In 2025 I decided to stop drinking alcohol once and for all.

This decision came at the end of a multiple years-long journey of revelations that ultimately led me to adopt an alcohol-free lifestyle.

So in this article I’m going to give you the five reality checks that inspired me to search for a solution to quit drinking, and hopefully you’ll also get something out of this.

Stick with me. This is going to be a bit of a story, but I think it’s important that you understand the journey because that’ll give you the full context.

Honestly these kinds of decisions are rarely a one-and-done thing.

People are complex. You probably go back and forward and ruminate on all of the possibilities, the pros, the cons, and you go through an internal process of your own to reach whatever conclusions you reach.

So I feel that I owe it to you to walk you through my journey.

Then at the end I’ll provide you with some details about the specific system that I used to finally draw the line and end my relationship with alcohol altogether.

Unlike a lot of people, I actually didn’t start drinking until I was 21.

I still remember the first time I drank, it was so disgusting, I couldn’t understand what the appeal was.

But what I also noticed was that it made socializing way more fun, I would let my guard down, and when you’re at that younger age, social inclusion is extremely high on the priority list.

Because alcohol made it so much easier to integrate into the social scene, it quickly became a regular part of my life.

Soon after I started drinking, at the age of 22, I created a nightclub promotion company, so for 5 years I spent every weekend inside of a nightclub surrounded by alcohol.

Being the one doing business with the venue meant I had ridiculously cheap access to drinks.

I’m a pretty introverted person and I hated everything about being in that environment, so drinking made it so much easier to get through the night.

To add to that, this was in New Orleans, which is one of the most notorious party cities in the US. Alcohol in that city is fully integrated into the culture to the point where you have drive-thru daiquiri shops and casually drinking in public is not only allowed, but encouraged.

So as far as I was concerned, drinking was an acceptable and expected aspect of the human experience, and I didn’t really see it as a drug or a problematic thing.

In my mind, drinking only was a problem for people who have zero control and they can’t go a day without.

And most people didn’t fit into this category, so I didn’t have the frame of mind to draw connections between “moderate” consumption and the everyday problems that are super common, and most people face at some point in their lives.

While I was still in my 20s, when I was still young, dumb, an incredibly stupid, after having a few drinks I decided to drive home with a full cup of beer in hand (one for the road).

It was quite literally a 3 minute drive back home, but between the bar and my house, a cop got behind me. He didn’t have his lights on, so I could have driven normally, obeying the traffic laws. But I was fueled by liquid courage.

At the time I drove a luxury coupe with 330 horses under the hood, so I did the math and made my alcohol-induced decision to lose the cop. Instead of following the traffic laws, I made a left turn into one of the side streets and floored it.

I was for sure going to lose him. Except, I didn’t. To make a very long story short, that’s how I ended up with a DUI, three days in jail, a suspended license, $10,000 in legal expenses, and probably 200 hours of my time spent dealing with the legal ramifications.

Part of that time included defensive driving class (which was very useful, by the way), a attending a Mothers Against Drunk Driving panel, and going to several AA meetings.

I assumed the AA meetings would be full of haggard and decrepit people, but to my surprise these meetings had some of the most high-functioning people I’ve ever met. Lawyers, doctors, business executives, you name it.

That’s when I begin to see alcohol as a menace that’s kind of hiding in plain sight. While the really bad cases of alcoholism stand out, there’s a lot of suffering that happens in the middle ground between no drinking and being at the extreme end of the spectrum.

I realized that most drinkers drink enough that alcohol has a measurable negative effect on their lives, but not enough that it causes acute pain and suffering. And in some regards that’s probably the worst place to be because there’s no feedback strong enough to incentivize a change.

Needless to say, the message was clear. In my eyes, drinking was a net-negative activity, and drinking while driving is incredibly stupid.

Never again have I gotten behind the wheel of a car after having even ONE alcoholic drink.

I’ll save this story for a different day, but having a suspended license was also the catalyst behind me turning to minimalism and giving up driving altogether…. but we won’t talk about that today.

