The Art of Staying After the High
There’s a kind of silence that follows transformation - the hush after the confetti, the stillness after the summit, the hangover after the hope.
When I first got sober, people warned me about triggers, cravings, and temptation. No one mentioned the quiet. The part after the breakthrough - when you wake up one day and realise you’ve built a life worth living, but it feels oddly muted.
I used to chase highs: nights that bled into sunrise, ambitions that glittered just out of reach, that sweet cocktail of dopamine, novelty, and self-delusion. Sobriety was supposed to fix that. Instead, when the rush stopped, I mistook peace for boredom.
The Desolation Phase
Brooks draws from Ignatius of Loyola’s idea that after any great awakening - love, faith, recovery - the euphoria fades, and doubt seeps in. The trick isn’t to flee the desolation but to walk through it.
That resonated. My early sobriety glowed. Everything was new again - taste, sleep, skin. I was high on healing. But a few months in, the novelty evaporated, and a heavier truth settled in - the work wasn’t getting sober. The work was staying sober.
When the adrenaline of transformation dips, your nervous system mistakes stillness for loss. That’s why so many people bail - they quit the job, change the city, find a new partner, or relapse. I did all of those, mistaking motion for progress.
Brooks calls this “the satisfaction trap”: confusing the chase for happiness with the substance of it. Real joy, he says, depends on patience, presence, and service - none of which come with fireworks.
The Truth About Alcohol
For years, I told myself alcohol was medicine. It loosened my nerves, made me social, softened the world’s edges. But new evidence paints a clearer picture - and it’s not kind.
According to The Washington Post study on alcohol and dementia risk, even light drinking - a few glasses a week - increases the likelihood of cognitive decline. Yale neuroscientist Joel Gelernter, who once enjoyed a daily drink himself, now avoids it entirely after seeing the data: every threefold increase in consumption raises lifetime dementia risk by 15 percent.
Derek Thompson, adds another sobering calculation: “Every drink takes five minutes off your life.” He frames it not to shame but to remind us that moderation still carries a price - one often paid in mental clarity, sleep quality, and emotional balance.
For me, those five minutes were metaphorical, too. Each drink dulled something: my instincts, my empathy, my creativity. I wasn’t just losing time; I was losing presence.
The Flat Line of Real Life
When I stopped drinking, I expected serenity. Instead, I got sameness. Every day felt ordinary - until I realised ordinary was the point.
Psychiatrist Anna Lembke describes this as the dopamine recalibration: the brain must relearn equilibrium after years of reward distortion. The highs feel lower; the lows feel sharper. But when you resist the urge to self-medicate or chase new stimulation, your baseline for contentment slowly rises.
The boredom I once feared became the ground beneath my feet.
The Practice of Staying
Arthur Brooks suggests that “sticking to your knitting” during desolation — continuing your daily practices even when they feel dull - is how we transform short-term discomfort into long-term growth.
For me, that meant rhythm over reinvention:
Morning runs instead of hangovers.
Sunday calls with two friends who’d seen the worst of me.
Volunteering once a week, because showing up for others steadies me.
Writing every day - even if it’s nonsense — to prove to myself I’m still here.
These weren’t glamorous habits. But they gave me a scaffold. Stability is unsexy - it doesn’t trend - but it heals.
Esther Perel calls it “eroticism for life”: finding energy not in chaos, but in curiosity. The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it’s connection. And connection thrives in routine, not drama.
Learning to Sit with the Quiet
In Buddhist tradition, any form of suffering - loneliness, craving, restlessness - can become what Zen teachers Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison call a “gateless gate”: a threshold to awareness if you stay still long enough.
I love that image - the idea that loneliness itself can be a doorway, not a dead end. For me, the gate was boredom. It was learning to sit in my apartment on a Friday night without reaching for something - a drink, a phone, a person - to fill the silence.
I used to think sobriety would make life smaller. Instead, it’s expanded it. The quiet has become full - of mornings, of conversations, of purpose.
Where I Land
Every time I stay - through the boredom, the longing, the dip - I build trust. Not in other people, but in myself.
I’ve learned that the opposite of the high isn’t the crash. It’s calm. The high was loud; the calm is true.
I don’t crave fireworks anymore. I crave steady light. I crave people who stay. I crave mornings that don’t ask for apology.
The art of staying, I’ve realised, is the art of living - one quiet, deliberate, ordinary day at a time.