Stop Counting Days – Why Focusing on Sobriety Metrics Can Keep You Stuck
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 18
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 22
Written by Sonia Grimes, Alcohol Control Coach
Sonia Grimes is The Alcohol Control Coach and founder of The Simply Sober Path. She helps high-achieving individuals break free from the Alcohol Illusion and silence Alcohol Noise–creating lasting freedom with confidence and ease.
What if counting sober days is making your journey harder, not easier? In this eye-opening article, Sonia Grimes challenges the common habit of tracking sobriety by the calendar. She reveals why focusing on numbers can keep you stuck in performance mode — and how shifting to self-awareness can unlock real freedom from alcohol. If you’re ready to change how you see sobriety, Sonia’s fresh approach will inspire and guide you every step of the way.
What if counting sober days is actually making your sobriety feel harder—not easier?
For many high-achieving individuals beginning their journey of alcohol freedom, counting sober days feels like a logical place to start.
It offers structure. It offers focus. It offers a sense of progress.
But here’s a truth that most people never realise:
Counting sober days—especially in the early stages—can quietly shift your focus away from healing, and toward performing.
It turns your journey into a tally. A scoreboard. A number to protect.
And while that may seem motivating at first, it reinforces a deeper belief:
That your success depends on how perfectly you perform recovery.
The Moment It Becomes a Performance
Instead of focusing on how you feel, what you’re learning about yourself, your boundaries, your needs, your healing, and what’s shifting internally... the focus quietly turns to how many days you’ve “achieved.”
It becomes about doing it right instead of becoming free. It becomes about proving your progress instead of embodying it.
“You weren’t meant to perform sobriety. You were meant to live it.”
“That’s not freedom. That’s pressure in a different outfit.”
Performing means measuring your worth by visible success. Transforming means anchoring into your truth—regardless of what the number says.
The Real Risk of Counting Days
When the number becomes the goal, your self-trust becomes conditional:
“I’m doing well because I’ve made it 30 days.”
“I’ve failed because I slipped on day 42.”
But drinking never erased the progress you made. It didn’t undo your growth. You didn’t lose what you learned—unless you choose to ignore everything you’ve gained, fall back into old feelings of failure, and abandon the very needs you’ve been learning to meet.
The truth is, you simply had a moment where your old wiring still felt safer than your new one.
And when the spotlight is on the number, that one moment can feel like collapse.
That’s the real downside. Not because the number is wrong—but because it becomes the measure of success, instead of the by-product of healing.
Self-Awareness Over Scorekeeping: The New Way Forward
The truth is, freedom starts not with tracking—but with checking in.
When you feel the desire to drink rise up, don’t go into fear and fight—go into awareness and care. Pause and ask:
What am I really feeling right now?
What am I trying to change, escape, or soothe in this moment?
What is causing this discomfort? The conversation, the situation, memories?
What would feel comforting or supportive if alcohol didn’t exist?
This is the emotional audit. A moment of radical self-awareness that dismantles the illusion of alcohol as comfort.
Because here’s what most people miss: the desire to drink is never about alcohol. It’s about the need beneath it.
And once you start meeting that deeper need in a different way— The desire begins to dissolve.
“When you meet the need underneath the craving, the craving disappears.”
The habit starts to break.
The “need” loses power.
Here are three powerful ways to self-audit when the urge arises:
Name the emotion
Is it boredom? Stress? Loneliness? Naming it gives you power over it.
Ask what you need
Not what you want. Not what your habit demands. But what your heart is actually asking for.
Deliver the need in a new way
That might mean movement, connection, rest, expression. When you deliver the real need, the false one fades.
What I Teach Inside the 6-Week Simply Sober Path™
Inside the Simply Sober Path™, we don’t count days.
We dismantle beliefs.
Because when alcohol no longer feels like comfort... When it no longer feels like the thing you need to escape, cope, or belong...
You're not staying sober. You've simply stopped wanting to drink. The battle disappears. Not because you’re resisting harder—but because there’s nothing left to resist.
And your days of freedom? They begin to count forward—not from the last drink, But from the moment you no longer needed it
In less than 6 weeks, from the truth of your drinking—not fear—you’ll learn how to find peace and freedom from your daily drinking pain, and enjoy a level of ease around alcohol that is true freedom.
The ONE Reset That Changes Everything:
Sobriety isn’t about how long you’ve gone without a drink.
It’s about how little alcohol matters anymore.
That’s the shift. And it’s available to you now.
Ready for More?
After 29 years of struggling with alcohol and over a decade of complete freedom, I can tell you with certainty:
When you finally see alcohol through the lens of The Alcohol Illusion—the belief it eases stress or makes you feel better, when in truth it only ever leaves you feeling worse—everything shifts.
That’s where true, lasting change begins.
And it’s exactly what I guide you through inside The Simply Sober Path™.
If you're ready to break free from the daily drinking battle and return to peace, clarity, and control, here are two powerful ways to begin:
Join my FREE 7-Day Alcohol Reset to discover the truth about your drinking—and how to change it.
Or book your complimentary 20-minute Take Back Control Call
You don’t have to stop forever.
You just need to see alcohol differently.
Read more from Sonia Grimes
Sonia Grimes, Alcohol Control Coach
The Alcohol Control & Midlife Mindset Coach
CREA Global Award Winner
Author of This Isn’t Me
Mentor to thousands of high-achieving women ready to stop the battle, reclaim their peace, and live powerfully as themselves.
