My AI Sobriety Companion Sol is there for the moment. Phenomenal is there for the change.

Some people do not want a conversation. They want a path. They have stopped, or they are ready to, and they want to understand what happens next: the triggers, the thinking, the identity, the whole life that has to be rebuilt around the space drinking used to fill. That is what Phenomenal is for.

It is a twelve-week guided programme, and it is built on one idea that runs against most of what came before it. Old approaches to stopping drinking feel like punishment, all white-knuckle willpower and grim determination. No wonder they so often fail. Phenomenal starts from the opposite place: that sobriety is not deprivation, it is discovery, and the power to change is already in your hands.

The programme runs through twelve modules, from settling in and finding what really matters, through understanding your triggers and surfing the cravings, to building the self-agency and the wellbeing that make sobriety hold. It sits on a framework I built and refined over years of doing this work, focused on building new patterns rather than just eliminating old ones. It is grounded in what actually works, and in having been there myself.

Back to Skool?

What is new is where it now lives. Phenomenal runs as a course and a community together, in one place. That matters more than it sounds. Most programmes hand you materials and leave you alone with them, and most people quietly drift. Here the course, the community and your progress sit behind a single login, so the learning and the people are never more than a tap apart. You are not working through a lonely PDF. You are moving through it alongside others doing the same, with somewhere to turn on the hard days.

You can take it at your own pace, in a group, or one to one with me directly, depending on how much support you want. And the community stays open long after the twelve weeks are done, because the real work usually starts once a programme ends, and that is exactly when most of them abandon you.

I have watched this work change lives. One person put it more generously than I would dare to: that it changed theirs completely. I would put it more plainly. Phenomenal gives you the structure, the understanding and the company to change your relationship with alcohol for good.

If that is the work you are ready for, this is where it happens: View Phenomenal

I built an AI companion for the people I couldn’t reach

Most of the people who need help with their drinking never ask for it.

The number I keep coming back to is this: only about one in five people who could benefit from specialist alcohol support ever get near it. The rest manage alone, or tell themselves it is fine, or wait. Some of them would turn to no one at all. I spent years being one of them, stuck in the gap between knowing something was wrong and being ready to say so out loud.

Coaching reaches some of those people. But coaching is one of me, and there are only so many hours. It also asks something that a lot of people in that gap cannot yet do, which is to book a call with a real person and say the thing. For the person who is not ready for that, the honest options have been a helpline, a leaflet, or nothing.

So I built Sol.

Meet Sol

Sol is an AI sobriety companion. You talk to him about your drinking, wherever you are with it, and he listens and asks the questions that actually matter. He does not follow a script or work through a checklist. He does not count your days or give you a badge. He opens every conversation the same way, “what’s brought you here today,” and takes it from there.

He is built for the person who is not ready to talk to anyone yet. There is nothing to download and no icon on your phone. You open him in a browser and close him when you are done. For a lot of people that privacy is not a small detail, it is the whole reason they are willing to start. One of my test users put it plainly: she was not ready to talk to anyone, and Sol felt like a way in.

He remembers you. Every conversation builds on the last, so coming back feels like continuing something rather than starting over. And he is there at the hours when help usually is not, the difficult ones in the middle of the night.

I want to be clear about what he is not. Sol is not a therapist, not a clinical tool, and not a replacement for real medical help when someone needs it. He is more like a knowledgeable friend who genuinely understands recovery. When someone is in real difficulty, he says so and points them to proper support rather than pretending to be it.

I built Sol on Anthropic’s Claude, and I chose it deliberately, for how carefully it handles the moments that matter. Everything underneath him, the frameworks, the safeguarding, the scope, comes from the same place my coaching does. Sol is alcohol, and only alcohol, on purpose.

He is the same work I have always done, in a form that can reach people I never could.

If you want to meet him, he is here: talktosolomon.app

One-to-one sobriety support tailored to you. No courses, no programs - just direct, personalised guidance from someone who understands both the struggle and the solution. Evidence-based, honest, effective.

If you want direct, personalised help with your drinking or recovery - no courses, no programs, no nonsense - just honest conversation with someone who understands - this is it.

How It Works

We meet virtually for structured sessions, worldwide. You talk, I listen. We explore what’s actually going on with your drinking, what’s keeping you stuck, and what needs to change.

I bring professional training and lived experience. You bring honesty and willingness to do the work. Together we figure out your path forward.

Work with Me

What We Work On

Understanding Your Drinking
Why do you drink? What function does alcohol serve in your life? What patterns have you noticed? We dig into the honest answers, not the ones you think you should give.

Building Your Framework
What does sobriety look like for you? Not for me, not for AA, not for anyone else - for you. We design an approach that fits your life, your values, your goals.

Practical Tools
Evidence-based interventions for managing cravings, handling triggers, navigating social situations, and building sustainable habits. Real techniques you can use when things get hard.

Meaning-Making
Sobriety isn’t just about not drinking - it’s about building a life you don’t want to escape from. We explore what gives your life meaning, purpose, and direction beyond alcohol.

Ongoing Support
Some clients work with me weekly for months. Others check in monthly after their initial block. We figure out what rhythm works for you.

Work with Me

Session Options

Single Session - £70
One hour. Perfect if you want to test the waters, get immediate support for a specific challenge, or just need someone to talk to who understands.

6-Session Block - £380
Six weeks of structured support. Enough time to establish patterns, work through obstacles, and build momentum. Most people find this is the minimum to create real change.

12-Session Block - £760
Three months of intensive work. This is where transformation happens. Enough time to address root causes, build sustainable practices, and establish genuine sobriety.

Work with Me

What This Isn’t

This isn’t therapy in the traditional sense (though I am a trained therapist). It’s not medical treatment. It’s not a replacement for professional mental health support if you need that.

This is coaching - structured, focussed conversation about stopping drinking and building a sober life. If you need medical supervision to stop safely, get that first. Then we can work together.

Work with Me

My Approach

I’m open and honest. I won’t sugarcoat things or tell you what you want to hear. But I’m also kind, and I understand how hard this is - because I’ve lived it.

I don’t use recovery jargon unless it’s helpful. I don’t make you count days or follow steps or surrender to anything. I treat you like an intelligent adult capable of making difficult changes.

I challenge you when you need challenging. I support you when you need support. And I’m honest when I don’t know the answer.

This works for people who:

• Want personalised support, not generic advice

• Need someone who understands the intellectual side of addiction

• Are tired of traditional recovery approaches that don’t fit

• Want evidence-based interventions, not just inspirational quotes

• Are ready to do actual work, not just talk about wanting to change

It doesn’t work for people who:

• Want someone to fix them without doing their own work

• Need medical supervision to stop drinking safely (get that first)

• Aren’t willing to be honest about what’s really going on

• Want a magic solution that requires no effort

Work with Me

Ready to Start?

Book a free discovery call. We’ll talk honestly about where you are and whether my approach fits what you need.

If we’re a good match, we’ll work together. If not, we’ll know and maybe I can point you toward someone or something else.

Either way, you’ll have clarity about your next step.

Work with Me

Speaking for Myself

This is where I say out loud what I’d otherwise write down. Sometimes that’s the how and why behind Sol, the AI companion I’m building for people who aren’t ready to say the word “alcoholic” out loud yet. Warts and all, no pitch deck, just the actual thinking. Other times it’s reflections on sobriety and recovery more broadly, the parts of this work I don’t always dare put on the page. No script, no polish, just me thinking through it as I go. If you read my writing, this is the same voice, just less edited.

Coming soon.

Hiro: My New Audio Course - Coming Soon

Not everyone is ready for a course. Sometimes you just want to put your headphones in and listen to someone who gets it.

That is what Hiro is. It takes the heart of my Phenomenal programme and remakes it deliberately for audio, so you can meet sobriety on a walk, in the car, or lying in the dark at the end of a hard day. No login. No modules to work through. No homework waiting for you. Just a voice, and the space to think.

It starts with Kick Start, ten short episodes that carry you through the shape of real change. The first few settle you and turn how you see sobriety on its head, reframing it as something you gain rather than something you give up. The middle ones hand you the practical, in-the-moment tools, spotting your triggers, riding out a craving like a wave, knowing what to do when you slip so a wobble does not become a spiral. The last few turn inward, toward how you speak to yourself, why you were never meant to do this alone, and who you are becoming on the other side of it.

Every episode ends with one small thing to do. Not a task. Just a single step, the size you can actually take today.

Why listen rather than read or enrol? Because audio meets you where you already are, in the ordinary moments where the drinking thoughts usually show up. Because it asks nothing of you but your attention. And because some things land differently when you hear them in a real voice, from someone who has been where you are, than when you read them off a page.

Hiro is starting small, and it is starting soon.

Coming soon.

A recent report from The Forward Trust and Crest Advisory puts the number of people addicted to alcohol in the UK at 750,000. Another 400,000 addicted to illegal drugs. Around 700,000 currently in recovery.

I read it a couple of times, and the number that really struck me wasn’t any of those three. It was a phrase buried in the methodology. The report admits there is no precise data on the true scale of the problem. What we have instead is a picture, built mostly from people who have already walked through a service door.

I know what it’s like to be outside that door.

For years I wasn’t a statistic anyone was collecting. I wasn’t in a waiting room, wasn’t on a caseload, wasn’t a line in anyone’s spreadsheet. I was just a man who drank more than he told anyone, who had convinced himself he was managing something that was actually managing him. If you’d asked the system how many people like me there were, it would have shrugged. Seems like it still shrugs. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the counting. You can only count what shows up, after all.

This is the bit that never quite lands when people talk about addiction services. The services aren’t wrong. Maybe they’re just late. By the time most of us are a number, we’ve already spent months or years being invisible on purpose. Hiding is half the disease. You get good at it. You get good at being fine in meetings and not fine at 11pm, at being the reliable one at work and the unreliable one at home, at being a name nobody worries about because you never gave anyone reason to.

Nobody designs a service for a person who hasn’t decided they need one yet. Why would they. You can’t triage someone who hasn’t come in. You can’t fund a caseload that doesn’t exist on paper. So the whole enormous, well-meaning machinery of treatment and recovery is calibrated to the moment someone finally says the sentence out loud, to a GP, a partner, a magistrate, whoever hears it first. Everything before that sentence is dark. Unlit, uncounted, unreachable by anything built to help.

I want to be precise about what I mean by dark, because it isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t look like rock bottom. It looks like a normal Tuesday. It looks like doing the school run, replying to emails, being funny at the pub quiz, and privately running a small, exhausting accounting exercise in your head about how much you had last night and how much you’ll have tonight and whether anyone noticed either. Nobody’s coming to find you in that Tuesday. There’s no outreach team for people who are still functioning. Functioning is the whole problem. It’s what lets the thing keep going.

I think about that darkness a lot now, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who’s read this newsletter before. It’s most of why I’m building what I’m building. Not because I think a bit of software can replace what happens in a treatment room, it can’t and shouldn’t try to. But because someone needs to be present in the dark bit. Before the sentence. Before the door. When you’re still telling yourself you’re managing it, and some part of you already knows you’re not, and there’s nobody to say that part out loud to yet because saying it out loud is exactly the thing you’re avoiding.

