In conversation with Marcus Barnes - Men, Alcohol and Mental Health

I’ve been a journalist for 17 years now. All of the different areas of journalism that I’ve worked in have allowed me access to parties, social events, events that have free drink etc. I started off in men’s interests, lads mags. Then I went into tabloid journalism, and now I cover music, mostly club music, raves, festivals and clubs. I’ve been doing that for the last 10 years and one of the things that I started to realise a few years ago was that alcohol had become quite a bit of a social crutch for me.

I started stepping into a more of a mindful, perhaps slightly spiritual way of being, my lifestyle choices started to change. I became more aware of my habits and decided to take a real hard look at what I was doing in terms of drinking. I decided to go sober two years ago. I had already done it once for 18 months. Prior to that, I was doing annual sober months in November, that gave me a little bit of a taster. But in December 2018 I went sober. I haven’t looked back since.

WAS THERE ANY KIND OF PARTICULAR MOMENT OR SOMETHING THAT MOTIVATED YOU TO SAY ‘RIGHT NOW, THIS IS THE MOMENT I’M GOING TO STOP DRINKING COMPLETELY’

I was taking steps into being a bit healthier and conscious of my mental and physical health. I started to have this nagging feeling sort of deep inside me. I’d never really enjoyed drinking that much anyway and I’d always get sick. I was notorious for vomiting the next day. When you take a step back from it, it probably was a bit of a problem, but it just it’s so normalised that nobody ever pulled me up on it.

This nagging feeling was always there and the more I focused on it, the more I just couldn’t get away from it. I ended up really not enjoying drinking at all, and hangovers of course! I don’t think I really hit a rock bottom, but over a period of maybe a few months, even up to a year, whatever joy I was getting from drinking just started to fade away. It was a heavy internalised feeling that just wouldn’t go away. I just had like a lot of self-loathing and a lot of like negative feelings around drinking.

In the end what gave me the push to go sober was going with my partner to a wellness retreat in Thailand. We took part in a spiritual ceremony there. In order to prepare for it, you had to abstain from pretty much everything, any vice that you had. So drinking went in the bin and it stayed in the bin. That was the first time I went sober for 18 months. I thought once I’d given up for two weeks, I’d just carry on and see how I got on. The second time around I took myself off the wagon for a crazy summer and autumn. Having done 18 months previously and feeling the benefits to my physical and mental health, I thought ‘I’m going to do it again. And this time I think it will be for keeps.’ So far so good.

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