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If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media lately, you’ve surely heard of Dry January. Like clockwork, the wellness experiment resurfaces in news and pop culture every New Year. But why are so many people choosing to cut out booze for the first month of the year?
Dry January is basically what it says on the tin: Participants abstain from any and all alcoholic beverages from January 1–31. The average U.S. adult has four alcoholic drinks a week, per a 2022 Gallup poll, so an entire month of no booze is not insignificant.
Importantly, Dry January is not designed to help people who are suffering from alcoholism. It’s typically approached as a finite willpower exercise, with many participants — this writer included! — using this period as a moment to reflect on their relationship to alcohol and prioritize their wholistic wellbeing. (“New year, new you,” right?) Sometimes, it’s employed by people who are “sober curious,” or thinking about cutting out alcohol altogether.
The negative health effects of regular alcohol consumption are well-documented, so it’s easy to see why Dry January appeals to so many of us. All things considered, one month is a pretty short amount of time. Abstaining from alcohol for that duration is attainable for most of us — not to mention good for our bodies, our sleep patterns, our mental health, and our wallets. And besides, there are plenty of delicious, ready-to-buy mocktails and adaptogen drinks on the market these days, ready to replace your usual mixed drinks.
Are you also embarking on a Dry January journey this year? It can be tough to stay motivated, but trust me, you are not alone. In fact, a number of high-profile celebrities have spoken publicly about experimenting with sobriety for a month. For some of them, Dry January even catalyzed a longer-term sobriety journey.
Below, read up on quotes from Tom Holland, Bella Hadid, Kelly Ripa, and other celebs who’ve sworn off alcohol for the month of January — and why, for some of them, the month-long experiment turned into a lifelong commitment to sobriety.
Tom Holland
Tom Holland has been sober for three years, a journey that started with Dry January in 2022. “Doing Dry January, it really scared me because I had a really tough time,” Holland said on a 2024 episode of the Rich Roll Podcast. “I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how much I was struggling without booze.”
Holland decided, “as a sort of punishment,” to stay sober through February as well, and found the second month even more difficult. He kept abstaining through June, which is when he finally started to feel the benefits of sobriety. “I started sleeping better,” Holland explained. “I was handling stressful situations better. My relationship was better, my relationship with my family was better. My relationship with my work was better.”
After the actor made it through all of 2022 sober, he knew he wanted to make it a lifelong choice. “By the time I’d crossed that annual mark, I was done,” said Holland, who launched BERO, a non-alcoholic beer, in 2024. “I was like, I’m never going to drink again, because this is the best version of myself.”
Valerie Bertinelli
In a candid Instagram Story, Valerie Bertinelli spoke about her decision to try Dry January in 2023, per People. The Food Network star explained that she was seeking a break from alcohol to reset her nervous system after a particularly stressful year, which included Bertinelli is getting divorced from her ex-husband, businessman Tom Vitale.
“I want to calm down the cortisol in my body that has been raging for the last five, six years,” Bertinelli explained. “I’ve been in fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode. And I want to go into rest and digest. I think cutting alcohol will help me do that.”
She’s also hoping abstaining from alcohol will help curb her sugar cravings: “I want to try and cut down the cravings for my sugar. And I think alcohol exacerbates that.” So far, she’s liking it, so cheers to that!
Bella Hadid
Supermodel Bella Hadid has drastically cut down her alcohol consumption over the past few years. She did a true Dry January in 2022, citing her “crippling anxiety,” which is exacerbated when she drinks.
“I don’t feel the need [to drink] because I know how it will affect me at 3 in the morning, when I wake up with horrible anxiety thinking about that one thing I said five years ago when I graduated high school,” she told InStyle magazine in 2022. “There’s just this never-ending effect of, essentially, you know, pain and stress over those few drinks that didn’t really do much, you know?”
Instead, she’s a big fan of adaptogenic beverages from Kin Euphorics, the non-alcoholic adaptogen beverage brand she co-founded. “It doesn’t put you slap on your butt, asleep for 15 hours,” she explained, “but it does really calm your brain, your nervous system, and those late-night thoughts. I drink it before bed and I sleep like a baby.”
Mila Kunis & Ashton Kutcher
In 2022, husband-wife duo Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis embarked on a Dry January journey together. Alas, the actors went viral after Kutcher uploaded an adorable Instagram video of Kunis making herself a cocktail…on January 31, 2022.
“I work off of the lunar calendar, so it’s ‘Wet February’ for me right now,” the Luckiest Girl Alive star quipped to her husband. “Don’t worry about it.”
Rumer Willis
Rumer Willis’s experience with Dry January was so positive, it led her to quit drinking altogether. That was in 2016, and the actress hasn’t looked back. She opened up about her opinions on alcohol in a 2021 video interview with American Addiction Centers on Instagram.
“When I would drink, I think obviously because it lowers your inhibitions, it gave me this false sense of confidence and I was almost using it as a tool … as a way to be this version of myself [that] I thought was smarter, funnier, more confident, more interesting,” she admitted. “And it’s a lie, it’s completely a lie. And it’s this illusion of somehow you’re this magical, sparkly version of yourself when you are drinking.”
After successfully completing that fateful Dry January experiment, Willis’s “perfectionism” propelled her forward: “There’s this part of me that was like, ‘Oh, I have a month? Well I can’t go back now.’ I made it a challenge for myself.”
Kelly Ripa & Mark Consuelos
Like Willis, Kelly Ripa went full teetotaler after a successful Dry January. Ripa first tried the experiment in 2017. At the time, her former co-host Michael Strahan was transitioning off the ABC talk show, with Ryan Seacreast lined up to take his place.
It was a stressful time in her life, Ripa told People, so she and some friends made a pact to abstain from alcohol together. “I did a sober month — all my girlfriends did it, we all did it together — and I just never went back to it,” said the 52-year-old.
Quitting cold turkey didn’t even really involve “a thought process,” she continued: “It felt great, I felt like I looked great, I felt like I didn’t feel hungover. Not that I was a heavy drinker — I wasn’t someone who got drunk — but even like two glasses of wine at a girl’s night out dinner; I would feel it the next morning.”
Ripa also has the support of her husband, actor Mark Consuelos, who no longer drinks either. The pair references their sobriety as a key factor in their “healthy lifestyle,” per E! Online.
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