15 Sober Celebrities Discuss Ditching Alcohol to Inspire Your Dry January

The F1 champion launched his first nonalcoholic spirit in 2023, Almave, and has spoken openly about being sober curious. With an interest in wellness (he has adopted a plant-based diet for the last few years), he decided to take a step back from booze having started drinking at the age of 16, and suffering hangovers for several days. “There is pressure within a social setting,” he told Vogue. “You have that one shot and are like, ”Damn, why did I do that?’ when you get home. I was like, wow, that’s kind of crazy how I’m feeling pressured. And I realised, how can I be feeling pressure at 38? Imagine young 18 year olds.”

He added some of the benefits he’s felt since quitting alcohol. “I don’t know if I’m going to drink again,” he said of his new approach. “Since I’ve stopped drinking, I’ve just been feeling so much better, so much more clarity. I sleep better, I wake up in the morning and I can still get up at 5 a.m.”

Actor and singer Lily Allen has been sober for almost five years, after having a publicised struggle with drug and alcohol abuse. Speaking to Glamour magazine last year, she credits going teetotal for getting her personal and professional life in order. “Sobriety has just changed my life immeasurably. I don’t think I’d be married to my husband. I don’t think that my kids would be thriving in the way that they are. I don’t think that I’d have gone into finding acting and how much I enjoy that. I definitely wouldn’t be getting as much sleep,” she said. “I go to the gym four times a week. Pretty much every aspect of my life has changed as a result of my sobriety. I actually don’t even know if I’d be alive if I’m honest if I hadn’t got sober. So yeah, that’s definitely at the top of my gratitude list when I go to bed every night is my sobriety.”

Singer Liam Payne revealed he was sober in 2022, after opening up on the Diary of a CEO podcast about struggling with alcohol and drug abuse during the height of One Direction’s fame. He returned to his YouTube channel last summer to record a personal message to fans about his absence from the platform, in which he outlined a rehab facility he visited in Louisiana and that he has made the choice to go sober.

“I was having a drink, and then I was like, ‘You know what? This just isn’t serving me at all; I don’t really need this right now,’ and it’s the first time I’ve ever put a drink down without telling someone I’m finished, I don’t need it,” he said. “And I haven’t picked one up since, which has almost been six months [as of July 2023], which I’m excited about. It’s good to be in this position, and I definitely don’t need those things anymore. The party’s over.”

Cara Delevingne took on the 12-step programme and entered rehab in a bid to quit alcohol after she was given a wake-up call when paparazzi photos of her behaving erratically circulated the internet in September 2022 after her 30th birthday. Having begun drinknig and partying as a teenager, she has spoken about her struggles with mental health, and often used alcohol to paper over the cracks. She decided to seek help at the end of 2022, appearing on the cover of Vogue to detail more of her experience.

“I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they’re good. The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed but I’m okay with that, and that’s the difference,” she said.

Spiderman star Tom Holland’s journey to sobriety started with Dry January after having a particularly boozy Christmas period, but was worried about how much he was thinking about alcohol during this time. He decided to extend his dry spell for month, and then to his birthday in June to prove to himself that he didn’t have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. “I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem. So I decided that I would wait until my birthday, which is June 1,” he said on the “On Purpose With Jay Shetty” podcast. “I said to myself, ‘If I can do six months without alcohol, then I can prove to myself that I don’t have a problem.’ And by the time I got to June 1, I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

He added: “I could sleep better. I could handle problems better. Things that would go wrong on set, that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had much better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter. I just sort of said to myself, like, ‘Why? Why am I enslaved to this drink? Why am I so obsessed [with] the idea of having this drink?'”

Now two years sober, he has said “It’s honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done.”

The “Flowers” singer has been sober since 2020 and strives to break the stigma that not drinking equates to not being fun. “I did a lot of family history, which has a lot of addiction and mental health challenges. So just going through that and asking, ‘Why am I the way that I am?’ By understanding the past, we understand the present and the future much more clearly. I think therapy is great,” she said on the Just for Variety with Marc Malkin podcast in 2020.

She continued: “It’s really hard because especially being young, there’s that stigma of ‘you’re no fun’. It’s like, ‘honey, you can call me a lot of things, but I know that I’m fun.’The thing that I love about it is waking up 100%, 100% of the time. I don’t want to wake up feeling groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready.”

The “Game of Thrones” actor spoke about dark periods in his life to The Sunday Times in 2021, detailing his decision to go sober. “You get to a place where you feel like you are a bad person, you feel like you are a shameful person. And you feel that there’s no way out, that’s just who you are. And getting sober is the process of going, ‘No, I can change’,” he said.

Married to costar Rose Leslie, and now a dad of two, he added: “I have a child [now two] and my relationship is brilliant. I’m a very, very happy, content, sober man.”

Actor Blake Lively has never had a penchant for alcohol. “I don’t drink. I’ve never tried a drug,” the former “Gossip Girl” star told Allure back in 2012. She added: “It’s not like I decided on these strict lifestyle choices and I’m enforcing them. It’s just something that I genuinely don’t have a desire for.”

She has since launched a nonalcoholic brand, Betty Buzz, and spoke at a mocktail-making class of her choice to live teetotal. “I don’t drink because I don’t like the effects of alcohol, but I like being a part of it,” she said, per People. “I like being social. I like people coming together. I found that sometimes not drinking, the thing that was interesting was that it was a little alienating, because you don’t feel – and maybe it’s just in your own head – but you just don’t really feel a part of it.”

