Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s hard to ignore the explosion of tech-enabled health and wellness products that have emerged in recent years. We’re turning to apps to manage more and more aspects of our physical and mental health, from tracking calories (MyFitnessPal), steps (FitBit) and workouts (Fitbod) to sleep (Sleep Cycle), meditation (Calm), anxiety (Shine) and mood (Reflectly). A recent Gallup poll found that 1 in 5 US adults regularly use at least one health app, with 92% of this population identifying their usage as helpful or very helpful. Thanks in part to this trend, once stigmatized areas of our wellness — like mental health and depression — are an increasingly normal part of the public dialog.
Yet with all of this great progress, solutions for managing alcohol intake as a component of our overall health and wellbeing remain limited.
Up until now, alcohol-related apps and programs have almost entirely geared themselves towards helping those who have decided alcohol has no place in their lives to achieve complete sobriety. While often life saving for this population, these tools exclude the millions who enjoy drinking and have no desire to quit entirely, but who could benefit from building healthier habits around their consumption. In a time when US adults are drinking more alcohol than ever before, with 1 in 4 engaging in binge drinking one or more times a month, we believe it’s time the conversation around alcohol health enters the mainstream.
However, for the moderate drinkers who wish to cut back, or even simply keep tabs on their consumption, few options exist for helping them do so in a way that’s guilt-free, and doesn’t ultimately drive towards sobriety.
Sunnyside takes a different approach, leveraging proven strategies from behavioral psychology to help our members continue to enjoy drinking, while limiting the negative effects of over-consumption.
Our program focuses on mindfulness vs. sobriety, empowering members to achieve goals like:
We tend to bucket drinkers into two categories: either you have a “drinking problem” that’s severely affecting your personal and professional relationships, or you’ve got things totally under control. We believe most of the 82M moderate to heavy drinkers in the US fall somewhere in between these two extremes, and we’re building for this multitude.
Just as we’ve learned to track calories and steps in the pursuit of improving our overall health, Sunnyside makes it just as easy to keep tabs on drinking with the same goal in mind.
And just as you don’t need to be morbidly obese to want to track diet and exercise, you don’t need to be a severe drinker to keep track of your alcohol intake. It’s time we break the stigma, and give alcohol a place in the conversation about managing our overall health. This is our mission.
Interested in building healthier drinking habits? Jump right in and get started. We can’t wait to work with you!
Nick Allen is co-founder & CEO of Sunnyside. He’s a student of habit change and behavioral psychology, and an avid self improvement enthusiast. He founded Sunnyside after finding few options to help with more mindful drinking, vs an all or nothing approach. Sunnyside is the system he designed for himself, and is now sharing with you!
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