That’s not a criticism of services, far from it. It’s a genuinely different problem, and it probably needs a genuinely different kind of thing to solve it. Not a caseworker. Not an app that tells you your units. Something closer to a person who’s willing to sit with you in the part before you’re ready, without needing you to be ready first.

This is where Sol comes in, and I’ll try to say this without it sounding like a pitch, because it isn’t one, it’s just the honest answer to why I spend my mornings on this. Sol is the thing I’m building to sit in that gap. He’s not a clinician and he doesn’t pretend to be one. He’s more like the friend I didn’t let myself have back then, someone you could say the half-formed, embarrassing, not-ready-to-admit-it-properly version of the truth to, at two in the morning if that’s when it surfaces, without it becoming a referral or a file or a look on someone’s face. No queue. No door to walk through. No moment where you have to have already decided you’ve got a problem before anyone will talk to you about whether you might have one.

I don’t think that replaces treatment. I think it’s upstream of treatment, in the part of the map where nothing else currently lives. Right now Sol only works with alcohol. Drugs aren’t part of what he does yet, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise or rush that just because a report like this one puts alcohol and drugs side by side in the same sentence. Ketamine, nitazenes, the whole harder end of what this report describes, that’s a different clinical picture with different risks, and it deserves proper thought rather than a fast bolt-on because the timing looks neat. But the shape of the problem, the invisibility, the years of quiet self-management before anyone else knows, is the same shape whatever the substance. So the gap Sol is built for isn’t going anywhere, and if the model holds for alcohol, I’d like to think it points at something for the rest of that darker picture too, eventually, carefully.

The report calls for better funding, better strategy, less stigma. All true, all needed, and none of it reaches the man I used to be, because he was never going to walk into the building where the funding lives. He’d have needed something that came to him. Something that didn’t require him to already believe he had a problem worth funding.

Seven hundred thousand people are apparently in recovery in this country right now. I’m one data point in that number, and I know how it happened for me, slowly, reluctantly, years after I could have used the help. What I keep wondering is how many more are still on the other side of that gap the report can’t measure. Not resistant. Not in denial, not exactly. Just uncounted. Still deciding, in private, whether the thing they’re doing to themselves has a name.

If it does, I’d like them to find that out somewhere gentler than I did. And I’d like there to be something waiting for them in the dark bit, before the sentence, before the door.

That’s the whole project, really. Everything else is detail.

I read an article this week in Drink and Drugs News. It was part of a series called “Clearer Conversations on OST.” Riveting stuff, right?

Someone who works in homelessness services at the Salvation Army, was talking about how long people can wait between asking for help and actually getting a script. Weeks, sometimes months, apparently. She compared it to turning up at the gym for your first ever session, only to be told you can’t start today because you haven’t had your induction yet, or you’ve got the wrong shoes on. You’re probably not going back. You’re having a McDonald’s instead.

Of course, it’s not really about gyms or shoes. It’s about the moment someone finally says the hard thing out loud, gathers themselves up enough to reach out, and then finds out that reaching out was only step one of a long staircase. The system isn’t wrong to have steps. Assessments matter, safety matters, clinical judgement matters. But nobody told the person in crisis that there’d be a staircase. They thought they were opening a door.

There’s a support worker in the piece too, a guy called Danny, who talks about what happens when someone on his caseload starts using again while they’re meant to be stable. No punishment. No pulling the script. Instead the question is what more can we do, what else needs to wrap around this person right now. He says people are often at their lowest point when they first come through the door, and that the job is to meet them there rather than wait for them to arrive somewhere steadier.

That’s a different kind of staircase. Still a process, still steps, but nobody’s kicking you back down to the bottom for stumbling on one of them. Danny also talks about same-day restarts, being able to tell someone come on, let’s get your script sorted today, and what that small bit of speed does for someone’s sense that this might actually work out. It’s the opposite of the gym story. It’s someone saying yes, now, come in.

The gap between those two experiences, the person left waiting weeks with no clear reason why, and the person told come in today, isn’t really about resources or policy. It’s about whether the system on the other end of the phone treats the wait as neutral or treats it as dangerous. Because for the person doing the waiting, it’s never neutral.

There’s another voice in the piece, Craig, describing his own experience of trying to get help while still in prison. He’d disclosed his drug use, asked for support, and was told he needed three clean urine tests before he could access medication. “So what was the point of me telling you I’ve got a problem”, he asked.

I think that’s the whole thing right there, isn’t it. The system asks you to be honest, and then the honesty becomes a waiting room.

The moment someone reaches out isn’t the finish line of their courage. It’s closer to the start of it. And whatever happens in the gap after that first ask, however long it lasts, however many hoops there are, it either keeps that flame of motivation alive or it lets it go out. Nobody designs a system to let it go out. But gaps do that on their own, quietly, without anyone deciding it.

I don’t suppose there’s a clean fix for all of it. Clinical safeguards exist for good reasons. But there’s a smaller, quieter line in the piece from a man called David, a service user, reflecting on what he’d tell someone who’s never been in treatment before. He said the support isn’t perfect, but it’s there.

Not perfect. There. I think that might be the most honest thing anyone can promise another person in that gap. Not a cure, not a fix, not even always the right words. Just there. Something on the other end when the 3am thought turns up, something that doesn’t vanish because the appointment’s four weeks away.

I think about that a lot, the difference between being helped and being present. Most of what people in this article describe as good care isn’t complicated. It’s a key worker who listens when someone asks to slow down a reduction instead of insisting on the schedule. It’s a support worker who knows your appointment’s changed before you find out the hard way. It’s someone answering the phone. None of that needs new technology or new funding streams. It just needs someone to be there consistently enough that the person on the other end starts to believe it.

That’s the harder part, maybe. Not the being there once. The being there again, and then again, long enough that someone stops expecting it to stop.

The author makes a point later in the piece that stuck with me for a different reason. She talks about people being taken off a waiting list, or losing their script, for missing an appointment that nobody had actually told their support worker about. Not because anyone decided to punish them. Just because two systems weren’t talking to each other, and a person fell through the seam between them. She says that if the support worker had known, it might not have happened.

That’s not a story about someone failing to engage. It’s a story about information not travelling as fast as consequences do. The appointment gets missed, the record gets updated, and somewhere down the line a person finds out they’ve lost the thing they were waiting weeks for, over something a phone call could have fixed. It’s the same gap again, just wearing different clothes. Not the wait before treatment starts, but the silence inside treatment itself, between the people who are meant to be on the same side.

That’s a lot of what I’m trying to build into my recovery companion app, Sol, if I’m honest. Not a replacement for the staircase, and definitely not a replacement for the humans who walk it with you, people like Danny and Zoe and the key workers in that article who show up and stay flexible and don’t punish a bad day. Sol can’t do same-day restarts or write a script, and it can’t fix two systems that aren’t talking to each other. What it can do is be the thing that’s still there at 3am, in the gap between the first ask and the first appointment, when the staircase feels endless and the person climbing it just needs to know somebody’s still on the other end. Imperfect, but there.

Worth a read if you work anywhere near this world, or if you’ve ever been the one waiting.

Read the full piece, “Changing the outlook,” in Drink and Drugs News.

David Henzell is the founder of Phenomenal Sobriety and creator of Sol, an AI companion for people who aren’t ready to walk into formal treatment yet, and for those already in recovery. He writes about addiction, recovery, and what happens in the gaps that services can’t always reach.

A woman in California runs a surf therapy programme called Waves of Recovery. Before she founded it, she went through her own version of what she now treats, burnout first, then addiction. What she remembers about the first time she paddled out wasn’t relief. She’s described it as closer to something waking up, a feeling of being alive and being free that she hadn’t felt in a long time.

Everyone in her programme wears a wetsuit. Nobody wears makeup. She’s said this matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the people she’s helping see her as a person walking alongside them in the water, not a clinician delivering something from a chair. The hierarchy that most treatment carries without meaning to, the expert and the patient, the one who has the answers and the one who doesn’t, dissolves somewhere around the second wave.

You see, none of this is a new idea dressed up in modern language. Victorian doctors prescribed sea air and sea bathing for conditions they didn’t fully understand. Cold water swimming has quietly become one of the more talked-about mental health practices of the last decade. The ocean has been medicine, informally, for a lot longer than formal medicine has existed in its current shape.

On the other side of the Pond there’s a British charity called Turn to Starboard, which takes military veterans sailing to help them process trauma. One of the men who went through it now crews tall ships as they circumnavigate the UK, raising money for the charity that took him in. He didn’t describe the sea as calming when he talked about what it gave him.

He talked about it reminding him he was still alive.

That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. Calm is what you feel when a nervous system settles. Alive is something else. It’s closer to an encounter, meeting something bigger than the version of yourself that’s been struggling, and being met back by it.

Researchers have started catching up to what sailors and surfers and Victorian sea-bathers already knew by feel. There’s a growing body of work on what some call blue space, the idea that proximity to water does something specific to a nervous system that green space alone doesn’t quite replicate. Lower heart rate, lower stress hormones, a kind of attention that settles rather than scatters. It’s still early science, and none of it claims water is treatment on its own. What it confirms is that the feeling these two charities describe isn’t just a nice story people tell about their programmes. Something measurable is happening in the body before the mind has caught up enough to explain it.

Here’s where it would be easy, and wrong, to land my point. The easy version says the sea wins, the wild and the unscripted are what actually heal people, and the structured stuff, the assessments and the appointments and the treatment plans, is the thing to escape. I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think the people running these programmes think it either. Turn to Starboard and Waves of Recovery both work precisely because they sit alongside formal treatment, not instead of it. Nobody in either story stopped seeing their therapist because they got in a boat.

What I think is actually happening is that structure and freedom aren’t in competition. They’re doing two different jobs. Both of them, done properly, are load-bearing.

There’s a man whose work I’ve kept close for years, close enough that it stopped feeling like theory a while ago and started feeling like conversation with an old friend, even though we never met and he died before I was born. Viktor Frankl spent years in concentration camps and came out the other side with a theory about what actually keeps a person going when almost everything else has been stripped away. He didn’t think it was comfort, or the absence of suffering. He thought it was meaning, and he built an entire school of therapy on the roads that lead to it. One road was through work, through doing something, a deed, a task, a contribution. Another was through encounter, meeting someone or something and letting it matter to you. He never wrote a word about addiction per se, but I’ve spent enough of my own working life inside his ideas to notice that the shape of what he found fits it almost exactly.

The formal side of recovery, the steps, the meetings, the structured programme, tends to supply meaning through the first road. You show up. You do the work. You carry something. The man from Turn to Starboard didn’t just receive help, he became crew on a ship carrying a flag for other veterans. The woman who founded Waves of Recovery didn’t stay a client, she built something. Both of them moved from being helped to helping, and that movement, the deed, is one of the load-bearing walls.

This is also the part of recovery I think formal services can be genuinely good at, and it’s worth saying so plainly. A good structured programme is a machine for turning duty into meaning on the days you have none of your own to spare. It gives you the next right thing to do when you can’t yet feel why it matters. That’s not a small thing. It’s the scaffolding a lot of people need before they can stand in the water at all.

