Still here, and though I feel bleary-eyed after a fitful night, I am glad I didn’t drink last night. Day 2. I remain unconvinced as to whether day counting is helpful for me. What do you think?
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A Dappled Path 
I think the problem with counting days is that, although you’ve been alcohol free for most of the last fortnight, you’re only on Day 2! The really important thing is that you have to accept that this is a new forever, not a month, or a day… Until you do, the cycle will continue. Patti x
Day counting is key. Absolutely and completely essential.
If you don’t count days you cheat yourself two ways: 1) you can’t properly acknowledge your progress : every day forward is a new milestone worthy of acknowledgement and celebration. 2) it becomes easier to listen to the voices and give in.
The first 5-10 days are Really Effing Hard I know…I stalled out on those days SO many times I can’t even count. You are doing the right thing to keep trying: it sticks eventually and will be so worth it.
Big hugs.
I’m in the don’t count camp. I have an app on my phone that I can look at if I absolutely must know the day, but otherwise who cares.
I find counting helpful, but I work in a lean manufacturing company that has as it’s mantra, ‘what you cannot measure, you cannot improve.’
I belong to a forum where users the track number of alcohol free days per month, I think this is a super statistic, especially for those of us who want to throw in the towel if a streak of continuous days is broken.
So each person sets at the beginning of the month a target be it 5, 7, 20, 25 or whatever number of alcohol-free days with a goal to reduce by a little, month by month until you’re doing 30/30.
So I’d track both continuous days during a month and a count overall during the month. 🙂
Counting days seems like a burden in the beginning. It’s like staring at a pot of water waiting for it to boil. But it’s an essential tool in maintaining your sobriety. It’s the most basic measurement and the simplest tool for accountability. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted a drink, even in the last few months, and I thought of the number of days I’ve built up and how hard that was. I’m not throwing that away.
What I really think this question shows is your pattern. You stop drinking, you start laying the groundwork for your next relapse, and then you relapse. Then you start tinkering with your plan to try again. If you step back and think about it, can you see how crazy it sounds? “Oh, I just threw away 5 days of hard-fought sobriety and I drank. Maybe I’ll just stop counting days. Maybe that will help” Do you see how absolutely absurd that is? It’s not you. You don’t have a personality problem, you have an alcohol problem, and this is what that does to your thinking. It’s your fuzzy alcohol brain twisting everything up like this. You’re tinkering about the edges with all this planning, and each relapse is making the hill you’re climbing a little bit steeper. You need at least a month or two without drinking for your fuzzy brain to begin to clear.
Please do consider some outside help in getting that first 30 days under your belt. If not for you, for your children. I’m not here to tell you how to raise your kids, but I do know that they will remember every careless thing you say or do under the influence, even though you may not.