Does Mindful Drinking Help You Quit Drinking?

These days it seems like mindfulness is touted as a solution for everything. From reducing stress to developing a healthier relationship with things we consume, promises of the benefits of mindfulness have taken a traditional Buddhist concept to a strategy promoted even by mainstream media.

Meditation, for those of us who are unfamiliar with it, may not seem like an effective strategy to quit drinking. However, there have been numerous scientific studies looking into the specific benefits of mindfulness, one of which is developing a healthier relationship with alcohol. But what if we’re looking to quit alcohol? Let’s learn more about mindful drinking strategies and how they can help us transition to sobriety.

What Is Mindful Drinking?

Mindful drinking is the practice of developing a healthier, more conscious relationship with alcohol. It promotes questioning why we’re drinking and reflecting on how much we’re drinking, without judgment. Mindful drinking differs from moderation or sobriety, as they are more like end goals whereas mindfulness is a practice that involves actionable steps to help us reach these goals of quitting or cutting back. 

Some mindful drinking practices include the following: 

• Planning ahead when considering drinking, whether that’s the number of drinks you’ll have or what you’ll do after
• Noticing our emotions while drinking
• Identifying our triggers for drinking
• Being present in the moment, both while drinking and not drinking
• Identifying other coping strategies for negative emotions
• Finding alternatives to drinking, whether that’s non-alcoholic beverages or different activities

These practices create a strong framework to help us quit or cut back on alcohol by promoting greater intention with our choices. Helping us develop better habits ultimately leads to better physical and mental health. Mindful drinking promises many benefits, but how does it actually work?

How To Get Started With Mindful Drinking

If we’re looking to start developing a healthier relationship with alcohol, the first step is to get “sober curious.” This idea involves questioning our personal and societal reasons we drink rather than mindlessly sipping. Getting “sober curious” increases our awareness of our drinking habits, already dipping our toe into mindful drinking strategies. 

After realizing we may want to quit or cut back on alcohol, we may be looking for how to sober up. Alcohol hijacks our brain’s reward system, making it challenging to stop drinking even if we want to. On top of that, we may get withdrawal symptoms that make the experience even more unpleasant. We can explore ways to safely detox at home or find monitored options to increase our safety. 

Once we’re ready to embark on our journey of quitting or cutting back, we can find support options that work best for us. There’s no shortage of treatment options, from behavioral programs, peer support groups, and a newer option that helps meet us no matter where we are in our journey — mindful drinking apps. If you’re looking to learn more about the best “quit drinking” apps, check out “Sip with Purpose: The 10 Best Mindful Drinking Apps”. There are plenty of options to choose from, but let’s take a deep dive into the top alcohol reduction app — Reframe.

Reframe Mindful Drinking App: A Breakdown of Helpful Tools

Let’s take a walkthrough of the Reframe app to see how it can help us develop mindful drinking strategies and help us work towards an alcohol-free life. Here’s how it works:

1. Habit-Changing Program

Reframe’s habit-changing program is the heart of the app. The neuroscience-based alcohol reduction program is developed by leading experts in the field of mental health and medicine to help us change our relationship with alcohol and build positive habits using scientific practices.

By participating in daily tasks to learn something new every day, we get one step closer to sobriety and a healthier, more fulfilling life. As we  learn ways to change our habits, we can effectively develop skills to eventually quit alcohol for good.

2. Personalized Drink Tracker


Tracking our alcohol consumption helps us get a better idea of what our drinking habits look like over time. Reframe’s personalized drink tracker allows us to set targets that help us stay accountable day by day. It also allows us to track our progress over time, helping us adjust our goals and work toward quitting alcohol. 

Ditch the old pen and paper and prevent forgetting to log a drink. Logging our consumption right there and then not only helps us more accurately keep track of our alcohol consumption but also increases our awareness of how much we’re drinking while it happens. 

3. Mindfulness and Meditation Activities


The journey to sobriety can be filled with a spectrum of challenging emotions. We can tune into different guided meditations and mindfulness activities to help us relax and find inner peace during any wave of emotion we may be feeling. Check out meditations from inspiration-focused ones such as “Initiating Freedom” to stress-reducing ones such as “You Are Water”.