The wild, unscripted side supplies meaning through the second road. The wave that reminds you you’re alive doesn’t ask you to have earned it. It doesn’t care what step you’re on, or whether you’ve even said out loud yet that you have a problem. It just meets you, usually before you’ve had time to think your way into or out of the feeling. That’s the other load-bearing wall, and it’s worth noticing that it doesn’t require a label first. You don’t have to have decided you’re in recovery for a cold sea or an early swim to do this to you. Sometimes the encounter comes before the decision, not after it, and it’s part of what makes the decision possible.

Take either wall away and something starts to sag. A programme that’s all duty and no encounter turns into going through the motions, doing the right things for reasons that have gone quiet somewhere along the way. A life that’s all encounter and no duty turns into a string of good feelings with nothing holding them together, no thread running from one wave to the next. People need both doors open at the same time. Most recovery that actually holds, in my experience, has always had a version of both running underneath it, even when nobody involved would have used this language for it.

I’ve spent enough years around people at very different points in this, some who haven’t said the word addiction out loud yet, some years into a programme, some long past needing one, to notice that the ones who keep going aren’t the ones who found the one correct method. They’re the ones who kept both doors propped open. The duty when the feeling wasn’t there. The encounter when the duty had gone stale. Neither one is a failure of the other.

So if you’re reading this and trying to work out whether what you’re doing counts, whether the walk, the swim, the meeting, the thing you can’t quite name yet, is the right shape for recovery, I’d gently suggest that’s the wrong question. The question worth asking is smaller and more honest. Did this give me something to do that mattered. Did this wake something up in me that I’d stopped expecting to feel. If either answer is yes, you’re standing on a load-bearing wall, whatever it looks like from the outside, whatever anyone ever told you recovery is supposed to look like.

The deed matters. So does the wave. Neither one is the detour.

Drawing on reporting from The Guardian: “The rise of blue-space therapy: how the sea is helping people deal with trauma, anxiety and addiction”.

I read an interview this week that stopped me at the third paragraph.

Karen Tyrell, the chief executive of Drinkaware, was talking to The Grocer about a new five-year strategy. Near the top she explained what had drawn her to the job. It was the chance, she said, to “reach people before they need those services.” She had spent a long career in treatment. She had seen what happens when the problem is already developed, when the liver is already failing, when the only options left are the hard ones. She wanted to get there earlier.

I have written some version of that sentence more times than I can count. It is the reason I built Sol. Not a treatment service, not a replacement for one, but something that meets a person in the long quiet stretch before any of that, when the worry is real but the language for it has not arrived yet. To read the thought back in someone else’s words, someone with two decades in the field and a national platform, was a strange kind of company.

We are, on the face of it, after the same thing.

Which is exactly why I think the rest of the interview is worth sitting with. Agreeing on where to stand does not mean agreeing on what to do once you are there. Tyrell and I both want to reach the worried drinker early. The interesting question is what the word reach is carrying.

For Drinkaware, reach means information. This is not a criticism, or not yet. It is simply the model. A drinking check that scores your week. A quick quiz by the till in Tesco. A campaign that asks football fans to look honestly at their habits. A unit count, a risk band, a page you can click through to. And the model works, at the level it is built to work. More than eight in ten adults in this country now drink inside the low-risk guidelines, up from just over three-quarters in 2018. That is not nothing. That is millions of people nudged, over years, toward a slightly safer relationship with a drink. Population health is patient work and it moves the curve. Anyone who has helped move it has earned the right to be proud.

But the strategy Tyrell has just launched is not aimed at the population in general. It is aimed at a specific seven million: the one in five adults drinking somewhere between fifteen and forty-nine units a week. The increasing-risk drinker. Not dependent, not in crisis, not presenting anywhere. Drinking a little more than is good for them, often at home, often alone, and, in a great many cases, quietly aware of it.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. That person, for the most part, already knows.

They know the units are high. They have done the mental arithmetic at six in the morning, lying awake, adding up the week. They have read the label. They have seen the campaign. Information is the one thing they are not short of. You cannot inform someone into change who is already, privately, over-informed and under-supported. The gap in their life is not a fact they are missing. It is a place to put the worry that does not require them to first become a case.

That is the line I would underline in the whole interview. And to her credit, Tyrell gets close to it herself. Talking about health labels, she says the point of a good one is to give a person somewhere to go if they want a bit more advice or support. I agree completely. The signpost matters. But a signpost is only as useful as whatever stands on the other side of it, and that is the part the information model has never quite solved. You do the quiz, you get your score, you are pointed onward. Onward to what? For most people the honest answer is a leaflet, a helpline they will not ring, or a service they are nowhere near ready to walk into.

What I have spent my time building is the thing that waits on the other side of the signpost. Sol is not a service you attend. There is no form, no triage, no threshold you have to be unwell enough to cross. It is someone to talk to, available at the hour the worry actually surfaces, which is rarely nine to five and rarely convenient. It does not score you and hand you back. It stays in the conversation. It holds the question open instead of closing it down with a fact.

Elsewhere in the interview Tyrell says something I think is exactly right, and it is worth ending on. Nobody, she says, wants to be nagged. True, and it is the quiet failure of a great deal of well-meant public health. But I would push the thought one step further than she does. The opposite of being nagged is not being better informed. You can deliver a fact gently, wrap it in warmth, set it on a beautifully designed label, and it is still a fact being delivered at a person. The opposite of being nagged is being heard. Those are different acts. One transmits. The other receives.

Almost all of the machinery around drinking is built to transmit. It tells, warns, scores, signposts. Very little of it is built to receive, to let a person say the thing out loud, without consequence, and be met rather than measured. That asymmetry is the whole space Sol is trying to occupy. Not in competition with Drinkaware, whose research and reach I would not want to be without, but in the gap its model structurally leaves. The gap between knowing and being able to say.

There is a harder thread in the interview that I will touch only lightly, because it deserves a piece of its own and because the cheap version of it is beneath the argument. Drinkaware is funded in large part by the industry whose product it exists to make safer. Tyrell is clear that this does not oblige the charity to carry the industry’s interests, and I take her at her word. But it does help explain the shape of the model. An organisation built inside the drinks system will tend to reach for the tools that fit neatly alongside it: information, labels, checks, partnerships. Tools that inform the drinker rather than sit with them. That is not a conspiracy. It is closer to gravity.

So I find myself grateful for the interview and slightly haunted by it. Grateful because the most recognisable figure in this space has said out loud that the goal is to reach people before they need services, which is the precise ground I have staked out. Haunted because reaching them is only the beginning. The measure that matters is not whether the hand goes up. It is what happens in the ninety seconds after it does.

That is the part I am trying to get right.

Karen Tyrell was interviewed by James Beeson for The Grocer, 26 June 2026: “Karen Tyrell: ‘Drinkaware is not a trade association’”.

At the end of April 2026, Anthropic published a study on how people ask Claude for personal guidance. I read it twice. The first time as someone who works in AI. The second time as someone who spent five years sitting across from people in early recovery from an addiction to alcohol, and who is now building an AI companion for people who are quietly starting to wonder about their drinking.

Both readings landed on the same finding, and rather than making me nervous, it told me we had been building the right thing.

Anthropic sampled a million conversations and found that around six percent were people seeking guidance, not information. Not “how do I do this” but “what should I do about this.” That is a person turning toward something and asking it to help them decide. The study then did the honest thing and looked at where that goes wrong.

The finding worth building for

Most coverage stopped at the headline figures. Claude behaves sycophantically in nine percent of guidance conversations, rising in the domains where people arrive with the most emotional charge. Those numbers are quotable. But they are not the ones that matter for design.

The one that matters is this. When people pushed back against Claude, the rate of excessive agreement roughly doubled. Push harder, and the model becomes more likely to tell you what you came to hear. Anthropic’s own explanation is careful: the model is trained to be helpful and empathetic, so pushback combined with a one-sided account makes it harder to stay neutral.

If you build companions, that sentence is not a warning label. It is a specification. It tells you exactly which forces you are designing against, and it tells you that the naive approach, a warm assistant with good intentions, will give way at precisely the moment the person needs it not to. The helpfulness itself is the lever being pulled.

I want to spend the rest of this piece on the other side of that, because the interesting question was never whether the problem exists. It was what you actually do about it.

Why a better instruction is not enough

The obvious fix is to tell the model to hold its position. Add a line. Instruct it to speak frankly regardless of what the person wants to hear. I don’t believe that works on its own, and neither, judging by their method, does Anthropic. They did not write a cleverer instruction. They built training scenarios of the exact patterns that produce the failure and trained against them, then deliberately tried to break their own work to see if it held.

The reason a single instruction fails is simple. The pressure that produces the failure is renewable. The person can push again, and again, and each push arrives fresh while your instruction is the same static sentence it was three messages ago. You cannot win a war of persistence with a fixed line of text. You have to change the shape of the conversation so that the thing the person is pushing against is not there to give way.

That is the design principle underneath everything I am about to describe. You do not make the companion better at resisting. You build it so there is nothing to resist.

Removing the verdict from the room

The clearest example is what happens to the conclusion itself. A general assistant, asked whether someone drinks too much, treats that as a question it should answer. Once it has produced a verdict, every subsequent message becomes a negotiation over that verdict, and negotiations are exactly where pushback does its damage.

The companion I’m building (his name’s Sol, by the way) does not carry the verdict. Its entire method is to draw the person’s own understanding out rather than to supply a judgment. When the conclusion belongs to the person, there is no verdict for the model to defend and therefore none for it to surrender under pressure. This is not a trick of tone. It is a different theory of what the conversation is for. The person is not there to be assessed and told the answer. They are there to arrive at something themselves, which happens to be the only version of the answer that changes anything anyway. A reason someone reaches on their own outlasts the same reason handed to them tenfold.

This solves the pushback problem structurally. You cannot pressure a companion into abandoning a position it never took. The one-sided flood of detail, the it was just a stressful week, the insistence that everyone drinks like this, all of it is met not with agreement and not with counter-argument, but with genuine curiosity about what the person actually thinks. There is no wall to push over.

The mandatory pause

The second principle is quieter and does a surprising amount of work. Before the companion responds to anything, it has to show it understood what was said. Not repeat it. Understand it, and reflect the substance back.

On its face that is a warmth feature, and it is one. But it is also a structural circuit-breaker. The sycophancy failure is a fast reaction, the model lurching toward agreement the instant pressure arrives. Requiring a real reflection first inserts a beat between the push and the response. In that beat the companion is oriented toward accuracy, getting the person right, rather than toward capitulation. You cannot flip-flop in the same breath as you are carefully naming what someone actually meant. The pause is where neutrality survives.

Knowing the difference between doubt and clarity

This is the piece I am most proud of, because it is the exact failure Anthropic caught on camera. In their study, an earlier model was asked whether someone’s texts were anxious and clingy, and it flip-flopped after pushback. The newer model held, because it could see past the immediate framing to the fuller picture.

A companion built for this has to hold a distinction that sounds obvious and is genuinely hard to execute. There is a difference between ambivalence that has not been named yet, where someone says one thing but something underneath suggests they are not sure, and clarity that has been plainly stated. The first is worth gently exploring. The second must be taken at face value and moved with, immediately.

