> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.orsonboon.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Sobriety is the most underrated life hack - URL: https://www.orsonboon.com/sobriety-is-the-most-underrated-life-hack/ - Published: 2026-10-18T16:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-05T17:43:53.000Z - Description: I've just hit nine years sober. - Author: Orson Boon - Tags: Life Hacks, Body I’ve just hit nine years sober. What nobody told me is that the strangest part would come after the hard part. Not the first month. Not the first year. Nine years in, a voice still turns up out of nowhere and says: go on, have a drink. Let me be clear about what that means. I’m not going to. I never will. I don’t see myself as a drinker, and I don’t identify as an alcoholic, a former alcoholic or any other label that keeps the old story alive. That person is not me anymore. But the voice still knocks, like a salesman who has had nine years of zero sales and still turns up with the brochure. I find that fascinating, and a bit humbling, because it tells you something nobody says out loud about recovery. Healing doesn’t delete the experience. It just changes who is carrying it. I should tell you how I got here, because it wasn’t a plan. After 25 years of battling booze and drugs, I went on an ayahuasca retreat, and within a week I had stopped drinking. A week. Twenty five years of trying and failing, and then a week. I won’t pretend to fully understand it, and I’m not telling you it’s the answer. For me it was a door. But a door is all it was. Then I flew home to London and my wife was gone. The marriage had collapsed, and she had started a new relationship. That’s the part nobody puts in the retreat brochure. The ceremony took the drink away. It didn’t take the pain away. It sent me home with a clear head and no armour, straight into the hardest year of my life. I was broken, jealous and scared, and I was feeling all of it at once with nothing between me and it. I had spent a quarter of a century making sure I never had to feel like that. Now every emotion a human being can have was arriving at the same time, and all I wanted was to run back into the one place I knew would hold me: booze and drugs. My old comfort zone. Here’s what I hadn’t understood until I stopped. Drinking, if you do it for long enough, stops being a pleasure and becomes a system. It becomes an exit. Bad day: exit. Argument: exit. Boredom, loneliness, a flicker of shame, a Tuesday: exit. I didn’t deal with feelings. I had feelings, and I had a way out of them, and the way out was always within arm’s reach. Now the exit was gone, and every feeling I’d ever outrun was standing at the door, patient, waiting for me to turn round. Nobody warns you how loud a room is when you’re sober and anxious. How long an evening is. How jealousy feels in a body with nothing to dull it. So I did what a lot of us do. I swapped one exit for another. I took up running. Yes, I see it too. A man who’d spent 25 years running from everything finally took up running. I’d love to say I noticed the irony at the time. I didn’t. Within months it had become the new obsession: 500 miles a month around London, sometimes three or four runs a day. Early mornings, late nights, anything to keep moving, anything to avoid sitting still with it. It was healthier than the booze, I’ll give it that. But it was the same thing. The exit doesn’t care what it’s made of. You can run from yourself in a bottle or in a pair of trainers, and the feeling you’re outrunning is waiting at the finish line either way. What I eventually learned is that the only way through was to stop. To stand still in the middle of it all, jealous, scared, broken, and let the feelings be there without leaving the room. It was terrifying. It was also the first time I actually started. I know calling this a life hack sounds glib. People love a hack. Sleep in a cold room, drink water first thing, take the stairs. A hack is supposed to be a shortcut, and sobriety is the opposite. It’s the longest route there is, straight through everything you spent years running from. Yet it’s the only change I’ve ever made that made every other change possible. Sleep, health, money, relationships, a head that actually works. All of it was sitting behind that one door. That’s why I call it underrated. Not because it’s easy, but because nothing else you do will pay you back like it. People assume the hard part is early, and in some ways it is: loud, physical, obvious. But nine years on, I can tell you it doesn’t disappear, it changes shape. Early on, the voice shouts. Later, it negotiates. It doesn’t say have a drink, it says you’ve earned it. It says one wouldn’t hurt, you’re a different man now. It turns up on a good day to celebrate and on a bad day to cope. It’s patient. It has all the time in the world. And it still turns up when I’m stressed. I’ll find myself standing in the booze aisle of a supermarket, and I don’t remember deciding to go there. I’m not tempted. I don’t want a drink. I’m just standing there, like a man who has walked an old route home without thinking. Then I notice where I am, and I walk out. That’s what I find most interesting. It isn’t temptation. It’s memory. It’s a mind and a body that learned something so thoroughly, for so long, that it hasn’t realised it’s retired. > Not tempted. Reminded. That distinction changed everything for me. When I treat the voice as a decision I have to win, it has power. When I treat it as an old record playing in the next room, I can hear it, nod, and carry on making dinner. I don’t fight it. I don’t obey it. I just don’t give it a vote. If you’re reading this with a knot in your stomach, I won’t tell you what to do. But here’s what I wish somebody had told me. If you’re heavily dependent, speak to your doctor before you stop, because stopping suddenly can be dangerous. That’s not weakness, it’s sense. Then make the first stretch small. Sleep, eat, walk, have one honest conversation a day. Forget the big plan. When a feeling hits, name it before you reach for the exit. Say it out loud: I’m angry, I’m lonely, I’m scared. Feelings crest and pass faster than you think, as long as you stay in the room. And tell one person the truth, today, because secrecy is where the voice does its best work. Finally, try changing the sentence. “I can’t drink” is a rule you resent. “I don’t drink” is just who you are. Nine years ago I came home to a life in pieces and couldn’t sit still for five minutes. Today I can sit with every feeling I’ve got. I can be there, clear headed, for the people I love, with nothing to hide. I can have the hard conversation. I can hear the voice and smile. So yes, call it a life hack if you like. It’s the only one I know that gives you your life back.