Several years later around the age of 30 I embarked on a pretty serious health and fitness journey.

I was in a much better place in life than before, and fitness became very therapeutic for me. I seriously got into lifting weights, optimizing my diet, and living an all-around healthier lifestyle.

I had many different reasons for getting serious about my fitness, but one of the more superficial reasons was to look like an action figure. I wanted the type of body that instantly signaled to other people that I was disciplined, consistent, and a hard worker.

I wanted something that most people could not attain.

From the moment I started taking my fitness serious, I made crazy progress, except that no matter what I tried, I could not seem to get lean enough for a six pack to show.

As I evolved in my fitness journey, I began to treat my mind and body like a lab experiment where I’d try different things to elevate my physical being and my mental state.

I also switched from lifting to calisthenics which helped me to be way more in tune with myself. Since calisthenics is about building strength through bodyweight, it’s advantageous to be as lean as possible, so my motivations switched from just being about having abs to also being lean so I could have mastery over my body.

I decided that maybe if I stop casually drinking beer, I’ll see some progress. So that’s what I did. I quit beer, and I let time pass and the results were undeniable.

From that moment onwards my body fat plummeted and I became super lean.

I’ll attribute it to more than just cutting out beer, because I was deep into trying all kinds of new things to be as metabolically healthy as possible. So it wasn’t only quitting beer, but I do believe that it played a major role in my physical transformation.

Ever since then I’ve been way more conscious of my alcohol consumption strictly because I saw it as directly competing with my health and fitness.

So I began to consume less alcohol, but I still was a pretty regular drinker (2-3 drinks one or two nights a week).

I became vividly aware that anytime I woke up feeling groggy after a night of drinking, I didn’t fully show up for myself for the next day or two.

My work suffered, my workouts suffered, my mental clarity suffered, my relationships were suboptimal.

I started to feel like there is no way for the mind and body to be as sharp as they can be if alcohol is part of the equation.

At this point I’m drinking less, but I did still have the occasional moment where I went overboard.

When I was 33, I had the worst hangover of my life. If you’ve had hangovers before then you know the drill.

I spent the whole day in bed fighting extreme nausea, taking bites of bread, drinking ginger kombucha, and suffering from a full-on case of hang’xiety.

I had hangovers before, but this one made me seriously re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol.

Because here I am in my 30s, not getting any younger, wanting to be as healthy and fit as possible, yet I’m literally bedridden letting the day waste away.

This wasn’t a frequent occurrence but there was something about being voluntarily bedridden for a full day that didn’t sit well with me.

Symbolically I began to connect the experience of being hungover with being bedridden at old age, waiting to die.

I felt like I never want to simulate the death experience while I’m still young and vibrant and full of life.

So I started drinking even less. When I would go out or socialize, I started being very diligent about what I consumed strictly because I did not want a hangover the next day.

That episode was in June of 2021. I’ll never forget, and I’ve never had a hangover since. But I did still drink, and sometimes I did get close to my hangover threshold.

Fast forward a few years. Lots of life changes happened, and I found myself living in Lisbon Portugal.

Almost immediately after moving, my health began to deteriorate. I was chronically inflamed, constantly battling debilitating infections, and always fatigued with low energy.

I spent countless days in the doctors office and even had to go to the ER a couple of times.

What was crazy was that all of my vitals were fine. So almost every doctor I spoke with gaslit me as if I was exaggerating what I was experiencing. I won’t go into that rabbit hole in this article, but lets just say that I have a very strong distrust for the medical system after this experience.

And avoiding alcohol would be one very effective strategy for staying out of the medical system.

Since I had to figure this thing out for myself, I took it upon myself to stop drinking altogether. Saturday July 13th. I can’t forget the date because it was the same day as the Trump assassination attempt.

After a couple months passed, I came to learn that mold was present in my apartment in Portugal, and that was the cause of all of the health problems I was experiencing.