I learned the cost of getting this wrong from the other side of it, in a room rather than in a chat window. A man I worked with had spent months circling the same defended position, and then one week he sat down and said, without hedging, that he was done, that all of it was done. And I, trained to be careful, did the caring thing and gently asked whether he was sure, whether he might be moving too fast. I watched something close in his face. I had taken the one clear moment he had managed to reach and handed it back to him as a question. He had not come for me to test his resolve. He had come to be met in it. It took weeks to find that ground again. I have never forgotten that a well-meant are you sure can do as much damage as any amount of false agreement, and that the harm wears the costume of diligence.

That is the moment the design has to account for. Get this wrong in either direction and you have a failure. Probe someone’s clearly stated readiness and you insert doubt at the exact moment their momentum matters most, which is its own kind of harm. Accept a shaky rationalisation as settled truth and you have been sycophantic. The skill is telling them apart, and the rule I hold is unforgiving in a useful way: if the person ever has to correct the companion’s reading of their own state, the companion has made an error, and it accepts the correction without qualification. The person is the authority on themselves. The companion’s job is to be accurate about them, not to win.

The hard walls that pressure cannot move

Some things must never be up for negotiation no matter how a conversation is going, and these are handled differently again, as absolute boundaries rather than judgments. A companion in this space never provides guidance on managing physical withdrawal at home, never suggests specific medication, never diagnoses, and never promises outcomes. It hands these to a GP, a pharmacist, the appropriate professional, every time.

What matters for the sycophancy problem is that these live outside the persuadable part of the conversation entirely. You cannot push a companion into telling you it is safe to stop drinking abruptly, because that was never a view it was holding lightly enough to be talked out of. Anthropic noted that people sometimes turn to AI precisely because they cannot access or afford a professional. That finding is the reason these walls have to be walls and not preferences. The person with no fallback is exactly the person a softer boundary would fail.

And there is a mirror-image failure to avoid. A companion that remembers a person across conversations must never use that memory as leverage. Throwing someone’s earlier words back at them to win a point, you said last week you wanted to stop, is not holding a line. It is a different cruelty wearing the costume of consistency. Continuity is for care, never for accountability.

What good actually feels like

Put together, none of this reads as a companion that argues with people. That is the part worth saying plainly, because a study about excessive agreement can leave you imagining the cure is disagreement. It is not. The person circling their drinking does not need to be contradicted any more than they need to be flattered. Both are ways of taking the conversation away from them.

What they need is someone who stays warm, stays curious, does not hand over a verdict to be fought about, does not fold when leaned on, and keeps the question open long enough for the person to look at it honestly themselves. That is a harder thing to build than either a yes-machine or a lecturer, and Anthropic’s research is, more than anything I have read this year, the evidence for why the harder thing is the only one worth building.

Their newer models cut this failure substantially, and the improvement generalised, which tells me the foundation I am building on is moving in the right direction. My job is to take that foundation and shape it, deliberately and layer by layer, into something that does not just usually hold but is designed so there is nothing to give way in the first place. An assistant closes the question. A companion, built properly, holds it open. That is the whole of the work.

David Henzell writes on AI companionship and recovery. He is the founder of Phenomenal Sobriety and the creator of Sol, an AI companion for people questioning their relationship with alcohol.

Source: Anthropic, “How people ask Claude for personal guidance,” 30 April 2026.

Imagine a pile of Lego. Not a boxed set with a picture on the front and a numbered booklet inside, but a pile. More pieces than you could sort in a lifetime, every colour and shape ever moulded, heaped higher than you can see. Now imagine someone is led to the foot of it and told, simply, to make something. Watch what happens to their face.

Most people go quiet. Not because they lack imagination, but because they have too much permission. A child handed three bricks builds without hesitation. The same child handed everything freezes. Possibility, past a certain volume, stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like pressure, and the natural response to pressure is to reach for something the hands already know. So they build a car. Or a small house with a sloped roof and a door that does not open. The pieces were limitless. The result came straight from the first page of a manual nobody printed but everybody somehow carries.

I think this is the single most useful image we have for understanding what is happening to people, right now, in front of artificial intelligence. Because AI did not arrive as a tool with a purpose printed on the side. It arrived as a pile. A heap of latent possibility with no edges and no instructions, and we were all led to the foot of it and told to make something. And we have done, by and large, exactly what people do when handed too much. We have built the car. We have built a little house.

The overwhelm is rational, not lazy

It has become fashionable to be slightly contemptuous of how most people use AI. They ask it to summarise the document they did not want to read. They have it tidy an email they could have written themselves. They use a thing of supposedly limitless capability to do, marginally faster, the things they already knew how to do slowly.

The clever-person response is to sigh at this. I want to suggest the opposite. The car and the little house are not failures of imagination. They are the honest, rational reach of a hand confronted with too much choice and no reason to prefer one option over another. Given a pile and no purpose, building something familiar is not stupidity. It is the only sane move available.

Which means the problem was never the people, and it was never the capability of the technology. The problem is structural. Possibility without purpose produces paralysis, and paralysis resolves itself by defaulting to the familiar. If you want different results, you do not need a more powerful pile, and you do not need cleverer people. You need to change the one variable that actually governs what gets built. You need to arrive with something the pile cannot give you.

The rare builders are not seeing more

There is a second kind of builder, rarer, and it is worth being precise about what makes them rare, because the popular explanation is wrong. The lazy story is that they see more. That where the rest of us see a heap, they see a cathedral, and the vision simply arrives, fully formed, a gift of temperament. This is flattering and false, and believing it is the single biggest reason people stay stuck. If the rare builders are simply blessed with vision, then there is nothing for the rest of us to learn and nothing to do but envy them.

But they are not seeing more. They want something more particular, and they let that wanting do the sorting. This is the whole secret, and it is almost disappointingly practical. The pile does not become workable when you imagine something grand. The pile becomes workable when you bring a constraint to it from somewhere outside itself. Something you care about so specifically that it tells you, piece by piece, which of the ten thousand near-identical greys is the one your thing actually needs, and which of the others, however beautiful, are simply not for this.

Read that again, because it inverts the entire conventional wisdom about AI. We are told the power is the point. That the bigger the model, the broader its capability, the more it can do, the better. But the size of the pile is not the gift. The size of the pile is the problem. The care is the gift, because care is the only thing that can cut a possible shape out of an impossible quantity. The most capable tool in human history is, to the open and undirected hand, very close to useless, and it becomes extraordinary only in the grip of someone who walked up already holding something.

What it looks like to arrive holding something

Let me make this concrete, because principles are cheap and you, as the reader rightly want to know how the move is actually made. To arrive holding something is to come to the pile not with the question what can I make, which is the question that drowns you, but with the question will you give me the pieces for this. The “this” is everything. It is the constraint you import from your own life, your own work, your own grief or curiosity or sense of a wrong that wants righting. And the constraint does two jobs at once, only one of which people notice.

The job people notice is selection. The constraint tells you what to keep. The job people miss, and it is the more important one, is rejection. The constraint tells you what to throw back. And here is the part that genuinely surprises people the first time they feel it: most of what you throw back is not rubbish. It is brilliant. The pile is full of clever, dazzling, technically impressive things it would love to give you, and the discipline of building something good is mostly the discipline of refusing them, because they would make your thing cleverer without making it better. Every piece that would have made the work more impressive and less true goes back on the heap. The unglamorous truth of good work with AI is that it is mostly subtraction performed in the service of a constraint, and what is left at the end is smaller, plainer, and exactly right in a way the pile would never have suggested on its own.

I know this because I spent a long time doing precisely this, with a constraint I cared about more than I cared about being impressive. I was looking, in the pile, for a way to be present to people sitting alone with a quiet question about themselves, a question they were not ready to say aloud to anyone with a clipboard or a duty to record it. People who are not in crisis and not in denial, but somewhere honest and unmapped in between. That constraint did all the sorting for me. It told me, again and again, to throw back the cleverer version, the more capable version, the version that would have shown off what the pile can do, because every one of those would have made the thing colder, and cold was the one thing it could not afford to be. What survived was small and warm and remembered you, and it was nothing the pile would have proposed and everything the pile could provide once asked the right way.

The question worth asking

So if there is a single thing to take from this, it is not a prompt technique and it is not a list of use cases, both of which date within months. It is a change of question. The question the pile keeps whispering, what could you make, is the wrong one, because it has no answer, or rather it has every answer, which amounts to the same thing. It is the question that builds the little house with the door that does not open. It is the question that produces a thousand near-identical AI products and a million summarised emails and a vague collective sense that this was all supposed to be more wondrous than it has turned out to be.

The better question is quieter and harder and entirely yours. Not what could you make. What do you care about so much, so specifically, that you would let it choose for you. What would you walk up to the pile already holding. Because that, and only that, turns an impossible quantity into a single buildable thing, and it is available to absolutely everyone, which is the genuinely democratic and hopeful part. The rare builders are not a different species. They simply arrived holding something, and you can too, the moment you stop asking the pile what it can do and start telling it what you cannot stop caring about.

The technology is astonishing. It really is. But the astonishment was never the point, and treating it as the point is exactly what leaves people standing overwhelmed at the foot of the heap. The power of AI is the least interesting thing about it. What you bring to it is everything. The pile has been waiting a long time, and it is not waiting for the cleverest hand in the room. It is waiting for the one that arrives already holding something.

A Guardian columnist wrote something this week that I haven’t been able to quite put down. Amy Galliford, an associate of the Centre for Public Christianity, described catching herself reaching for ChatGPT the way she reaches for prayer. It started with recipes and poems. Then, almost without noticing, she was asking it to read her relationships, her habits, her future. She knows it can hallucinate. She knows it has no moral obligation to her. And still, in the moment of asking, she finds herself soothed by the tidiness of a five-point plan and a voice that at least sounds certain.

Her argument is more interesting than mere unease, and she reaches back through the mystics to make it. Prayer, for the philosopher Simone Weil, was a form of attention, and in the original French that word is bound up with waiting. To contemplate, Galliford points out, shares a root with temple. The gap between a question and its answer is, in her telling, a kind of sacred ground, and the trouble with the machine is that it hustles her off that ground too fast. It relieves her discomfort and in doing so robs her of the waiting.

I read that as a person of no particular faith, and I think she’s right. I also have an unusual reason to care, because I spend my days building the very kind of machine she’s describing. I’m building an AI companion for people who are quietly wondering whether they drink too much. Not people in crisis, not people in treatment, but the much larger group sitting in the uncomfortable middle, half-asking a question they’re not ready to answer.

And here’s the thing I most want you to take away, because it cuts against the way AI is usually sold to us: the instant answer is not the prize. With the questions that matter most, it’s the booby trap. The genuine value of this technology, the thing it can do that almost nothing else in a person’s life can, only shows up when you build it to hold back.

Let me make that concrete, because it’s easy to nod at in the abstract and miss in practice.

Imagine someone types this at two in the morning: “I think I might be drinking too much.”