Meditation and mindfulness practices might feel uncomfortable at first, especially in the fast-paced world we live in today. However, meditation is a scientifically proven tool to help reduce stress and quiet the mind. And some even better news? We can slowly develop these practices through Reframe’s mindfulness and meditation activities to hopefully be able to use them on our own one day!

4. Courses and Challenges

Learn new life skills through Reframe’s science-backed courses. We can explore a range of topics to acquire practical strategies to help us quit or cut back and build a healthier and more meaningful life in general. Some course topics include alcohol and digestion, stress and the body, improving our sleep, understanding the risks of hard liquor, and much more. Don’t worry, the courses provide recorded and live videos to present everything in an informational yet entertaining way.

But there’s more! We can participate in challenges that give us the opportunity to apply our learned skills in a fun way. Monthly challenges such as Reflect December, Dry/Damp January, Mental Health May, and Outdoorsy June are just some activities you won’t want to miss. Joining Reframe’s courses and challenges is the perfect way to apply mindfulness to drinking. Educational information from the courses helps to increase our awareness, and challenges help us to use those tools to make more intentional decisions. Practice mindful drinking in a way that’s enjoyable and doesn’t seem like a chore with Reframe!

5. Cutback Community

Join a thriving community of over a million Reframers that’s there to support you 24/7. The Reframe community is a private, anonymous community that allows you to celebrate milestones or give and receive support from those who may know exactly what you’re going through. In addition to staying connected to others through peer matching and group challenges, we can also get more personalized guidance through check-ins with certified coaches. Quitting or cutting back on alcohol can be a challenging journey, but we don’t have to go through it alone!

Support during recovery can be much more than just a network of acquaintances. Research shows that human connection can be a powerful tool for change and growth. During our journey to sobriety, which can be filled with overcoming uncomfortable emotions and facing the aftermath of life-altering experiences, a support system can help pick us back up and motivate us to continue to work toward a brighter future. 

6. A Comprehensive Toolkit


Reframe puts everything you need to help quit or cut back on alcohol all in one place. Ditch the need for scrambling to find a pen and paper when we need to write something down or scrolling through myriad online videos to find one that distracts us or motivates us to stay committed to the journey. 

If we’re looking to quit drinking, apps like Reframe allow us to tune in to a guided meditation, play a distracting game, or watch inspirational videos to help the cravings fade away. This sets us up for success, as all our tools and resources are right there at our fingertips. If we’re looking to take that leap from mindful drinking to full sobriety, how can we make that final push?

Moving From Mindful Drinking to Sobriety

There’s no right or wrong way to reach sobriety, nor any correct timeline for it. If we feel ready to take that next step from mindful drinking to sobriety, we can continue to implement these same strategies with a different end goal in mind:

• Find your purpose. Having something to work towards can be a significant motivator to take that step towards sobriety or keep going when things get tough. Our end goal may be to quit alcohol, but it’s also important to ask ourselves why. To develop more authentic relationships? To improve our physical and mental health? Our purpose acts as our guiding light on our journey to sobriety. 
• Adjust goals accordingly. Taking that step from mindful drinking to sobriety includes adjusting our goals with that endpoint in mind. Instead of limiting our consumption, we can identify alternative coping strategies to drinking and opt for alcohol-free alternatives. 
• Continue to cut back. Small steps add up over time and help us get to our end goal. If we’re looking to say goodbye to alcohol for good, we can set goals to cut back on alcohol weekly, eventually reducing our consumption to zero.
• Identify challenges. The journey to sobriety can be riddled with obstacles and challenges. Identifying what these are, such as our triggers for drinking and underlying factors for our habits, helps us overcome them and commit to an alcohol-free lifestyle.
• Get support. As we’ve mentioned, support can be a hugely beneficial tool in recovery. Open up to close friends and family, get involved in mindful drinking apps like Reframe, or explore professional treatment options.

Quitting cold turkey may work for some of us, but for others, we may be looking to transition into sobriety. Whichever we choose, tools like mindful drinking apps that promote science-based strategies can help us reach our goals.

Take the First Step

Mindful drinking isn’t a magical solution, but it can be an incredibly beneficial tool not only for developing a better relationship with alcohol but also for quitting it altogether. The two main mechanisms of increasing our awareness and making more intentional decisions help us reach sobriety in a transitional way. Luckily, there are many helpful tools to guide us on our mindful drinking journey, including mindful drinking apps like Reframe! Take the first step towards a healthier, happier life by embracing mindful drinking!