How tube amps helped me quit booze (New Year’s Resolution edition)
Oof, it’s been a while since we did a blog. As we approach the end of the year, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about resolutions for 2025, and where we’d all like to be a year from now. It wouldn’t exactly surprise me if some in this community suffer from the same affliction as me, and at this point, I feel as though I can offer something of value to the conversation.
As of New Year’s Day, 2025, I will have been alcohol-free for two years. Not a drop. And this didn’t seem even remotely possible three years ago. To be completely honest, I don’t even think about drinking that much anymore, and I drank a lot.
I wasn’t a big drinker in my 20s. But through a series of events and general lack of awareness, I gradually began drinking more, and it was increasingly becoming that thing I looked forward to. It became an every day thing.
But for a long time, I fooled myself into thinking it wasn’t a problem. I’m not embarrassed to admit that my drink of choice was white wine. And for a number of years I convinced myself that you can’t be an alcoholic if you only drink white wine. This is how alcoholism gets its claws into you; by making you think that you’re not an alcoholic. You have “reasons."
For me, the “reasons” could have been just about anything. Good news, bad news, no news. But it all felt like a “reason” to have a drink. As you progress in your alcoholism, you invent more and more fantastical “reasons” to have a drink. Like, “the French drink with lunch, right?” or “I heard Queen Elizabeth had four drinks a day, and she lived to be 99,” or even, “I’m part Irish, so I can handle this.” Everyone comes up with their own ridiculous justifications, but they all serve the same point: allowing you to go deeper into addiction.
One of the things I learned in therapy is that addiction has a super strong survival instinct, and its ultimate goal is to consume you. There’s no real end game other than you being dead, but that’s how it works, and it just keeps creeping the longer you live with it.
Eventually, you get to the point where you can see that you’re in a deep hole, but climbing out doesn’t seem like something you can or want to do. I used to make plans for after I climbed out of the hole, but I wasn’t making plans to get out of the hole. I would tell myself things like, “I’ll lose this extra weight once I stop drinking,” or “my stomach will finally feel better when I stop drinking.” I knew it was inevitable, but it wasn’t going to happen “today.” It was always a “tomorrow” problem.
Part of my problem, and why it took me so long to get help is that I wasn’t an “asshole drunk.” I rarely drank passed the point where I could control myself. I didn’t get belligerent or mean. I didn’t do irresponsible things. I didn’t get in trouble with the law or stay out late partying. For the most part, the extent of my drinking was completely private. I had figured out how to hide it because I was really good at it. If I had gotten a DUI or in a bar fight, I probably would have stopped sooner, but none of that stuff happened. I was perfectly content to sip wine, at home, perfectly politely all afternoon and evening. I had a system.
But eventually your system will break down. I started gaining weight and my yearly blood tests didn’t look so good anymore. My doctor sent me for an ultrasound of my liver and found that it was slightly enlarged, but not yet damaged. I still had a chance to turn it around, but one thing finally became clear: this was probably my last chance. I would actually have to take it seriously.
The first thing I did was tell my wife. She knew I drank, and she knew I drank too much, but again, I was a nice drinker, so I was able to keep the extent of it a secret. But an amazing thing happened when I told her how bad it really was: suddenly my secret wasn’t just between me and my addiction anymore. Someone else was there.
This is what addiction hates the most. Addiction wants you all to itself. That’s why it starts squeezing people out or your life. But once you shoehorn another person into the situation, your addiction can’t function properly.
So, I went to therapy. I don’t have rehab money lying around, but I spent a number of sessions working with a therapist who specializes in addiction because he is a recovering addict himself. I didn’t stop drinking overnight. I gave myself some time to get ready because I wanted it to work this time.
In the past, when my wife has talked to me about my drinking, I would always say that I would do better, but all that meant was that I would hide it better. Because I didn’t really want to quit. I just didn’t want to be scrutinized for drinking. So, I became dishonest. I hid wine around the house. I bought wine secretly. I did everything I could, for as long as I could, to keep my drinking quiet, and that took up a lot of time.