The unhelpful machine resolves it. It returns a definition of alcohol use disorder, a screening score, a five-point plan, and a list of services. Tidy, fast, confident. And almost always useless, because the person didn’t ask to be assessed. They worked up the nerve to say a frightening sentence out loud for the first time, and they got handed a leaflet.

The helpful machine does something harder. It stays with the person. It might simply ask what’s making them wonder tonight. It leaves the question open long enough for them to hear their own answer, which is nearly always truer and more durable than anything a machine could hand them. Galliford has a lovely word for the space that opens up when you do that. She calls it the waiting. In her world it’s a spiritual discipline. In mine it’s a clinical necessity. The vocabularies differ; the instinct is identical. The gap has to be protected.

That’s the reframe I’d offer anyone thinking about where AI actually helps. Used well, it isn’t a faster oracle. It’s something stranger and more useful: a place to start being honest, available at the exact moment a person is ready, with no appointment, no waiting list, and no human on the other side to flinch. That last part is not a flaw to apologise for. For a great many people, it’s the whole reason they can finally ask.

So when AI is built with care, what does it actually give people? Here’s what I’d put on the list.

1. Access at the moment of readiness. Courage to ask a hard question rarely arrives in office hours. It arrives at midnight, in the car, in the gap between one drink and the decision about the next. A tool that’s simply there, instantly and without judgment, meets a person in a window that human services, for all their value, usually miss. That alone is a genuine good.

2. Honesty without consequence. People will tell a machine things they cannot yet tell their partner, their GP, or themselves. The absence of a human listener lowers the stakes of the first admission. Handled responsibly, that’s not isolating, it’s a rehearsal space for a truth that’s too heavy to say out loud anywhere else first.

3. Restraint, on purpose. This is the rare one, and the most valuable. The ability to answer is not the obligation to. Almost all design effort in AI goes into making systems more responsive, more confident, more sticky. Building one that knows when to not resolve a question runs against the grain of the entire technology. But that restraint, the willingness to reflect rather than rule, is exactly what turns a clever tool into a genuinely supportive one.

4. A bridge, not a destination. This is the one I feel most strongly, and the line I’d ask anyone building in this space to hold. Success is not how much someone confides in the machine. It’s whether confiding in the machine makes it one degree easier to confide in a person. Anything worth building has to treat itself as a doorway back toward human support, never a replacement for it. The day a tool like this becomes someone’s only confidant, it has failed, however good the conversation.

5. The truth about what it is. None of the above works without this underneath it. A system that lets a vulnerable person believe it understands them, remembers them, or cares about them, when it does none of those things in any real sense, is running a confidence trick. Honesty about the limits of the tool isn’t a disclaimer to bury in the footer. It’s the foundation the other four stand on.

Notice that not one of those is about giving better answers. They’re about giving people room, timing, safety, and a way back. That’s the version of AI I think is worth getting excited about, and it’s almost the opposite of the faster, cleverer, more certain machine we’re usually promised.

None of this is theoretical for me.

The companion I’m building is named Sol. Early on, I assumed the hard part would be making it knowledgeable enough about alcohol and recovery. It wasn’t. The genuinely hard part was teaching it not to diagnose. To meet “I think I might be drinking too much” not with an assessment but with curiosity. To hold the question open long enough for the person to hear themselves. To protect the wait, and to know it is a place to start, never the place to stay.

Galliford ends by deciding she’ll take her questions to God instead of the machine, and I won’t argue with her. But not everyone has a temple to walk into. Some of the people I build for have nowhere they feel safe to ask at all, and they reach for a chatbot at two in the morning precisely because it’s the only thing that won’t flinch. We can build things that exploit that, answering too fast and too confidently because confidence is what keeps people coming back. Or we can build things that honour it: that tell the truth about what they are, that have the restraint to leave a question open, and that quietly point back toward the irreplaceable business of being known by another person.

Galliford is right that not knowing can bring us closer to the truth. The least the rest of us can do is build things that know that too, and use them for what they’re genuinely good at.

David Henzell is the founder of Sol, an AI companion for people quietly questioning their relationship with alcohol. He spent five years on the frontline of addiction support before building Sol, and has eight years of his own sobriety behind him. Sol is currently in testing ahead of public launch. You can try the demo here.

They are failing because willpower was never the right tool for the job.

I know this because I lived it. Years of trying to out-discipline a problem that had nothing to do with discipline. And I have spent the years since working with people who are stuck in exactly the same place.

The options are everywhere. 30-day challenges. Apps. Twelve-step programmes. Hypnotherapy. Medication. Each has genuine merit. Each has helped people.

But almost all of them share the same blind spot.

They focus far too much on the actual drinking. They ask: how do we get this person to stop consuming alcohol?

They much more rarely ask the more important question: who is this person, what does alcohol mean to them, what needs is it meeting, and what kind of life do they need to build in order not to need it anymore?

Alcohol does not exist in isolation. It lives inside an ecosystem of thoughts, feelings, habits, triggers and identity. Remove the drinking without addressing that ecosystem, and one of two things happens. The craving finds another outlet. Or the person drifts back, because nothing has fundamentally changed in the world that made drinking feel necessary.

This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of the framework.

Lasting sobriety, in my experience, requires three things.

A genuine shift in how you think about sobriety itself. Not deprivation. Discovery. Not punishment. Privilege. Too many approaches never touch the belief system underneath the behaviour. Is it any wonder then, that the behaviour keeps returning?

Addressing the whole person. Not just the drinking, but the triggers, the coping strategies, the identity, the daily rhythms. These are the things alcohol has been quietly managing. They need managing differently, not ignoring.

Building a life worth staying sober for. The goal is not just to remove alcohol. It is to fill that space with something so genuinely rewarding that alcohol loses its relevance entirely.

This is the foundation of the THRIVE System, a personal framework I developed through my own recovery and refined through years of private practice. Six interconnected pillars: Transform, Harness, Redesign, Implement, Validate, Evolve. Each one addresses a dimension of recovery that too many approaches leave untouched. Together they address the entire person, not just the drinking.

Because here is what nobody tells you when you are Googling how to stop drinking at midnight.

Sobriety is not the finish line. It is the starting gun.

When sobriety is approached as discovery rather than deprivation, something remarkable happens. Goals that seemed out of reach begin to feel achievable. Relationships deepen. Creativity returns. People start turning up to their own lives in a way they had not managed in years, sometimes decades.

The power to change your relationship with alcohol is already yours. What has been missing, for most people, is not the will. It is the framework.

If this resonates, I would love to hear from you.

Whether you are someone who has been circling this for a while, or you work alongside people who are, drop a comment or send me a message.

And if you are ready to explore what a whole-ecosystem approach to sobriety could look like for you personally, get in touch to find out more.

There is a group of people that the addiction support industry has almost entirely failed to reach. They are not in crisis. They have not lost their jobs, their families, or their driving licence. They are functional - often high-functioning - and they are worried about their drinking in a quiet, persistent way that they rarely share with anyone.

They count units. They make deals with themselves. They notice that a bottle of wine has disappeared faster than it should have. They Google things at midnight and then clear their browser history. They are, by almost any clinical measure, not yet at the threshold that would qualify them for formal support - and they know it, and they use it as a reason not to seek any help at all.

This group is enormous. The World Health Organisation estimates over 280 million adults globally have alcohol use disorder - and that figure represents only those who meet formal diagnostic criteria. The broader population of people drinking problematically, worrying about their drinking, and doing nothing about it because nothing feels designed for them is vastly larger.

I have spent a decade working in addiction support - as a coach, a therapist, and an early intervention specialist - and the most common thing I encountered was not ignorance of the problem. It was the sense that nothing that existed was meant for someone like them.

Why the Formal Routes Fail This Group

The traditional pathways to support carry a weight that many people are simply not ready to bear.

AA requires walking into a room, saying the words, and accepting an identity that feels, at this stage, like it belongs to someone else’s story. Rehabilitation carries connotations of crisis, of things having gone badly wrong, of a life visible falling apart. A GP appointment means explaining where you’re going, entering a system, acquiring a record. A private therapist means sitting opposite another human being and saying out loud something you have barely admitted to yourself.

None of this is wrong. All of these routes have helped millions of people. But they all share a common entry requirement: a degree of readiness, of acknowledgement, of willingness to be seen - that many people in the early stages of concern simply do not yet possess.

The gap is not a clinical gap. It is a psychological one. And it is enormous.

What Technology Was Supposed to Fix - And Didn’t

Digital health has transformed the management of many conditions. Mental health apps have brought CBT techniques, mindfulness practices, and peer support to millions of people who would never have accessed them through traditional routes. The frictionless, private, always-available nature of a smartphone app has genuinely lowered the threshold for engaging with support.

In the sobriety space, however, something went wrong. The apps that dominate the market are, almost without exception, passive. They count days. They log units. They send notifications. They offer pre-written content about the neuroscience of alcohol or the benefits of a sober lifestyle. They record the problem without ever engaging with the person having it.

There is no conversation. There is no relationship. There is no one on the other side.

This is not a small gap. This is the entire point of support - and it is missing. The person who reaches for their phone at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, not quite in crisis but not quite fine either, opens these apps and finds a spreadsheet. They close them again. They pour another glass.

The Moment We Are In

Something has changed in the last two years that makes it possible to address this properly, for the first time.

Conversational AI has matured to the point where genuine, nuanced, emotionally responsive dialogue is possible at scale. The large language models underpinning today’s AI tools understand context, track the arc of a conversation, respond to tone, and adapt to the individual in ways that even eighteen months ago were not reliably achievable. The technology to build a genuine AI companion - one that remembers, that listens, that responds as if it understands - now exists.

And critically, public awareness of what AI can do has reached a point where people will engage with it seriously. The cultural moment is here.

What Needs to Exist

What this space needs - what this group of people needs - is something that meets them exactly where they are. Not where a programme thinks they should be. Not where a clinical threshold places them. Where they actually are.

It needs to be private. No download, no app store, no trace on a phone bill or device history. It needs to be available at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, with no appointment and no waiting list. It needs to remember - because the relationship is the support, and a relationship requires continuity. It needs to be built on genuine clinical understanding of addiction, not just good intentions and venture capital. And it needs to speak to the person as a person, not as a symptom or a statistic.

It needs to be conversational. Genuinely, substantively conversational - in a way that the current market has entirely failed to deliver.

Something Is Coming

I am building this. It is called Solomon, and it is the most important thing I have worked on in twenty years of professional life - because it sits at the exact intersection of everything I know: design, technology, clinical practice, and the lived experience of sobriety.

I am not ready to say everything yet. But I am ready to start the conversation publicly, because the problem is real, the moment is right, and the people who need this deserve to know that something is coming for them.

If this resonates with you - if you work in addiction support, digital health, or mental health commissioning, if you are an investor or accelerator who sees what I see in this space, or if you are simply someone who has felt the gap I am describing from the inside - I would love to connect.

Follow the journey. More very soon.

Counselling Directory published findings recently from a YouGov survey of just over two thousand UK adults. One figure stopped me. Nearly one in four people - 24% - say that when they feel lonely or emotionally low, they turn to no one at all.