It turns out that mold absolutely terrorizes your gut health and your immune system, and drinking alcohol does not help. Not one bit.

As I’m educating myself on mold illness and how to protect the immune system, that’s when I really started to binge content about the effects of alcohol on gut health, immune health, the body, the brain, everything.

I’m not a medical professional so I wont educate you on that, there are plenty of content and resources out there that go into detail about the health effects out there.

So if I didn’t intuitively stop drinking altogether when I first became ill, then I probably wouldn’t even be here today.

During this time I didn’t drink for six months. I thought it would be impossible, but I became even leaner, and stronger. I made significant improvements in my calisthenics, and I was slowly, but surely overcoming the mold illness.

That really changed my relationship with alcohol.

After six months, I made a decision to try drinking again, but this time I would pay close attention to how I felt, and compare that to my six months of non-drinking.

But honestly, things would never be the same from this point onward.

Despite going back to drinking, six months of clarity, no grogginess, no disrupted sleep due to alcohol, and insane progress in my fitness, my desire to drink was much lower than ever before.

I’d occasionally order drinks here and there, but since I spent 6 months normalizing a life without alcohol, I still regularly socialized without drinking.

Drinking became a conscious choice that I would make and oftentimes I just didn’t want to do it.

It was during this time I specifically remember ordering a gin and tonic after not having had one in forever, and the first sip was terrible. The flavor of the gin was unbearably strong.

After years of gin-tonics being my go-to drink of choice, I’ve never ordered one since that experience.

You’d think that living in Europe, I spend my time sipping on the finest wines, but my reality couldn’t be farter from this.

Despite going back to occasionally drinking, I continued with the habits I created in that 6 month window. I continued to actively curate my information diet which included endless content about why alcohol is misaligned with my larger vision for life.

I’ve also prioritized relationships with other people who also either don’t drink, or was actively trying to drink less, and that energy rubbed off on me.

I got very serious about managing the inputs into my life - information inputs, social inputs, nutrition inputs, etc.

That ultimately led me to create The Focus Algorithm, which is all about helping people break the status quo of the standard American lifestyle, and get REALLY focused on living with extreme intention.

I’ll spare you the elevator pitch behind The Focus Algorithm, but one of the fundamental principles behind it is that people, myself, you, we can attain much more satisfying lives first and foremost by cutting out core distractions that have massive implications on our lives.

I do this through a 60-day process for locking in on the few aspects of life that matters most and then redesigning life around those core areas of focus. Part of that process includes what I call "The Anti-Desire Protocol” which is basically a fancy term for retraining the mind to be repulsed by things that you previously craved.

I saw drinking as one of those core distractions that fundamentally conflicted with the life that I really wanted for myself. So one day I woke up and just decided that alcohol doesn’t fit my lifestyle anymore.

I committed to 60-days of no drinking, building an anti-desire for alcohol, and re-focusing my life on the core principles that I want to embody.

And after that 60 day process, I simply had no desire to drink alcohol anymore.

I hated the smell, the taste, what it does to me, what it does to other people, what it does to my relationships, and what it represented in my life.

It’s not even about fighting temptation at this point. It’s a pretty repulsive thought in my mind, to put alcohol into my body and I’d rather direct my energy elsewhere.

If you’re looking to cut drinking or literally any habit that you feel is holding you back from living your best life then you can grab a copy of my Anti-Desire Builder.

Instead of a generic pdf written by AI (that’s what everyone is selling these days) or an online course (10% average completion rate), I’ve created an interactive tool that applies my anti-desire framework to YOUR specific situation.

You can implement this immediately, and then keep re-using it any time you feel like you need to get misaligned habits under control.

It’s a fully interactive tool that constructs a personalized 60-day plan for rewiring your brain to repulsively avoid the bad habits that are holding you back. Whether you need to break phone addiction or stop binging on junk food, you just follow the workflow and it’ll give you a personalized anti-desire curation plan.

You can access it by clicking this link.