MOORHEAD -- If you want to try to quit drinking for the new year, experts say now would be the best time to start.
It's Dry January, a month when people make it a goal to stop drinking alcohol as a personal challenge.
"Alcohol can kind of be the focus of social life," Alexandra Kohlhase, a clinical psychologist at Essentia Health, says.
Kohlhase says that's true especially in places where sometimes there's not much to do.
"People feel better because alcohol is a depressant, but it can also lead to unrelated depressed feelings," Kohlhase says.
That's why the clinical psychologist says quitting alcohol can be hard, but it's not impossible.
"Finding, like, a replacement behavior, and whether that is doing something active or picking up a new hobby, or maybe even spending more time doing a hobby that you really enjoy, that can kind of replace the social aspect of drinking," Kohlhase says.
It's what inspired the Starbird Lounge in Moorhead to start a sober movement in January after opening just three months ago.
"Dry January is a big thing. We wanted to lean into it and give people a place to come and still hang out and socialize, just without the alcohol," Shannon Wiedman, a co-owner of Starbird Lounge, says.
"We've got five individual cocktails that we spent the last month or so developing," Adam Wiedman, a co-owner of Starbird Lounge, says.
That's not all. He says they have six highballs, plus beer and seltzers; basically anything non-alcoholic that you'd like.
One of their non-alcoholoic drinks is called a Lei Lo. It's similar to an old school tiki drink called the Junglebird.
Inside of it is spiced cane spirit, pineapple, Italian orange apertivo, lime and cinnamon syrup.
"To come up with an NA (non-alcoholic) cocktail that still has that same feel in the mouth, feel the taste, it's a little bit more challenging. So you kind of have to take a cocktail idea, deconstruct it and then reconstruct it," Adam says.
And they'll continue to re-create non-alcoholic drinks beyond January.
That's the goal, too, going dry for a month, and then realizing that staying sober longer than that, might be the best thing for you to do, Kohlhase says.
"A lot of people feel better when they notice that maybe their lives aren't centered around alcohol as much, and certainly that can be motivating," Kohlhase says.
Going sober could actually save your life. The CDC says there are about 178,000 deaths each year in the U.S. from excessive alcohol use, which kills one in five 20- to 49-year-olds.