can see that, don't know if it's coming up clearly or not, but I'll read you the digits from this. So you pump in roughly how much you drink on a daily or weekly basis. So over the last four years, I have saved 4,000, sorry, $41,617. Now, Caroline is roughly the same. So between us, we've saved pushing close to $100,000. Significant coin. You know, it's some amazing holidays. That's a chunk off the mortgage, that's a couple new cars. That's an injection into the business marketing plan for the next couple of years. So there's some significant things from a financial standpoint, for sure, but also the other health benefits. And that calculator talks about it reduces our chance of stroke, heart attacks, many, many cancers, improves skin, improves hair, brain health, cognitive focus. At the end of the day, I work in high performance with high performers, whether they're athletes, CEOs, country leaders. Focus is so important. I need to be full focus. And often I'm on trains, planes and automobiles and speaking in Auckland and the next day in Queenstown and back to Christchurch and Then over to Fiji, it's full on. And I need to be so focused between different places and people. So taking the alcohol out has actually I felt elevated things massively. And look, it wasn't easy. And I have to acknowledge that some people will find this a lot more difficult than others. If you're truly on the addiction spectrum and of that alcoholism, this will be a much different ballgame and there'll be different levels of support that you might need. So going to Alcoholics Anonymous might be essential, or going to some personal therapy might be essential. But for me, I certainly wasn't far down on that spectrum. But I was very friendly with alcohol, used it a lot. It was very helpful in social settings. It was always in the fridge. There was something in the fridge. And looking at that now, I look back and I go that that's actually not high performance. It wasn't serving me. So the biggest lesson I learned was that our environment shapes our habits. And that's the same in a team, that's the same in an organization, same in a family. Whatever's happening in your environment, it shapes your habits and your decisions. So with my environment, I decided there would be no alcohol in my house. So it's an alcohol free house. And I don't often say sober. I feel the word sober attaches more closely to people who are alcoholic and have decided to go sober. I use the term more frequently, alcohol free. So there's no alcohol in my life. It's a decision. And honestly, changing the environment puts so much friction between you and the habit you want to stop doing. So if you want to remember, reduce alcohol. You don't have it in the house, the chances are less that you'll get in a car and go and get it. So it's about looking at your environment and really setting yourself up for success. Look, as I say, this is not for everyone, but I would suggest that if you have any. Oh God, but I like a drink and it's fun and I love it. I would suggest if you have any of those buts and those justifications like I did, I would challenge you to push past the 30 day thing and aim for 90 to 120 days. 90 days, you know, it's three solid months, but 120 when you push to that four month mark, right, that's where you start to see big cellular change in your body. A lot of your key organs take four full months to fully regenerate. So that means, you know, if you drink now and tomorrow when you know the alcohol still Be a part of your cell structure. But after four months, if there's a full regeneration and you haven't drunk, all of a sudden you're much, I think, much healthier. And the science will back that up. So I don't know where you're at on your journey with alcohol, whether it's part of your life, whether it's not, whether you've got someone with a problems with alcohol. And if you do, I'll make sure that the team put links in here to different resources for you. Alcoholics Anonymous. If someone's got, you know, is an alcoholic. And on that spectrum, we'll put in a link to the company one year, no beer that we actually started with, which was fun. It was just a lot of fun. And I'll put a link to that calculator, that sobriety calculator, where you can tally up how much you've saved and how many drinks. Actually, I'll tell you, you'll laugh at this. So it says here.

I've passed up 4161 drinks and the calories that I've avoided are 832,000 calories. So in terms of lifetime regained, it says I've gained almost 60 days of life just based on a few key decisions. So that's on the old phone there, simple little app. But I want you to just think about your relationship with alcohol. As I say, I'm into well over a thousand days without it. I don't miss it. I have a lot of fun. I've yet to meet friends who say, james, you've turned really boring. But life feels better. It feels lighter. Early mornings are easier. I know I can manage my emotions so much better. When I was drinking, even a little bit, my emotional management just was not anywhere near it is now. I'm way more responsive now and way less reactive. Still a work in progress, but I feel like I'm more in control. And as I say, if you've got lots of justifications, oh, I've always drunk, or my liver's made for it, or it's all good, or, you know, it's a family tradition. I want to challenge you to see if you can just do the 90 to 120 day of alcohol free, fully alcohol free, no cheat days, no arts, low alcohol, none. And the only reason to even attempt it is to test, see how you feel and shift your relationship with alcohol. So this is not necessarily about saying, quit, never do it again. It's just about saying, shift your relationship. So I've shifted my relationship. People have asked me, will you drink again? I say, maybe. I don't know. I've no interest in it. I've lost my appetite for it. If I'm traveling and I'm in, say, a lounge where there's free alcohol, there's not even a moment where I'm like, ooh, I've lost that appetite for it and I feel fine. I'm not losing out on anything. And in fact, in a lot of ways, I'm gaining a lot. So if you're interested in trying it, I would urge you to. We'll put links in below. But certainly for me, I think it's about making decisions that set you up for a massive success tomorrow, not set you up for failure to make small decisions that make tomorrow better. And I hope this has served you. I hope it's landed for you. If there's someone that you know that's thinking about giving up alcohol or have just given it up that this video might serve them, please forward it to them. And if you're listening on audio, great to connect with you again. Thank you for your ongoing support and for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

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