There is a version of December 29, 2023 that I look back on now and feel almost grateful for. At the time it did not feel like anything except a very good party. My friend Coco was getting married in El Valle de Antón — a mountain town about two hours from Panama City, green and cool in a way the city never is. There was Japanese scotch. There was dancing. There was the particular freedom that comes from being somewhere beautiful with people you love and no reason to be anywhere else.
I overindulged. That is the honest word for it. And then the next night, with friends visiting from out of town, I overindulged again. And then on the thirty-first, one more time, because that is how those weekends work when you have not yet decided they are going to work differently.
January first arrived the way it always did after a stretch like that. The body asking for the bill. I spent most of that day saying no, thank you — to my in-laws, to my friends, to every offer that came my way. Not dramatically. Just quietly, firmly, because I had nothing left to give the alternative.
The Drive
On January second, we drove home. Three hours from El Valle back to Panama City, the mountains flattening into the Pacific coast, my wife beside me, the kind of silence that settles into a car when both people are thinking and neither needs to fill it.
I started thinking about my friend Juan.
Juan does not drink. He made that decision years before I did, quietly and without announcement, the way people make decisions that actually stick. What I had always noticed about Juan — not consciously, not as something I analyzed, just as a fact I carried — was that he seemed less anxious than me. More settled. More consistently himself across different situations, different company, different kinds of days. I had attributed this to personality. To something he had that I did not.
On that drive, I started wondering if I had been wrong about that.
I told my wife: I had not had a drink yesterday and I felt better than I had in days. I was going to try to hold onto that for a while. Maybe a month. They call it Dry January. It felt like a reach.
What Happened Next
The weeks went by. And something started changing — not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet way that real changes happen. By mid-month I was sleeping better. My thinking was cleaner. I noticed I was less reactive in conversations, less likely to carry the residue of one bad moment into the next hour. People started telling me I looked well. And something unexpected happened: several of them told me they had stopped drinking too. Quietly, some time ago, without making an announcement. I had not known. There were more of us than I realized.
The month ended. I kept going.
A few weeks later I ran into another friend over coffee. We talked about life — about the specific kind of life where you are doing reasonably well by any external measure and still feel like something important is slightly out of reach. I told him about the anxiety. About the sense that I had no real structure, that I was hesitant in places I did not want to be hesitant. He listened. Then he said: there is a mindset course you should look at. He had taken it. He thought a short conversation with the teacher might help me understand what it was.
So I had the conversation. And that is how the next chapter started.
What I Know Now
I did not stop drinking because I had a problem in the clinical sense. I stopped because I started paying attention to evidence. Juan's evidence. My own evidence from those first sober days. The evidence that said: this version of you — the one that woke up on January first feeling like that — is not the version you want to keep building.
That is a small distinction that turns out to matter enormously. I was not running away from something. I was running toward evidence of who I could actually be.
Research on cognitive clarity and alcohol confirms what I felt empirically: even moderate regular drinking suppresses the prefrontal cortex's ability to consolidate positive experience. The brain is already biased toward retaining threat and discarding growth. Anything that compounds that bias is working against you at the neurological level, not just the behavioral one.
I did not know the science then. I just knew how January felt compared to December.
Why This Story Belongs in DOPAmine
DOPAmine exists because the brain deletes evidence of your own progress. Every day you do something real — something that shows who you are becoming — and the brain files it under irrelevant and moves on. The negativity stays. The growth disappears.
What I started doing on that drive home, without knowing that is what I was doing, was paying attention to evidence. Noticing what felt different. Naming it. Holding it long enough to actually keep it. That is the entire practice. That is what DOPAmine is built to do systematically.
The three-hour drive did not hand me a new life. It handed me a question worth asking.
Your day is already full of wins. You are just not keeping them. DOPAmine fixes that.
Fall in love with your own progress.
Start the 7-Day Dare. Three minutes a day. Your own evidence, compounding.
Start at mydopa.app →