The 90-day verdict

Day ninety I sat at my kitchen bench at 7am with a coffee and the spreadsheet I'd been keeping for three months. Sleep score, weekly average. Resting heart rate. Weight. Mood number out of ten. Money saved. I read the page top to bottom. Then I closed the laptop and went for a walk and tried to decide what to do next.

This module is that morning. The honest read at day ninety. What good looks like. What the numbers tell you. And the three different paths the verdict points to, depending on what the data actually says.

What good looks like, by the numbers

Run the spreadsheet against your day-zero baseline. The deltas to expect:

• Sleep. Average sleep up by 30-60 minutes per night. Sleep efficiency up by 8-12 percentage points. The 3am waking is gone.
• Resting heart rate. Down 6-12 bpm.
• Blood pressure. Down 8-15 systolic, 4-8 diastolic. If you were borderline at the start, you're now squarely in the normal range.
• Weight. Down 2-6kg. Most of the loss is in the first six weeks.
• Body composition. Waist down 3-6cm. The face is visibly different in photos.
• Mood baseline. Up about 1.5 points on the 1-10 scale, averaged over weeks 8-12. The Sunday gloom is gone.
• Energy through the afternoon. Stable. The 3pm slump is something you used to have.
• Money. $1,200-$2,500 you didn't spend on alcohol over ninety days.

If your numbers are in this range, the experiment worked. If your numbers are not in this range, that is also data. It means alcohol was a smaller part of your problem than you thought, and the rest of the work (sleep, training, food, stress, mental health) is the real frontier.

The honest read

Beyond the numbers, the harder question. Sit with it for an hour, not five minutes.

Three honest reads, each pointing to a different next step.

Read one: "I feel objectively better and I don't want to go back."

Most men. If your sleep, weight, mood and energy are all up, the rational move is to extend. Not "give up drinking forever". Extend.

Two paths from here:

• Continue the dry stretch. Make it 180 days. Same protocol. By six months, the brain's reward circuitry has reorganised enough that the question "am I a man who drinks?" reads differently.
• Reintroduce, deliberately. Pick a defined boundary: two drinks, twice a week, never at home, never alone. Track the numbers for another ninety days. If sleep stays steady and weight holds, you've found a sustainable position. If the numbers slide, your data has told you the truth: you can't drink moderately.

Don't reintroduce on autopilot. The "I'll just have one tonight and see how it goes" approach is how most men silently return to baseline within sixty days.

Read two: "I feel a bit better, but I'm not sure it was worth it."

A small group, but real. The numbers moved a little but not dramatically. The social cost felt high.

This read often means alcohol was not the load-bearing wall you thought it was. Your sleep was bad before because of stress or screen time, not the wine. Your weight was up because of food, not the beer. Your mood was low because of work, not the bottle.

That's a useful finding. Two routes:

• Go back to drinking, but do the rest of the work. Now you have to look at the actual dragon. Sleep hygiene, training, food, therapy, work, marriage. Pick the next experiment.
• Reintroduce on a hard cap. Cap yourself at five standard drinks a week (the Australian guideline). Track for ninety days. If you can hold the cap, you've found a position where alcohol is a small ingredient. If you can't hold the cap, the data has just told you something useful and the verdict is read three.

Read three: "I feel genuinely worse than I expected to feel without alcohol."

The smallest group. Also the one this module is most for.

If, after ninety days, you are still struggling with the absence (cravings strong, mood low, sleep barely improved, irritability persistent), the experiment has produced its most important finding: alcohol was load-bearing in a way that 90 days of abstinence has not resolved.

This is a small group of men. It includes:

• Men whose AUDIT-C at day zero was 15+ and who completed the 90 days through pure stubbornness.
• Men with underlying anxiety or depression that the alcohol was masking, which has now surfaced with no infrastructure to handle it.
• Men whose drinking was tied to trauma or grief that had not been processed.
• Men with a family history of alcohol dependence who are at meaningful biological risk.

If this is you, call your GP. Not later. This week.

The conversation is short. "I've done ninety days off alcohol. The cravings are still strong. I think I need help with what comes next." The GP will ask a few questions and may refer you to a counsellor, a community alcohol service, or, in some cases, a brief course of medication (naltrexone or acamprosate) that genuinely shifts the dial in this band.

This is not failure. This is the experiment doing its job.

The three things you actually take away

What you actually take away from the ninety days:

• A baseline. You now know what your body, sleep and mood look like without alcohol in them. You can never un-know it.
• A method. You ran a 90-day experiment with measurable inputs and got a real answer. That is a method you can apply to anything.
• A trip switch. You know, now, that you can stop. Whatever your verdict, the demonstration is in the bank.

What to actually do tomorrow

If verdict is read one and you're extending: book the next 90-day window. Same tracking. Tell your wife.

If verdict is read two and you're reintroducing carefully: write the cap on a card. Five drinks a week. Track the numbers for the next ninety.

If verdict is read three: book the GP appointment today. Not Monday. Today.

Run the trial. Read the numbers. Tell the truth.