One of the things that happened after I quit drinking is that my world got bigger. I used to notice that even after a couple of days of not drinking, as my sleep started to settle and I felt calmer and more secure in myself, I was friendlier in the everyday brief interactions with the people in my office building or the grocery.  I felt more open and connected to the world, a feeling that increased after I quit drinking “for good.”

In contrast, when I was drinking—maybe because I was mildly hungover or tired or at least foggy in the morning—I was more head-down, grinding through the day. And then at the end of the end of the day, I was a little too laser-focused on that glug-glug-glug going into the first glass, followed by fuzzy conversations I never remembered as well as I thought I should.  Doing that day in, day out leaves you with a smaller world. Less whimsy, less adventure, fewer real connections.

Taking this a bit further, I recently decided to lean into stranger interactions throughout my day. Whenever I have a simple (kind) thought about a stranger that I’d ordinarily hold back, (as simple as “wow, she has incredibly muscular arms”), I’m trying to share it if I think it will make the person’s day better. I started this over a weekend—going to the gym, the coffee shop, having great exchanges with strangers.  Compliments went back and forth, we both left smiling, and I felt extra positive at the end of the day both for having made someone else feel good and for having additional micro connections throughout the day. (As we learned during COVID, these micro connections, the brief exchanges happening on our commutes and with people at front desks and cash registers, make a meaningful difference in our happiness.)

All of this is to say that not drinking has led to lots more connections, which made my world bigger, and that’s a huge gift. It’s so easy in midlife to allow our world to grow smaller and smaller as we fall into well-worn routines. But you can reverse course by disrupting your most protected routine.  And once you break the booze routine, you might just break open your whole world.