Tracking your drinking is an intuitive step for those who are attempting to moderate their alcohol intake. After all, how can you stick to low-risk drinking limits if you don’t know how many drinks you’ve had?

But it turns out tracking your drinking does more than just help you keep count.

A recent study of over 100 problem drinkers over 4-5 months found real benefits to the act of tracking.

The drinkers in the study called an interactive voice response system to report their drinking and urges to drink. The study found that people were less likely to respond to their urges to drink with heavy drinking if they tracked both frequently.

While we’re delighted, we’re not surprised by this finding. Drinker’s Helper has always emphasized the importance of tracking your drinks and urges to drink in our app, and not just to keep count.

Instead, our tracking system is designed to help users reflect: on the benefits of sobriety, on why they ended up drinking too much, on how they can avoid future heavy drinking, among other things. This process of reflection may help people react differently to urges to drink, seeing more clearly why they might not want to drink heavily. We believe tracking also helps people to become more conscious of their urges to drink, and therefore less likely to react unconsciously to them.

If you’re looking to cut back or quit drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking and insights into why you drink, and a personalized support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. You can try it out for free for a week before joining.

All the best of luck with your goals,

The Drinker’s Helper Team