The 30-day reset

Day three of my first thirty days, I lay awake from 2am to 5am with my legs twitching and a low-grade rage I couldn't aim at anything in particular. My wife asked, mildly, if I was alright. I said yes. I was not alright. I was halfway through a predictable physiological reset and didn't know it, and the not-knowing was the problem.

Nobody had told me what the reset would feel like, in order, by week. So I'm telling you. The next 30 days have a shape. Once you know the shape, the bad nights stop feeling like a sign you should quit quitting.

This module maps the four phases. None of them is permanent. All of them resolve.

Days 1-3: the irritability window

This is the worst stretch. It's also the shortest.

What happens physiologically: your liver was processing alcohol every day or every second day. Take it away and the enzymes have nothing to do for 48-72 hours. Your nervous system, which has been mildly suppressed by the booze and mildly excited compensating for it, swings the other way. The result is a cocktail of:

• A persistent low-grade headache, especially behind the eyes.
• Sleep that breaks at 2-4am for a stretch. You wake hot, fully alert, and then doze badly until the alarm.
• Irritability that flares at small things. Traffic. The kids' breakfast. Your inbox.
• A weird sweetness craving around 7pm, the time you usually drank.
• Vivid, sometimes unpleasant dreams.

What to do:

• Drink water. Not a wellness gesture, a real one. The body is mildly dehydrated and the headache responds.
• Eat earlier and bigger. Don't skip dinner. Low blood sugar in this window magnifies everything.
• Move. A 30-minute walk after dinner displaces the 7pm pull. A heavy gym session burns off some of the agitation.
• Be in bed at the same time you'd usually go. Your sleep will be worse for three nights regardless. Don't stack a late bedtime on top.
• Tell your partner what's coming. "I'm going to be a prick for three days. It will pass."

A note: if you are in the AUDIT-C 15+ band, the irritability window can include genuine withdrawal symptoms (tremor, sweating, racing heart, nausea, in rare cases seizures). That is a medical emergency, not a phase. Call your GP before you start, not after.

Days 4-10: sleep returns

By day four, the headache lifts. By day five, you sleep through the night for the first time in possibly years.

This is the phase that shocks most men. Not because they didn't know alcohol affected sleep, but because they had no reference point for what good sleep felt like. They'd been living in the four-hour-real / three-hour-pharmacological pattern for so long that "tired but functional" was their normal.

What you'll notice:

• Falling asleep takes 15-20 minutes, not 5. That's correct. You were knocking yourself out before, not falling asleep.
• The 3am waking stops. You sleep through to the alarm.
• You wake up clear-headed, often before the alarm. Not bouncy. Clear.
• Dreams come back. Sometimes in vivid colour. This is REM rebound; your brain is replaying months of suppressed REM in a fortnight. It calms by week three.
• Energy in the afternoon improves. The 3pm slump you've blamed on coffee or the lunch was probably the previous night's drinking.

The 7pm sweetness craving may still be there. Push through. Your body is asking for the dopamine spike, not the calories.

Days 11-20: the body starts moving

Around day twelve, the scale starts shifting. Not dramatically. A kilo, sometimes two. Then a steady drip downward. The mechanism is simple: you've removed roughly 2,000-4,000 kilojoules a week, freed up 8-12 hours of fat oxidation per drinking day, and started sleeping enough for cortisol to drop.

What changes:

• Waist measurements before clothes do. The shirt buttons sit easier. The belt sits the same.
• Resting heart rate falls 4-8 bpm. If you wear a watch, you'll see it.
• Blood pressure drops. If you measure it, expect 5-10 systolic over a fortnight.
• The face de-puffs. Specifically around the eyes and the jaw. Other people will notice before you do.
• Energy stabilises through the afternoon. The training session you've been forcing through becomes the training session you actually look forward to.

The trap in this phase: you start feeling so good that you think one drink to celebrate is fine. It isn't. You haven't earned a drink. You've earned the next ten days. Read the relapse map module before week three lands.

Days 21-30: emotional regulation

This is the phase nobody warns you about because most men quit before they reach it.

Around day three weeks in, something less measurable happens. The emotional thermostat resets. You stop overreacting to small annoyances. You stop under-reacting to things that should have hurt. You feel a thing, you sit with the thing, the thing passes.

What it looks like in practice:

• The argument you would have escalated, you don't.
• The colleague who needles you, you brush off.
• The grief or low mood that you'd been numbing for a year sometimes shows up. This is not a relapse trigger. This is the actual feeling, finally available to be felt. Most men move through it.
• Sex drive returns. Usually noticeably.
• The Sunday 4pm gloom is gone or drastically reduced.

This is also the phase where your wife (or whoever lives with you) tells you, often unprompted, that you seem like a different man. Don't argue. Take it.

What to track, and what to ignore

Track:

• Hours of sleep, ideally with a watch. The trend matters more than any single night.
• Resting heart rate, weekly average.
• Weight, weekly, same time of day.
• Mood baseline, 1-10, end of each day. One number. Don't journal.

Ignore:

• The number on the scale on any single day.
• The 7pm cravings (they fade by week three).
• The voice that says "you've proved your point, you can have one now". You haven't. You've just started.

Thirty days is not the answer. Thirty days is the threshold past which you've earned the right to ask whether the next sixty are worth doing. The honest read is in module five. The point of weeks one to four is to get you to a state where you can ask the question with a clear head.

Sleep first. Body second. Mood third. Patience throughout.