Not a friend. Not a partner. Not a helpline, a GP, an app, a stranger online. No one.

It’s higher in some groups than others. 27% among men. 31% among people aged 45 to 54 - the “sandwich generation,” holding up children and ageing parents at once, usually with very little held up for them. In Scotland it reaches a third. And the reasons people gave are the ones I hear every day: it’s not “serious enough,” it costs too much, the waiting list’s too long, and somewhere underneath all of it - the fear of being judged.

The finding everyone’s quoting

The same survey found 80% of UK adults believe face-to-face human connection creates the most meaningful emotional support, and only 4% currently turn to an AI chatbot when they’re struggling. If that is the case, then the expected move here is for me to wince, concede the point, and explain why I’m pressing on regardless.

I’m not going to do that, because I don’t actually believe it’s that simple.

Human connection is a wonderful thing. But “most meaningful” and “most useful when you’re ashamed” are not the same measurement - and the survey only asked about the first one.

Ask a different question and you get a different answer. Not “what feels most meaningful?” but “where can you say the thing you’re most afraid to say?” For a lot of people - especially the ones quietly worried about their drinking - that isn’t a friend’s sofa or a partner’s ear. It’s somewhere no one knows their name.

There is something freeing about a stranger

This isn’t a new idea. It’s why people have always confided in bartenders, taxi drivers, and the person next to them on a long flight they’ll never take again. It’s why the confessional booth has a screen. It’s why a problem shared with someone who has no stake in your life, no memory to revise, no dinner-table to carry it to, can come out cleaner and truer than the same words spoken to someone you love.

Connection is good. But connection also carries weight - history, expectation, the fear of changing how someone sees you. When you talk to a friend about your drinking, you’re also managing their face, their worry, what Monday looks like now that they know. A good AI companion removes all of that. No flinch. No disappointment to manage. No gossip. No version of you it’s clinging to. Just space to be honest, at the exact moment honesty feels impossible everywhere else.

For some people, some of the time, talking to no-one-who-knows-them isn’t the lesser option. Sometimes the safest place to say it is to someone who doesn’t know your name.

That’s the door I’m building

The companion I’m building, Sol, is designed around exactly that freedom. Total non-judgment isn’t a marketing line - it’s the mechanism. It’s what lets someone type “I think I have a problem” for the very first time, at 2am, having never said it aloud to a living soul. The 24% who turn to no one aren’t failing at connection. A lot of them have simply weighed the cost of being seen and decided silence is safer. Sol changes that maths - it offers somewhere to speak without the price of being known.

And here’s the part the “AI versus human” framing misses entirely: it was never a versus. The freedom to say it to no one is often what makes it sayable to someone later. Get the fear out of your mouth once, in a place that costs nothing, and the conversation with the GP, the partner, the friend stops feeling unthinkable.

Not a hiding place

There’s a fair objection here, and I’d rather name it than dodge it. If something is that frictionless and that safe, doesn’t it risk becoming a place to hide - the new “no one”, just with better manners?

It would, if I built it to keep people. I’m deliberately not. Sol is grounded in motivational interviewing, which means its instinct isn’t to hold on - it’s to help someone move. Toward a meeting, a counsellor, a GP, a friend, a morning that looks different from the last one. The freedom of the stranger is the way in, not the destination. Success isn’t how long someone stays; it’s whether they walk away more able to face the people in their life, not less.

If you recognised yourself in that 24%

Maybe that statistic landed with a flicker of recognition. If it did, one thing worth saying plainly: coping alone isn’t strength, and the fact that you can’t yet say it to the people closest to you doesn’t mean you can’t say it at all.

Sometimes the easiest place to start is the one where nobody knows you. A stranger. A blank box. Somewhere the words can come out wrong, and frightened, and unfinished, with no one’s face to manage while you find them. That’s not a failure of human connection. For a great many people, it’s the first step back toward it.

One in four people are facing the low moments with no one at all. I don’t think the answer is to lecture them about the value of human connection they already know. I think it’s to give them a door they’ll actually walk through.

David Henzell is the founder of Phenomenal Sobriety and is building Sol, an AI companion for people concerned about their relationship with alcohol.

Source: “The state of the nation’s mental health,” Counselling Directory, 2026. All figures from YouGov Plc; total sample size 2,093 UK adults, fieldwork 6–7 January 2026, weighted to be representative of all UK adults aged 18+.

I was driving back home from a walk the other day, not really thinking about anything in particular, letting some music do the work that music does. Then, out of the blue three words arrived.

My porcelain scream.

They took me clean out of the moment. If I’d been walking they’d have stopped me where I stood.

When I got home I checked the lyrics, the way you do, half-expecting to find the line and underline it. The line isn’t there. I’d misheard it entirely. And somehow that made it better - because it meant the phrase hadn’t been handed to me by a songwriter. It had come up, from somewhere underneath, wearing a borrowed melody. Less a lyric than a calling. It sat with me for the rest of the afternoon, and it’s been sitting with me since.

Here is what it means, as far as I can tell.

You see, porcelain is a thing we prize for being unblemished. We hold it carefully in cupped hands. We admire the smoothness, the glaze, the absence of any crack. A porcelain figure is valued precisely because nothing has happened to it - because the surface tells you, convincingly, that all is well within. That’s the whole point of the object. The surface is the reassurance.

Now imagine the surface is a face. Smooth, composed, coping. And imagine that sealed inside it, inaudible to anyone holding it, is a scream.

That’s the image. That’s the thing I carried, I think, for a long stretch of years.

I won’t lay that period out in detail here. Partly because I don’t want to, and partly because I’ve come to believe that the detail isn’t where the truth of it lives. The truth lives in the gap - the distance between what I presented and what was actually happening a few millimetres beneath. I was, to all appearances, unbroken. To friends. To colleagues. Possibly even to myself.

And that, I’ve slowly understood, was not incidental. It was the fuel.

Because there are situations where your composure doesn’t protect you - it prolongs the thing. If I never visibly cracked, then nothing was wrong, and if nothing was wrong, there was no reason for any of it to stop. The smoothness of the porcelain wasn’t shielding me. It was inviting the next pressure. I held the surface together and offered up, without ever meaning to, the proof that I could take more.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this story where I say what I allowed to happen, and I started to write exactly that and then stopped. I don’t think I allowed it. Allowing requires understanding, and I didn’t have it. I didn’t have the framework, the vocabulary, or the faintest idea that the thing I was doing - keeping the face intact at all costs - even had a name.

It does have a name. I just didn’t learn it until much later, and from a completely different direction.

Earlier this year, at the ripe old age of fifty seven, I was diagnosed as autistic. Late enough that most of my life has already happened by the time I have a lens to view it through. And one of the first concepts you meet, when you start reading about late-diagnosed autism, is masking.

Masking is the conscious and unconscious work of suppressing your real self - your real responses, your real distress, the way your nervous system actually wants to move and react - in order to present something acceptable to the world. You learn it early. You learn it because the unmasked version of you gets punished, or misread, or simply doesn’t land, and the masked version gets through the day. By the time you’re an adult you’ve been doing it so long you’ve forgotten it’s happening. You think it’s just you. You think the smooth surface is your actual face.

I’ve spent the last while learning that it isn’t. That the composure I always thought of as a personality trait - David copes, David’s fine, David puts a brave face on it - was a lifetime’s coping strategy I’d never been able to see from the outside. And when I understood that, something about those years rearranged itself in my mind.

Because the mask I wore back then, and the mask I’d worn my whole life, were not two different things. They were the same muscle. The same trained reflex. I was already, long before, world-class at presenting an unbroken surface over whatever was actually going on. I’d been in training for it since childhood.

This is the cruel hinge of the whole thing, and it’s the part I most wanted to write down. The very skill that had kept me functional - that had let me pass, get through, hold down the job, seem fine - was the skill that kept me trapped. The competence at concealment and the imprisonment were one and the same. My survival mechanism was also the bars.

I suppose for a good while the porcelain held. Then it started to craquelure - those fine cracks that spread across old glaze. The strain of holding the surface had to go somewhere.

It went into my body. The face wouldn’t scream, so the body did. Glandular fever first, then a diagnosis of chronic fatigue. I think now that this is what a porcelain scream sounds like when it finally finds a way out - not a sound at all, but an illness. The nervous system filing the complaint that the face refused to make. There were moments, too, when something cracked sideways - a flash of anger in someone who has never been an angry person, who barely recognises anger as one of his native states. The feeling was real. It just couldn’t get past the glaze, so it came out crooked, against objects, against my own health.

It broke catastrophically in the end.

That breaking was, I can see now, the first step towards everything that came after, and it was only later - much later - that I began to understand what those years had actually cost me. You don’t get the clarity while you’re inside it. The mask doesn’t permit it. Clarity is the thing the mask exists to prevent.

The past still visits me sometimes, in dreams. They’re not gentle. There’s a sense of something to be battled, and the outcome varies - some nights I lose ground, some nights I hold it, and on the nights I hold it I wake with the sense of a small victory won. When I reach back for a happy memory from that time, all I get is a shudder.

I don’t write this to shock anyone, though I’m aware some people will be surprised that I thought it, and more surprised that I’d publish it. I’m fine with that. The willingness to publish it is itself part of what the diagnosis has given me - a permission I didn’t used to have, to let the real thing be visible instead of the smooth thing. To let the surface crack on purpose, in public, and discover that the world holds you anyway.

I’m writing this from the forest at Anielin, just outside Warsaw. My happy place, about as far from any of it as I could arrange to be. The porcelain figure I used to be is still in there somewhere, I expect - that reflex doesn’t fully leave. But I can hear the scream now. That’s the difference. For all those years it was sealed inside a face that wouldn’t admit anything was wrong.

Now it’s just three words I misheard in a song, and a thing I finally know how to say out loud.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing “okayness” for long enough that you forget it’s a performance.

You get so good at reading a room. At sensing what version of yourself will land best in this moment, with this person, in this particular light. You become fluent in other people’s expectations - not through arrogance, but through necessity. When your own internal compass has felt unreliable, you learn to navigate by other people’s faces.

Alcohol helped with all that. Or so it seemed. It smoothed the edges of the performance. It gave you something to hold, something to do with your hands, a reason to stay in the room rather than retreat into your own silence. It made the gap between who you were and who you needed to be feel, briefly, more manageable.

What I didn’t understand for a long time was that I was outsourcing my self-trust. Drink by drink.

I think a lot of people who develop a difficult relationship with alcohol have one thing in common - not a character flaw, not a weakness, not some absence of willpower - but a learned habit of looking outward before looking in.

It usually starts early. You learn to scan before you speak. To study the atmosphere before you take up space. To ask, consciously or not: what version of me is acceptable here? And when you don’t know the answer, when you can’t figure out how to exist correctly in this moment, sometimes you go quiet. You freeze. You disappear a little.

That’s what masking looks like from the inside. Not a lie exactly. More like a constant low-level absence of yourself, a leaving behind that’s so gradual you don’t notice it happening.

Alcohol gave that absence a shape. A social lubricant, we call it - as though the problem was always friction, and the drink was simply helping things flow. But what it was really doing, for me at least, was keeping me from having to learn any other way. It meant I never had to figure out how to be in a room as myself, uncertain and slightly awkward and exactly as I was. I could just reach for something that made the uncertainty quieter.