I started to realize that opportunities were sliding by. I had a two year old son who would soon figure out that his dad was drinking all the time. The clock was ticking, and I knew it.
So, after a couple of months in therapy learning about why I used substances as a crutch in the first place, I started making a plan to quit. I also read some helpful books, which I will link to at the end. But actually, let’s just talk about book for a minute because it’s important.
I chose some books that seemed to be well-regarded, and they were helpful in several ways. While they didn’t necessarily describe my experience perfectly, they showed me just how widespread alcoholism is, and also how ingrained alcohol is in our culture. And when I say “our,” I mean most cultures.
The ubiquity and sheer availability of alcohol makes it different from other drugs. And the way our culture has embraced alcohol as a net good for society for centuries, makes it even harder to quit. Most people don’t go out for a round of heroin with their buddies after work.
The reason I chose to quit drinking on January 1st is simply because I’m not good with dates, and I wanted to remember when I did it. I don’t remember the exact date I founded Dexter Amps, and neither my wife nor I can remember the date of our first date. But I wanted to know when I stopped drinking.
By the time I quit, I was drinking in excess of two bottles of wine a day, every day, pretty much without fail. When your body becomes accustomed to that, quitting is difficult. Beyond the willpower needed to get through those first days, you can also expect withdrawal symptoms, that are more severe the more you drink. In some cases, severe alcoholism withdrawal needs to be done under the supervision of a doctor or you could die.
My symptoms started at around 7 pm on the first day— January 1st, 2023. We were having dinner at my parent’s house, and I started to feel sweaty. I needed to go home and be in the dark. My therapist had recommended binaural beats, which are available on Youtube, and this was extremely helpful during the periods of anxiety and shakiness of early withdrawal.
Articles written by recovering alcoholics always seem to include something about how they instantly started getting the best sleep of their lives when they quit drinking. But that’s not the case for everyone. It wasn’t the case for me.
The first six month without alcohol were also mostly without sleep. My body didn’t know how to fall asleep anymore, and I had to relearn how to fall asleep without passing out from booze.
Honestly, the first couple of months were excruciating, but the reason it was different was because I had accountability this time. I wasn’t “cutting back,” or “thinking about quitting” anymore. I had quit, and I had told all of the important people in my life about it. A lot of people were surprised that I had a problem. Some were not. But the fact that they all knew that I was quitting meant that if I failed, I’d have to answer to all of them. I wasn’t downplaying my problem anymore. I was forcing it into the open, and when you do that, you can’t go back. When everyone you know knows you have a problem, they aren’t going to forget it, and they aren’t going to feel the same if you start drinking around them again.
If you get to the point where you hate or fear your addiction enough, you can do this. I spent some time going to AA, and ultimately it wasn’t for me, but for a lot of people it is essential, so try it. Part of their goal is to make you feel a sense of accountability by having you share your story with other people. For me though, I gained a far greater sense of accountability from sharing my story with people close to me— the people who wouldn’t let me off the hook.
I brought my wife in first, but then I realized that I had to bring in more people. And I’m not the kind of person who likes to talk about alcoholism. I’m not that guy. I’m not an evangelist for the booze-free lifestyle, and I don’t feel any particular stigma not drinking in social situations. You don’t have to burden your loved ones with your recovery, and you don’t have to make recovery your whole personality in order to be successful.
But people are an important part of the equation. And the more people who know what you’re going through, the more support you have. I’ve found that even my drinking friends— especially my drinking friends— are most supportive of my sobriety because I have a feeling a lot of them are in a similar situation I was in, and they understand how hard it is to dig your way out.
So, what do you gain from quitting? As I said, I didn’t gain much sleep, but I also didn’t gain any more weight. I had been rail-thin all through my 20s, but in my late 30s booze started packing on the pounds. By 43, I was looking kinda bloated and gray.