The former “Made in Chelsea” star went sober in 2018, shortly before becoming a dad. He has since raised awareness for the sober lifestyle and set up his own business, Cleanco, of nonalcoholic spirits. The dad-of-three regularly posts on social media about his decision to quit booze as well as speaking on podcasts about his mental health.

“In the back of my mind for many years, I had always felt that my relationship with alcohol, although seemingly harmless was unhealthy and somewhat destructive,” he wrote on Instagram in 2019. “Drinking lead [sic] me to make poor decisions and achieving my full potential was slipping away. I had abstained from alcohol for lengthy periods at a time but in doing so had made drinking at the end of that period a reward – a pat on the back for my achievement. It was a vicious cycle… I had to change my relationship with alcohol in order to become the man that I knew I could be and that my family would be proud of.”

Model Chrissy Teigen took to Instagram in July 2022 to celebrate a whole year of being sober. “I miss feeling loopy and carefree sometimes, but to be honest toward the end, it didn’t give that fun feeling anymore anyhow. I drank to end crazy anxiety that later mostly went away when I – get this – quit drinking!” she wrote in the caption. Having had times abstaining from alcohol over the years, she gave up with a more permanent focus in 2021. “anyhow I feel really good. sometimes I get really frustrated looking back on days I should remember way better than I do because of alcohol,” she added, before late detailing that “There are pictures from huge moments in life where my eyes just look…gone.”

While not putting pressure on herself to never have a drop of drink again, she is honest about the process. “While I honestly STILL don’t know if I’ll never have a drink again, I do know I never want to be that way again. And for now, none is best. I’ll let the bad dreams come up and try to sort them out in therapy, without booze.”

Mental Health advocate Dr Alex George made the decision to go sober in 2022. The former “Love Island” star highlighted that he didn’t have a problem with alcohol, but just felt it didn’t serve him in a positive way. “There is a societal assumption that if someone has gone sober then they must have some serious ‘problem’ and be at ‘rock bottom’. I drink a couple of times a week, and have good ‘control’ of my consumption. But recently I have been questioning why I drink at all,” he wrote of his decision over a year ago. “I love being able to experience all of the colour in life, in full HD. Alcohol turns down the frequency, distorts the colours and muffles the noise,” he added.

After months without alcohol, he spoke to The Independent about the effect it has had on him. “It’s made a really huge difference,” George said. “I get to bed at 9pm every night, I wake up at 6am, I listen to music, I play music, I go to the gym, I spend quality time with a small number of people – I’ve developed really, really strong boundaries about how I spend my time and who I spend it with.” It’s an “investment” in himself, he said.

The “Stranger Things” actor, known for playing Vecna, has long been sober, celebrating seven and a half years without alcohol in 2022 (now nine years). Bower took to X, formerly Twitter, to explain more about life after alcohol addiction. “Hurting myself and those around me who I loved the most. It got so bad that eventually I ended up in a hospital for mental health,” Bower wrote. “I am now 7 1/2 years clean and sober. I have made many mistakes in my life… But each day is a chance to start again. Atone for mistakes and grow.”

And he added with some inspiration for anyone strugglign with alcohol misuse. “For anyone who wakes up thinking ‘oh god not again’ I promise you there’s a way. I’m so grateful to be where I am, I’m so grateful to be sober. I’m so grateful to be. Remember, we are all works in progress.”

You might think superstar DJ Calvin Harris would like a drink after spending much of his time performing in nightclubs, but he is actually sober. He told the BBC back in 2009: “I stopped drinking because it actually was making me ill. It was affecting my brain in the worst way.”

He later spoke more to the BBC, saying: “My live shows are a million times better now. If you drink, you can’t even remember if it’s a good show or not – and that’s probably for the best, because it would have been rubbish because I’d have been drunk and not making any sense. The fact that people would pay to see a show and I’d not be on form – it wasn’t fair. It’s not fair on anyone.”

Drew Barrymore has been open about her history with substance abuse, and has long lived a sober life. She relapsed after a difficult 2016 divorce from Will Kopelman, but has since found her way back to a healthy balance. She wrote an essay in the December 2022 issue of Drew magazine about using sobriety as an act of self-care. The actor called going teetotal as “one of the most liberating things in my journey of life”.

She added advice for others, too, writing: “One of the bravest things you can do is slay those dragons and finally change an awful cycle in which you’ve found yourself stuck. For me, it was to stop drinking. Giving up alcohol was a way for her “to finally become free of the torture of guilt and dysfunction.” While not everyone needs to ditch alcohol specifically, the point, according to Barrymore, is simply acknowledging that it’s alright to make yourself a priority.

Ultimately, “This has been the best decade of my life, without question,” she told People in 2022. “It wasn’t just the most awesome, it was the one where I feel like I’ve slayed more dragons than I ever have in my whole life.”

“The Hangover” actor has spoken candidly over the years about getting lost in drugs and alcohol before going sober. Speaking on an August 2023 episode of “Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge”, Cooper said: “I was lucky. I got sober at 29 years old, and I’ve been sober for 19 years. I’ve been very lucky.”

Cooper previously thanked comedian Will Arnett for helping him get sober in his 20s. Following a dinner party at the time, Arnett pointed out that Cooper’s attempted jokes were uncalled for, giving him a much needed wake-up call. “That was the first time I ever realised I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. The guy that I think is doing mean humour is telling me the truth, and it changed my entire life,” Cooper said on a June 2022 episode of Arnett’s “SmartLess” podcast.