Dry January : Does ‘Dry January’ actually have a real impact on overall health?
1 month of no alcohol makes real difference to health, study confirms Does ‘Dry January’ actually have a real impact on overall health? A study confirms its benefits.
• In 2013, Alcohol Change UK started the “Dry January” campaign, where people could commit to abstaining from drinking alcohol for the entire month.
• In January 2025, about 200,000 people worldwide signed up to participate in Dry January.
• A new study reports that abstaining from alcohol for just one month can offer meaningful physical and psychological improvements.
In 2013, Alcohol Change UK started the “Dry January” campaign, where people could commit to abstaining from drinking alcohol for the entire month.
In January 2025, Alcohol Change UK reported that about 200,000 people globally signed up to participate in their Dry January challenge.
Past studies show that taking part in Dry January may offer some positive health benefits. For example, research presented in January 2019 found that those who followed Dry January had higher energy levels and a healthier body weight.
Now, a new study recently published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism reports that abstaining from alcohol for just one month can offer meaningful physical and psychological improvements, including better sleep, weight loss, and improved mood.
Why study ‘Dry January’?
For this study, researchers analysed data from 16 previously published studies on Dry January, encompassing more than 150,000 participants. Scientists focused on who took part in Dry January, the impact it had on them, and what helped them be successful in the campaign.
“Our decision to conduct this systematic review stemmed from a recognized research gap,” Megan Strowger, PhD, who at the time of the study was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies (CAAS) in the School of Public Health at Brown University, and lead author of this study, told Medical News Today.
“Since its launch in the U.K. in 2013, Dry January’s popularity has exploded globally, turning it into a massive public health phenomenon fuelled by media and online discussion,” she said.
“However, the robust, peer-reviewed scientific findings on its actual effects were not centralized or widely known,” Strowger continued. “We saw an urgent need to move past anecdotal evidence, to systematically identify all existing rigorous studies, and provide an unbiased, comprehensive assessment of the campaign’s true impact on participants’ overall health and long-term drinking behaviour.”
Just 1 month of no alcohol offers many benefits
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that Dry January participants who abstained from alcohol for the entire month reported improved sleep, better mood, enhanced ability to lose weight, increased energy, and healthier liver function and blood pressure.
“The significance of these findings is that they reveal the subtle, wide-ranging, and often unnoticed cumulative burden that alcohol places on mental and physical health,” Strowger said.
“Our review found that just a one-month break is sufficient to achieve measurable improvements across multiple systems, including better sleep, reduced blood pressure, and healthier liver function. This is incredibly encouraging.”
— Megan Strowger, PhD
