One day last year, Christine Mosley woke up with the kind of hangover that inspires self-reckoning. That day, she decided she would never drink again.
A few days later, Ms. Mosley, 31, found herself with a cocktail in hand. For her at least, she said, “it’s really not that simple.”
More recently, Ms. Mosley, a business marketing manager in San Francisco, has tried to be not fully sober, but “soberish,” by reducing her alcohol consumption and paying closer attention to its effects on her mood and health.
“I want to emphasize the ‘-ish’ part — not to be dry but to increase the number of dry days,” she said.
The designation, sometimes also referred to as “sober curious,” has caught on in the United States and elsewhere as the health risks of alcohol become better understood. “Soberish” can mean drinking more mindfully, drinking less or avoiding alcohol altogether but not other drugs. At parties, people often reach for seltzers and nonalcoholic beers, and more people are using apps that help them track and reduce their alcohol intake.
The idea has been popularized by confessional podcasts like Soberish Uprising and social media accounts that advocate a soberish lifestyle.
One of them is run by Katie Nessel, a stay-at-home mother of two in Seattle, who started the account in 2022 after realizing she had started to “really look forward to that 5 p.m. drink.”
Ms. Nessel doesn’t try to avoid alcohol entirely, and doesn’t believe her more than 200,000 followers should need to, either. But she likes to post low-proof cocktail recipes and links to studies on the health risks posed by alcohol.
“The hard truth is complete sobriety is going to be a nonstarter for people who just want to cut back,” she said. “That all-or-nothing approach means most people are going to do nothing and continue drinking for a long time.”
Soberish vs. Sober
The growing scientific consensus suggests that no amount of alcohol is good for you, and even small amounts can hurt.
Abstinence is healthier than drinking a little, despite some doctors espousing the benefits of moderate drinking for years.
And for patients with severe alcohol use disorder, sobriety may be the only way to avoid cravings, said Barbara Wood, an addiction specialist in Rockville, Md. These consequences can include the loss of a job, relationships and interest in children or hobbies.
“If their reward system is so organized around the good feeling from alcohol, it’s going to be harder to rein in that impulse to drink,” Dr. Wood said.
Even for some people who haven’t been diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, sobriety just works better. Among them is Dawn Murray, a high school librarian in St. Louis, who started drinking most weekdays during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ms. Murray, 43, didn’t like the effect alcohol had on her. It worsened the symptoms of her autoimmune diseases and arthritis and affected her sleep. She would also wake up with hangover-sharpened anxiety she called “hangziety.”
For a while, Ms. Murray tried out the soberish lifestyle. She immersed herself in “quit lit” books and podcasts, started weight training five days a week and subscribed to Reframe, an app to help people reduce their alcohol consumption.
But when she did have a drink, it still aggravated the symptoms of her diseases. One night last August, awakened with gut pain, she asked herself a question.
“Why am I still drinking? It’s a poison,” she said. “I was exhausted. It just didn’t make sense anymore.”
She hasn’t had a drink since.
“Soberish” Can Be Harm-Reduction
Public health officials have long championed sobriety as the best antidote to a drinking problem. But even as the downsides of alcohol have become better understood, some experts have come to believe that approach might not work best for the millions who are not addicted to alcohol, or who only have one or two symptoms of alcohol use disorder, such as struggling to limit how much they drink, or occasional binge drinking.
In an attempt to reach people who may not want or need to quit, experts have increasingly taken a harm-reduction approach, saying that it is better to at least cut back a little than not at all.
“It’s good to think beyond the two states of drunk or dry forever,” said Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University.
In recent years, alcohol use has risen — and with it, alcohol-related illness and death. Between 1999 and 2020, alcohol deaths in the United States more than doubled, according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say even small changes can help.
Studies have recently found that people who cut back on their drinking or binge drink less often experience a drop in blood pressure, improved liver function and a better quality of life. Heavy drinkers can reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease from moderating their alcohol use. A small study showed that anxiety symptoms also improved.
Dr. Humphreys compares the soberish approach to how many doctors think about weight loss: “A slight decrease is still a benefit, and it’s OK to shoot for that, rather than the potentially demoralizing goal of, ‘I have to have perfection right away.’”
For some people, the harm-reduction approach has worked well.
When Kayla Lyons first tried to change her own relationship with alcohol, she tried to go completely sober. At the time, her life was falling apart as a result of her use of alcohol and the anti-anxiety medication Klonopin, she said.
At age 23, she entered Alcoholics Anonymous. The program helped her deeply, she said, and she even got the organization’s symbol tattooed on her forearm. But after two years, she decided she wanted to search out other approaches to recovery.
“A.A. saved my life,” she said. “But I don’t think anything in life is binary.”
Since then, she has vacillated between moderating her drinking, and going completely dry. Sometimes, she microdoses psilocybin, she said.
It’s worked for her. In 2023, Ms. Lyons also published an autobiographical guide to drinking less. She called it “Soberish.”