Dry January: What Happens to Your Body When You Skip Alcohol for a Month

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It’s that time of year again, when revelers swap holiday hangovers for a month of booze-free living. Known as Dry January, this annual ritual has settled into the American calendar: Roughly 87 million U.S. adults, or one in four, skipped alcohol during the opening month of 2025, according to a poll, and similar numbers are expected this year. The trend’s influence now extends well beyond personal resolutions to bar menus and beverage sales.

But does abstaining for a mere month actually have quantifiable benefits? In a new review of 16 studies spanning 150,000 participants, researchers found improvements to mind, body and well-being that are sobering.

People who cut out alcohol for the entire month reported better sleep, mood, and weight loss, as well as improved liver function and blood pressure, and decreases in cancer-related growth factors. In some cases, these improvements lasted months after the challenge was over, according to the team of scientists from Brown University’s School of Public Health and the Warren Alpert Medical School. The abstainers also reported being able to concentrate more and having more energy. Many of them continued to drink less up to six months after their booze-free stretch. And even those who tried “damp” January, cutting back instead of going cold turkey, reported some of these benefits. The team published their results in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.

Read more: “Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?”

“The effort leads to sustained moderation: most participants continue to drink less alcohol rather than increasing consumption afterwards,” explained lead author Megan Strowger, now a postdoctoral research associate at the University at Buffalo, in a statement. “Overall, participating in Dry January allows people to pause, reflect, and rethink their relationship with alcohol, including how it affects their social life, mental health, and physical health.”

Those who were most successful at getting through the month alcohol-free, Strowger and her colleagues found, attributed it to social support, self-monitoring, and enjoying non-alcoholic beverages. Dry January first officially launched in the U.K. in 2013 as an abstinence challenge led by a group called Alcohol Change U.K. That year some 4,000 people registered for the challenge on the group’s website. The number has grown every year since. The group has developed other temporary challenges, such as Sober Spring, as well.

The Brown University review isn’t the first of its kind, but it’s the first to focus exclusively on peer-reviewed publications and the first to include studies conducted since 2022, as well as a number of smaller and experimental studies. The scientists found few negative effects for those participating in the sobriety experiment, aside from some reduced social contact in one study and some rebound effects in a small percentage of participants, where they drank more after the month was up. (It’s worth noting that these rebound effects primarily affected people who were unable to abstain for the full month.) Though withdrawal can be risky for people who are dependent on alcohol, the researchers didn’t find any evidence of this in the studies they reviewed.

Participants weren’t a random cross section of drinkers. Compared with drinkers in the general population, Dry January participants tended to be younger, more often female, and more educated, and reported higher incomes and heavier baseline drinking. Paradoxically, lighter drinkers were more likely to complete the month of abstinence successfully.

Looking at the big picture, the authors found that Dry January doesn’t seem to have had measurable impacts on population levels of drinking.  They speculate that more people would need to participate for it to really begin shaping larger-scale drinking habits.

But while Dry January hasn’t rewritten our culture’s relationship with alcohol yet, it does seem to give people who participate a tangible shine up—and greater resolve to cut back as the months march forward into spring and summer.

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Lead image: Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Lio putra and Aleksandr_Lysenko / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Posted on January 1, 2026

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.