I also gained focus. I was tired from the insomnia, but I could use my brain much more effectively and for more of the day. I’ve heard a lot of people say that when they quit drinking, life became deathly boring. And to that I say, “if you’re bored, it’s because you’re boring.” Alcohol is great at making you think you’re doing stuff with your time, when in fact, you are doing nothing. When you quit, you suddenly have a lot of time to fill.
I had already been building amps, but when I stopped drinking, I started building more amps. That meant I had to start selling them. I had so much more useful time to learn and work and be a good dad. I became more patient. What “I needed” became less the focus. What others needed became my main concern, and it wasn’t hard because my life had become so much less complicated. I didn’t have to keep the whole charade going all the time.
When you’re finally free of it, you start to realize that you were putting a lot of stuff on hold because you had something else to do: drinking. When you look back on the whole thing, it seems almost impossible that you wasted so much time doing basically nothing. Grieving that lost time is also completely pointless. What matters is the time you now have on your hands, and this is key.
You will have more time on your hands, and if you use it correctly, you won’t even really think about drinking that much. You might get “low key” addicted to something else— I’m now hopelessly addicted to plain sparkling water, but I can deal with that. But the greater issue is the time.
Once you don’t have to spend time planning how to drink, drink, or cover up the evidence of your drinking, you have to do something else. Or you will, inevitably, start to think about drinking, and that’s what your addiction wants.
Also, your addiction isn’t going anywhere. Eddie Vedder once said something about how he feels like his mind is a car and there are different people in the car who could be driving. And he realized that you can’t kick anyone out of the car. You’re stuck with all the people in the car. All you can do is control who’s behind the wheel. As long as you make sure the right person is behind the wheel, you’re ok. But you have to be aware that the addict— the miserable drunk who just wants company— is always going to be in the car. You just can’t let him drive anymore.
I sleep better now. But not every night. If something is on my mind, it’s going to stay on my mind as I’m trying to fall asleep because I don’t pass out anymore. But now, when I wake up in the morning, I’m able to take care of whatever kept me up late. And that’s when you start to see where you are in the circle. That thing (alcohol) that you needed to maintain “normal” becomes the main threat to your new normal. And that is when you realize that it’s not actually that hard anymore. That’s when you really feel free.
I know that relapse is usually considered an important part of recovery, and it’s entirely possible that I’ll relapse at some point, but it won’t be for long, and it hasn’t happened yet. Something interesting did happen though.
It’s probably not a huge secret that I’m not a big fan of the incoming president, so election night was a gut punch. If ever there was a time to have a drink, that seemed like it. But the addict wasn’t driving the car anymore. The sober guy was driving, and he said, “just think how good you’re going to feel about yourself tomorrow if you DON’T have a drink right now? That would be pretty punk rock.” And sober guy is almost always right. It was pretty punk rock.
The point of this is not that you need to start building tube amps or even that you need to quit drinking. The point is that addiction can creep up on anyone, and the deeper that hole gets, the harder it is to dig out. What I’ve learned is that people experience addiction differently, and there isn’t a one size fits all “program” that will fix you. And for fuck’s sake, there isn’t an app that will work either. They just want your data.
But if you feel as though you’ve been sliding into dependency, I can tell you one thing with certainty: You can fix it. And the voice in your head telling you that life will be unbearable without your drug of choice, is just lying to you. I can’t make you believe it, but I know it’s true.
Once you take that leap, you need to make sure you leap into something though. And there are a lot of hucksters out there preying on recovering addicts. When I quit drinking, I knew I wanted to throw myself into amps because drinking was holding me back, and I knew it. But what I realized is that you have to have something that replaces drinking as a main feature of your life. Otherwise, something will be missing.
I don’t like to get too sentimental about my drinking, but I remember how helpless I felt at the time. And it took me a long time to realize that other people and a purpose are the only solution. I have no professional advice to offer about how to quit drinking or any other substance. But if you’re serious, there are resources everywhere. Here are a few:
Alcohol Lied to Me by Craig Beck
Sober on a Drunk Planet by Sean Alexander