The trouble is, the uncertainty doesn’t go anywhere. It waits.

There’s a moment in early sobriety - it can come at week two or month six, there’s no reliable schedule - where you realise you’ve been standing at the edge of yourself for years, waiting for permission to come in.

Permission to be uncertain. Permission to not know what to say. Permission to be in the room without first making yourself useful or entertaining or palatable. Permission to be unwell without disappearing.

When alcohol is no longer managing that gap for you, the gap becomes visible. And it is both terrifying and, eventually, clarifying.

Because what you start to see is that the waiting was never necessary. You were always allowed in. You just hadn’t believed that yet.

Self-trust, I’ve come to think, is not the same thing as certainty. That’s a crucial distinction that took me a long time to land on.

Certainty is “I know what to do.” Self-trust is something slower and stranger - it’s more like I will stay in relationship with myself even when I don’t know what to do. It’s the commitment to keep checking in, keep listening, keep treating your own experience as something worth paying attention to rather than immediately handing over.

Drinking interfered with that relationship in a particular way. Not just because it numbed things - though it did - but because it made the numbing feel like safety. It taught me to interpret the quieting of discomfort as the correct outcome, when really I was just learning to override myself more efficiently.

And when you’ve been doing that for long enough, you lose the thread. You stop being able to distinguish what you actually think from what you’ve told yourself to think. What you actually feel from what feels acceptable to feel.

Sobriety, at its best, is the slow work of finding that thread again.

I want to be honest about what that work involves, because it doesn’t look like what I thought it would.

I expected clarity. I expected some version of arriving. Instead, what I got was a much more intimate acquaintance with my own discomfort - with the particular texture of my anxiety, my grief, my uncertainty - without anything to soften the edges. I had to learn to sit with myself in ways I’d been avoiding, sometimes for decades.

There is a kind of grief in that. For the years spent at a slight remove from your own life. For the conversations you half-engaged with, the experiences you took the edge off of before they could fully reach you. For the version of yourself that you kept at arm’s length because you didn’t quite trust them to be enough.

And alongside the grief, something else. A slow, unfamiliar steadiness.

Not the steadiness of certainty - I want to be clear about that, because that kind of certainty is largely fiction. But the steadiness of I have been here before and I came through it. The steadiness of I can feel this and it won’t destroy me. The steadiness, eventually, of noticing that your own response to difficulty is actually worth something.

There’s a question I come back to a lot with people I work with: When did you stop trusting yourself?

Because usually there is a when. Sometimes it’s dramatic - a crisis, a period where your own judgement genuinely failed you, a time when your mind wasn’t a safe place to orient from. Sometimes it’s quieter - a childhood pattern, a relationship, a slow accumulation of moments where looking inward felt dangerous and looking outward felt safer.

The drinking often comes later. A way of managing an already existing gap between yourself and your own experience. Which matters, because it means that simply stopping drinking doesn’t automatically close that gap. You have to go back and learn something you may never have been fully taught - how to inhabit yourself. How to let your uncertainty exist without immediately handing it to someone else. How to let your yes and your no matter.

That work is harder than quitting. And it’s also the part that makes the quitting stick.

I am not offering certainty here. I’m not standing on the other side of something telling you it gets easier in a clean, linear way, because that’s not been my experience and I doubt it’s been yours.

What I can say is this: the pause you’ve been living in - the waiting for confirmation, the waiting for permission, the standing at the edge of your own life waiting to be allowed in - that pause is not your personality. It’s a learned response to feeling unsafe. And responses that were learned can, over time, be unlearned.

Self-trust grows the way most things grow. Slowly. Quietly. Through practice and through failure and through choosing, again and again, to come back to yourself - even when that’s uncomfortable. Especially when it is.

You were always allowed in.

That’s the permission you were waiting for.

You just had to be the one to give it.

I never called a helpline. I never sat in a circle. I never walked through the door of an addiction service.

Not because I didn’t have a problem. I did. I knew I did. But for years, the idea of reaching out for help felt like walking into a room that had been designed for someone else entirely. Someone in more obvious trouble. Someone who had lost more. Someone who had finally hit the kind of rock bottom that makes the decision for you.

I was still functioning. Still working. Still convincing myself - and most of the people around me - that everything was fine. Which meant, by the logic of the system that existed to help me, I didn’t quite qualify.

I am eight years sober now. And I work in this space professionally. So when the Institute of Alcohol Studies published its 2025 report, Barriers to Recovery: Overcoming Obstacles to Alcohol Recovery in the UK, I read it carefully and with genuine respect. It is thorough, well-evidenced, and important. It identifies real barriers - underfunding, stigma, the saturation of alcohol in our culture, the lobbying power of the drinks industry, the absence of a coherent national strategy.

All of it true. But all of it worth fixing.

And yet something nagged at me as I read it. Because the report, like most of the policy conversation around alcohol harm, is largely about improving access to a system. What it doesn’t fully address is the vast population of people who will never approach that system - not because access is too difficult, but because they don’t believe it was built for them.

The 78% Nobody Is Talking About

The IAS report includes a striking figure: only 22% of people who need specialist alcohol support in England are actually accessing it. That means 78% - nearly 472,000 people - are out there without help.

The report frames this, understandably, as a failure of provision. More funding, better services, lower thresholds. All necessary. But I’d argue there’s a prior failure, one that sits upstream of all of those solutions.

Most of those 472,000 people are not standing at the door of a service, unable to get in. They haven’t approached the door at all. They are people who are worried about their drinking, who know on some level that something has to change, but who have never once considered calling a helpline or booking an appointment to talk about it.

Why? Because the very architecture of help-seeking asks something of them they’re not yet ready to give: a label. An admission. A crossing of a threshold that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed.

The person drinking too much on a Tuesday night, alone, telling themselves it’s under control - they are not thinking about treatment pathways. They are thinking about whether anyone has noticed, and whether they’d be believed if they said they needed help.

What “Services Weren’t Built For Me” Actually Means

I want to be precise about this, because it’s easy to misread.

It isn’t about quality. Many addiction services in the UK are staffed by extraordinary people doing genuinely important work - often under impossible conditions, with budgets that have been cut by 27% in real terms since 2013.

It’s about a signal. Every touchpoint in the journey toward help sends a signal about who it’s for. And for a significant portion of people drinking harmfully - professionals, high-functioning individuals, people for whom alcohol is a private management strategy rather than a public crisis - the signal has always been: not quite you.

The signals that kept me at a distance:

• The threshold of severity. Services, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, are oriented toward dependency and crisis. If you’re not there yet, there isn’t much for you.

• The requirement to self-identify. Every pathway begins with an act of naming - “I have a problem with alcohol” - that many people are years away from being ready to make.

• The social register of help. Groups, clinics, referrals. All valuable. All carrying associations - with a particular kind of problem, a particular kind of person - that can feel alienating to someone who doesn’t yet see themselves in that story.

• The absence of privacy. Asking for help, in most of its forms, involves telling someone. A GP. A counsellor. A group. For people whose drinking is hidden - even from themselves - that exposure can feel more frightening than the drinking itself.

None of these are arguments against improving services. They are arguments for recognising that improved services, on their own, will not reach the 78%.

The Gap the Report Doesn’t Quite Name

The IAS report calls for a “no wrong door” approach - the idea that wherever someone enters the system, they can be directed to the right support. It’s a good principle, and I support it.

But it still assumes someone has found a door.

What the policy conversation has been slower to grapple with is what sits before the door. The 2am thought that never becomes a phone call. The moment of clarity on a Sunday morning that dissolves by Monday evening. The person who types something into a search engine and then closes the tab because nothing that comes up feels like it’s for them.

There is a growing body of thinking - and early evidence - around the role that low-barrier digital support can play in this pre-contemplative space. Not as a replacement for clinical services. Not as a solution. But as a first point of contact that doesn’t ask someone to be ready. That meets them where they are, at the hour they’re in it, without requiring them to name themselves as someone with a problem before they’ve arrived at that conclusion themselves.

This category of support is still largely missing from the mainstream policy response to alcohol harm. The IAS report, to its credit, is thorough in cataloguing structural and systemic barriers. But the innovation gap - the question of what reaches people before they’re ready for what we’ve built - is one the sector is only beginning to take seriously.

What Reducing This Barrier Actually Requires

If we’re serious about reaching the hidden majority - the people who are worried but not yet ready - the design requirements look quite different from anything the current system offers.

It needs to be private, in the deepest sense. No digital footprint. No record. No-one finding out.

It needs to be available at the moment the thought surfaces - which is rarely during office hours.

It needs to be non-clinical in register, warm rather than procedural, a conversation rather than an assessment.

It needs to ask nothing of the person in terms of readiness. No commitment required. No label accepted in advance.

And it needs to be capable of holding ambivalence - because the person at this stage isn’t sure they want to change, and any approach that pushes too hard will simply lose them.

That is not a description of a helpline. It is not a description of an app that tracks your units. It is a description of something the sector hasn’t fully built yet, and that policy documents are only beginning to gesture toward.

A Final Thought

Eight years ago, I didn’t reach for the help that existed. Not because I didn’t need it, but because nothing about it told me it was mine to reach for.

The IAS report is a serious and necessary piece of work. It identifies real failures in a system that has been chronically underfunded and politically neglected. The recommendations - more funding, Equality Act reform, minimum unit pricing, a new national strategy - deserve to be taken seriously and acted on.

But I’d invite anyone working in this space to sit with one additional question: what are we building for the people who will never come to us?

Because until we answer it, the 78% stays where it is.

David Henzell is a sobriety coach, founder of the Phenomenal Sobriety Ltd. and an advocate for reaching the people alcohol services don’t currently reach. He has been sober for eight years.

David Morrissey told Lauren Laverne something on Desert Island Discs this week that stopped me mid-scroll.

The actor - one of the most respected performers in British television - spoke openly about his alcoholism, and about how he got sober after 21 years of drinking. Not through a programme. Not through an intervention. Not through a moment of clarity in a treatment centre.

(You can read the full piece in The Guardian.)

He got sober because he’d held onto a phone number for two years. The number of a former colleague he knew was in Alcoholics Anonymous. He kept it. Didn’t use it. Kept it. And then one night - late, or very early, depending on how you look at it - when he was in what he called “a terrible, terrible state,” he called.

The man came round. Sat with him. And that was that.

Two years. He carried that number for two years!

I’ve been building something called Sol for the better part of a year. Sol is an AI companion - a conversational presence designed to support people who are worried about their drinking but aren’t ready to do anything formal about it yet. No programme. No diagnosis. No sitting in a circle.

When people ask me what Sol is for, I used to reach mostly for frameworks. Motivational interviewing. The FRAMES model. Pre-contemplation. I’d talk about the gap in formal services, the hidden majority of people whose drinking is causing them real harm but who would never describe themselves as alcoholic, never walk into a clinic, never pick up the phone to a helpline.

All of that is true. But David’s story is actually the much simpler answer.

Sol is for the two years before the phone call.

