By Annabel Fenwick Elliott | Published: 11:36, 8 December 2025 | Updated: 18:14, 9 December 2025

Yuletide is nearly upon us: Welcome to the best time of year for problem drinkers. The easiest period in which to get blitzed as often as we wish without too much judgment.

Those twinkling lights and jolly songs drown out all the rules against daytime drinking, and I, for one, used to spend the entirety of December hammered.

Not generally a social person, I would never turn down a festive party. Indeed, I would be nicely lubricated before turning up so as to have got a good head start on my peers. Even my mother couldn't judge me for knocking back champagne first thing in the morning on Christmas Day, I reasoned: I was simply honouring tradition.

It helped (or really didn't, depending on how you look at it) that the rest of my relatives, particularly on my father's side, drink extra heavily around this time of year, too. And the truth is, it was always riotously fun, cheer-enhancing and a very merry bonding experience. Unlike a lot of families, we never quarrelled or partook in alcohol-induced drama. We just spent weeks on end giggling, pleasantly pickled. There was, in short, very little downside.

The Warning Signs I Ignored

The problem would emerge when I then suddenly returned to the office come January, and a strong urge would start tapping my shoulder around midday, thirsty for a dose of wine.

It was one of the countless warning signs I ignored for so many years that indicated my relationship with alcohol was not a good one. Often, I'd surrender to the craving and buy one of those single-serve bottles of chardonnay from Marks & Spencer to wash down a sandwich on my lunch break.

This would go on for a week or so until I had sufficiently cut back to only popping the cork when I got home from work in the evening – the very first thing I'd do after closing the door behind me.

If I had continued swaying down that path, my tolerance to alcohol inching ever upwards, I would have ended up in a very bad place and been forced to give it up altogether. I got away with it most of the time because I was the sort of drinker you wouldn't have clocked – always relatively composed, even mid-blackout – but the liver can only take so much.

The Wake-Up Call

One of my wake-up calls came two Christmases ago, when at 35, I had become a parent for the first time. Before then, the consequences of my drunken Decembers were limited to hangovers that I'd just chase away with the hair of the dog, and as I mentioned, tapering off in January on my lunch breaks.

This time, though, I had a six-month-old, and while I'd thus been almost teetotal that year in the run-up to the 25th, I gave in to my old habits on the big day itself and got so quietly hammered on Christmas morning that I spent the afternoon in bed while my mother took care of her grandson.

We were living in Iceland at the time, and a bitter storm left us snowed in over Twixmas, with all the booze shops closed. We ran out, therefore, and I'll never forget the panic that gripped my brother (who has also long struggled with alcohol) and I, over the prospect of being dry that week.

Discovering the Sinclair Method

Shortly after that, I decided that enough was enough and quit alcohol cold-turkey for several months, before falling off the wagon a few more times and then finally the following year adopting a programme that wound up curing me.

At the age of 37, I came across a medication called Naltrexone, and a plan – the Sinclair Method – that solved my alcohol problem almost with a snap of the fingers.

Together, they rewrote my brain's neural pathways such that wine no longer triggered the same response, and allowed me to be what I always wanted to be: A moderate drinker. The sort of person who used to baffle me, who can leave a glass of wine on the table unfinished or go weeks without even thinking about it – even during December.

How Naltrexone Works

Naltrexone has a lot in common with Ozempic-type drugs in that it erases cravings and cures overconsumption to a staggering extent in a very short time frame. In a nutshell, it stops alcohol from being moreish.

When taken according to the Sinclair Method – developed in the 1980s by Dr John David Sinclair, an addiction specialist at the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies – an hour before drinking, the drug, a dopamine inhibitor, kills off the reward loop for the next eight to 12 hours until it wears off.

In the simplest terms, it switches off the part of your brain that usually reacts to the sight of alcohol with that warm euphoria which keeps you coming back for more.

Expert Insight from Dr Janey Merron

Dr Janey Merron, who left the NHS out of sheer frustration because she couldn't prescribe Naltrexone to patients who desperately needed it, joined the Sinclair Method UK in its early days.

Most of her patients, she tells me, are professionals between their 40s and 60s and are – as I was – very high-functioning. 'A surprising number are within the top 1 per cent of earners,' she says. 'I have treated elite athletes, doctors and entrepreneurs. They work hard and they drink hard at the end of the day, yet their colleagues would rarely guess it.'

'The problem is that the more we drink and the more frequently we drink, the more conditioned our brains come to need the dopamine reward, which itself drives us to keep the drinking up. The brain does not like to be deprived of its reward.

'For those with enough willpower, you can employ habits like alternating alcoholic beverages with soft drinks, but it's a bit like doing weights at the gym. It's manageable for a certain number of reps before the fatigue sets in. Unless you take an opioid blocker like Naltrexone, which for the next eight to 12 hours eliminates the need for willpower because it prevents alcohol from being rewarding.'

Life After Naltrexone

The drug did a stellar job in rewiring my brain's response to alcohol, and destroying the desire. I don't miss it at all; quite the opposite, my life is irrefutably better without it.

A good example is parties. I am socially awkward and autistic. I have never liked them. The only way I could ever tolerate them was by stupefying myself with booze.

These days, rather than having to endure them sober, I simply don't go to them. Unless I have to, in which case I have one glass of wine and leave early.

Just be prepared for there to be at least one person or place that will feel utterly wrong without alcohol. And at that point, do what I plan to do next Christmas, and call a good therapist first.