Disclaimer alert: I’m not actually finding this as hard as I thought I was going to.

I’m not saying it to sound smug – and if you’re struggling (or even if you’ve fallen off the wagon!), I don’t blame you, because there have been countless times I’ve tried to cut out booze for a length of time and failed miserably, the most recent of which was at the start of the November lockdown. Like, who was I kidding?

I suspect part of the reason is because the double hangovers I had on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve are still pretty vivid in my memory. The truly terrible kind, where you spend the entire day with your head in the toilet and can’t even keep down water. It’s safe to say, both days were entirely ruined, and I’m in no rush to repeat the experiences. I’ve been assured by those older and wiser than me that this is an inevitable casualty of aging, and I ain’t getting any younger.

But it’s not just the physical effects of drinking too much that can linger for days after a binge. Hanxiety, Beer Fear, the existential dread that often comes the morning after the night before are as good a reason as a pounding headache for taking a break from booze. Many describe waking up in a cold sweat, with fragmented memories of the previous night, scrambling around for their phone to undo the damage they’ve inevitably caused (that’s if they can find their phone and haven’t left it in the taxi/club/puddle of wee in the alleyway on the way home).

Former X Factor star Lucy Spraggan – who charmed the nation in 2012 singing about Tea and Toast – has been extolling the virtues of cutting out booze since going sober eighteen months ago, and despite losing over three stone and gaining an actual six pack, says that the biggest impact has been on her mental health.

“I’ve had perpetual anxiety and depression throughout my entire adult life,” she says. “Think of hanxiety as an octopus with eight tentacles – remove the alcohol, and there’s one tentacle.

“The more you drink, the more tentacles there are. I have 95% less mental health issues now, because alcohol is a mood inhibitor, it’s a depressive substance. Not just mentally but on your nervous system. You will get anxiety from drinking, from the downward spiral of the sugar as well as the stuff you don’t remember [from the night before].

“Doctors would tell me to try some light exercise before they told me to stop drinking – not that I would have listened, but somebody should have told me. It’s like liquid anxiety. Liquid depression.”

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For me, hanxiety manifests as a wholly disorienting sense of vertigo (anyone else?). Driving on wide roads, crossing bridges and using escalators when I’ve drunk heavily the night before are all likely to raise my heart rate and have even resulted in full on panic attacks. But this all goes to show the havoc alcohol can play with your physiology. I recall a time when I’d decided to take a nice long sunny walk along the river Thames to clear my head after a heavy night.

There I was, on the South Bank, and suddenly realised that I was stuck on the wrong side of the river – the hanxiety was so real that I couldn’t walk back across the bridge, and I couldn’t get the tube home because I was scared of the escalators. I ended up getting an Uber all the way home to Hackney, because I could hardly get him to drive me the length of an actual bridge, could I? (Don’t ask me how I got over to the south side in the first place – I was probably still pissed.)

Speaking of making the decision to stop, Lucy said that during the first few weeks of sobriety she suffered from physical effects similar to withdrawal symptoms from harder drugs.

“The first six weeks were the worst of my life,” she said. “My skin really hurt. Everything felt really abrasive.

“I was hyper emotional and hyper aware and all I could think about was eating sweets. I was having withdrawal from taking that amount of sugar out of my diet.

“But the worst part was the emotion. When I removed alcohol from my life, I didn’t know who I was. I’m the partying, drinking, [her 2013 hit] Beer Fear-singing, centre of the room all the time, and when the alcohol was gone [I realised] I’m kind of introverted.

“In this country, if we’re happy, we drink. If someone has a baby, we drink. If someone dies, we drink. We don’t sit and experience emotions, we have a drink. So when you’re sober if something is sad, you’ll be sad. And at the beginning I didn’t even know what sadness felt like. It’s a skill, being able to manage your emotions, that gets so easy that it becomes a superpower.”

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In a world full of wellness trends and #health, it’s bizarre how reluctant we are to reduce our consumption of actual poison (sorry to break it to you, but alcohol is poisonous) to make ourselves feel better. Drinking culture is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we are struggling with our mental health, we drink to numb our emotions. When we’re feeling socially anxious, we drink to make ourselves seem more fun.

But the next morning, and over time, these feelings become exacerbated and no amount on mindfulness practise or gratitude journaling can undo the damage caused by prolonged alcohol use. A former government drugs advisor, David Nutt, once published a paper claiming that if alcohol was discovered today, it would be classified as a class A substance.

And though I’m loathe to compare my penchant for a bottle (or two) of wine to crack habit, when you look at how much damage alcohol can cause to individuals and society at large, it is worth taking a closer look at how casual our relationship with it is. It’s not always glam cocktails and Instagrammable bars.