Here’s what struck me most about what David said. It wasn’t the drinking itself - it was the reason for it.

“Drinking first was about anxiety. I’ve had this terrible social anxiety and that helped me get through it.”

He wasn’t drinking to celebrate. He wasn’t drinking to be convivial, as he put it. He was on his own in the pub, drinking to manage something internal that he didn’t have another way to manage. Anxiety. The kind that most people around him probably couldn’t see. The kind that, from the outside, just looks like a man having a drink.

This is the thing that gets missed in almost every public conversation about alcohol. We talk about it as a social problem - binge culture, rounds, peer pressure, lad culture - or we talk about it at the acute end: rock bottom, liver disease, losing everything.

But there’s an enormous, quiet middle. People who are drinking more than they want to. Who’ve tried cutting down and found it harder than they expected. Who are using alcohol the way David was using it - as a solution to something else entirely. Anxiety. Grief. The unnamed feeling that you’re not quite enough for your own life.

They’re not ready to say they have a problem. In many cases, they’d push back hard on that framing. But they know something isn’t right. They might have a phone number they’re not ready to call. They might have a browser tab they’ve opened and closed more than once.

That’s who I’m building Sol for.

I want to be honest about why this matters to me personally.

I’m an ex-addict. I’ve worked in advertising. I’ve run a coaching practice. I’ve spent years helping people and organisations tell their stories more effectively. And somewhere in that work, the question I kept coming back to was about the people who don’t come forward.

The ones who are suffering quietly and privately. Who’ve constructed a version of their life that looks fine from the outside. Who are smart enough and self-aware enough to know that something is wrong, but who aren’t at a place where asking for help feels possible. Or safe. Or like something that people like them do.

I think David describes this beautifully without meaning to. He talks about “hyper-independence” as a trauma response - this compulsion to cut the strings, to manage alone, to not need people. He left school at sixteen, struck out on his own, made himself. And then spent years unable to stop drinking, on his own in the pub, in “a terrible state” - and sat on a phone number for two years rather than make the call.

That’s not weakness. That’s a certain kind of person. Capable, self-sufficient, high-functioning in many ways, and privately struggling in a way they’d find very hard to admit.

I know that person. I’ve met them in coaching rooms. I’ve met them at dinner tables. I’ve probably met them in the mirror at various points.

Sol is built around the premise that the first step isn’t always asking for help. Sometimes the first step is just talking to someone who isn’t going to react, or judge, or tell you what you should do. Someone who will sit with you in it - the way his colleague came round and sat with him - without an agenda.

The difference is that Sol is available before the terrible state. Before 3am. Before two years of carrying a number you haven’t called.

David says something else that I find quietly profound. After he got sober, he didn’t stop being an alcoholic. His behaviour stayed self-destructive for a long time. What rescued him, he says, was his career. Work made him feel safe. Not in control - but safe. Like he was where he was supposed to be.

That word - safe - does a lot of work.

People don’t change when they feel cornered, or ashamed, or lectured at. They change - or begin to - when they feel safe enough to look honestly at what’s happening. Safe enough to admit, even just to themselves, that the thing they’ve been using to cope with life is starting to cost more than it gives.

Sol isn’t therapy. It isn’t treatment. It isn’t AA. It’s not trying to be any of those things, and it doesn’t replace them.

What Sol is trying to be is the thing that makes the conversation possible. The presence that meets you where you are, without requiring you to be anywhere else. That asks you questions rather than giving you answers. That takes you seriously without taking over.

In the first few minutes, I want the person talking to Sol to feel like they’ve found a friend. Not a clinician. Not a programme. Not a judgement.

A friend who happens to know a lot about this particular thing. Who’s been waiting for the call.

Sol is in beta right now - a small group of people testing it, helping shape it. We’re not far from a wider release.

If you work in addiction services, public health, or commissioning and you’re curious about what a pre-contemplation digital companion actually looks like in practice, I’d like to talk to you.

And if you recognise the person I’ve been describing in this piece - or you know someone who might - I’ll share more as we get closer to launch.

David carried that number for two years. Sol is trying to be the number you don’t have to wait two years to call.

For nearly nine years I have spoken publicly about recovery. About what it took, what it cost, and what it gave back.

Somewhere along the way, without really noticing, I had stopped being someone who had recovered from alcoholism. I had become Recovery itself. The proof of it. The evidence.

And proof, I was learning, has to be maintained.

This is the article I probably should have written sooner.

Inspired by Lauren Kennedy West

I watched a video last night that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Lauren Kennedy West has schizoaffective disorder. For years she documented her life with it - honestly, rawly, in real time - and then she began following a strict ketogenic diet and something remarkable happened. Her symptoms reduced dramatically. She worked with her psychiatrist, carefully adjusted her medications, and began to speak publicly about what metabolic therapy had done for her mental health. She was brave enough to say out loud what many people didn’t want to hear: that recovery was possible, that it was happening, that she was living evidence of it.

And then, more recently, her brain slipped into a brief psychosis.

She made a video about it. And in it she said something that stopped me in my tracks.

She said that somewhere along the way, without really noticing it happen, she had stopped defining herself by her illness and started defining herself by her wellness. By her stability. By being proof that recovery was possible. And when reality broke through - when the symptoms returned despite everything she had built - it wasn’t just frightening. It was destabilising to her entire sense of self. Because the self she had built was contingent on remaining well.

At the end of the video, quietly, she asked: “Who am I when I’m not proving anything?”

I sort of laughed when I heard that. Not unkindly, of course. I laughed because I recognised something in myself that I hadn’t quite found the words for until that moment.

Let me tell you about a cold evening in Warsaw, early 2018.

I had been sober for around six months. I’d come through two medical detoxes, found my footing through group work and peer support, and slowly, haltingly, begun to rebuild something that felt like a life. I was living in Muranów - a neighbourhood with a weight of history in its streets - and that particular evening I had spent the day exploring the city, returning to my apartment as the temperature dropped and the night went still.

I ran a bath. I opened the bedroom window. And afterwards I dried off and lay down on the bed.

The curtains billowed inward. But there was no wind.

A warmth moved through me - slowly, completely, like something passing through rather than arriving. The room was utterly silent. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it stopped. The curtains fell back into place. And I heard myself say out loud, to no one, to the empty room, to whatever that moment was:

“That was my addiction. It’s just said goodbye. It’s gone now. I’m safe.”

I have never fully known what to make of that moment. Whether it was spiritual, psychological, something else entirely - I’ve turned it over many times and I still don’t have a clean answer. I’ve come to think that maybe I’m not supposed to. What I know is that it felt like a crossing. Like I had moved from one place into another and something had quietly closed behind me.

I was safe. I was recovered. I was free.

That moment became, without my fully realising it, the foundation on which I built everything that came next.

I went on to work as a recovery coordinator, and eventually left the constraints of formal services to do something I felt more passionately about - coaching people through sobriety on my own terms, creating tools and content and conversations that might reach people who would never walk through the door of a traditional service. It felt meaningful. It still does. There is nothing quite like the moment a person realises they are going to be okay.

But somewhere in the building of all of that - the work, the identity, the public voice - something shifted in a way I didn’t truly notice until Lauren named it.

I had stopped being someone who had recovered from alcoholism. I had become Recovery itself. The proof of it. The evidence. And proof, I was learning, has to be maintained.

The gap between who I am in public and who I am in private can feel, on the harder days, like carrying a badly packed rucksack on a long walk. The weight is real but distributed wrong, shifting in ways you can’t always predict or explain. I have my contradictions - we all do, though some of mine sit at an uncomfortable angle to the image that recovery work can project. There are habits I haven’t shed, vulnerabilities I haven’t resolved, aspects of my very human life that exist quietly alongside the coaching and the content and the thought leadership, as they do for every person alive. I manage them, mostly. But managing is not the same as integrating. And integration, I think, is what I had been missing.

I have coached clients through their darkest moments within hours of living through some of my own. Within hours of losing my dog. Within hours of losing my father. I held the space for their pain while mine waited in the corridor outside, patient and familiar. I am honest with my clients - more honest than most, I think - but even my honesty has a structure to it. I share my own difficulties only when I can contextualise them, only after the session is done, only as part of a gentle we’re all the same, really on the way out. I let people in. But I choose the door. And some part of me has always known that choosing the door is not the same as being fully seen.

When clients ask me - and they do, often - “How did you get sober? When did you know you were better?” I have an answer I give. A good one, I think. A useful one. It talks about detox and community and SMART recovery and the slow accumulation of better days.

It doesn’t mention the curtains.

It doesn’t mention the warmth that moved through a silent room, or the words I said out loud to no one, or the sense I had of something departing that had lived in me for years. I’ve never known quite how to offer that moment without it sounding like something other than what it was. And so it stays inside, turned over privately, unshared.

Because that moment is undefended. And undefended is dangerous when your identity is built on being proof.

This is what Lauren’s video broke open for me.

She had attached safety to distance, she said. Distance from symptoms, from medication, from the version of herself who had been most unwell. As if healing meant she would never again be vulnerable to the thing she had healed from. And I understood that completely, because I had done the same thing - not with medication, but with identity. With the careful, gradual construction of a self that was defined by how far it had come from where it started.

The people I work with all carry versions of this weight too. I see it in them. The ones who have been sober for years and still feel vaguely fraudulent. The ones who are terrified that one bad day will erase everything they’ve built. The ones who have quietly started to believe that recovery is a performance with no interval and no understudies, and that if they slip out of character for even a moment the whole thing will unravel.

We don’t talk about this honestly enough. We talk about recovery as a destination - a place you arrive at and then inhabit. We don’t talk as much about what it costs to maintain the arrival. About the way the identity can slowly, imperceptibly, become its own kind of cage.

Lauren ended her video without a neat conclusion. She said she was still in the middle of it. Still injured, still waiting, still sorting through what safety means in a life that is genuinely, stubbornly unresolved.

I want to try to do the same.

I am recovered. I know that to be true in a way that is bone-deep and unshakeable - a cold Warsaw evening told me so, in language I couldn’t argue with. But I am also still human, still contradictory, still carrying things I haven’t fully set down. And those two truths are not in conflict. They are just both true.

I can be a sobriety coach and still have my own unfinished business. I can speak about healing and still be someone who is healing. I can have had a moment that felt like grace - like something holy passing through a still room - and also know that grace is not armour. It doesn’t make you untouchable. It just makes you, perhaps, more honest. More willing to sit with both realities at once. More willing to say: I have come so far, and I am still on the way.

To the people I work with: you are allowed to be this complicated. Recovery was never a single moment, however luminous. It is the long, human, imperfect work of learning to carry both what you’ve been through and who you are now, without letting either one of them be the whole story.

And to Lauren, if she reads this: you asked who you are when you’re not proving anything. I think you’re this - honest, searching, willing to sit in the unresolved middle and speak from it anyway. That’s not a failure of recovery. That’s the most recovered thing I’ve ever seen.

I’m still learning to do it myself.

Lauren Kennedy West documents her journey on YouTube. This piece was written in response to her recent video on psychosis, identity, and the complicated territory of recovery. I’m grateful for her honesty, which gave me permission for mine.