Tom Holland is opening up about his journey to getting sober.
In a new interview on Jay Shetty’s podcast, the 27-year-old actor shared more details on his path to sobriety.
A few months ago, Tom revealed that he was going on one year of being sober.
Now, in the interview with Jay, Tom candidly stated that he never realized that he had an alcohol problem until he could not stop thinking about drinking. He revealed:
“I didn’t one day wake up and say I’m giving up drinking.
[I, like] many Brits had had a very, very boozy December, Christmas time I was on vacation, I was drinking a lot, and I’ve always been able to drink a lot… I decided to just give up for January.”
When he fully committed to a dry January, that’s when Tom realized that he had a dependence on drinking that he was not previously ware of:
“All I could think about was having a drink. That’s all I could think about. I was waking up thinking about it. I was checking the clock, when’s at 12pm? And it just really scared me. I just was like, wow. Maybe. Maybe I have a little bit of an alcohol thing.
So I sort of decided to punish myself and say, I’ll do February as well. I’ll do two months off.”
He then made the decision to extend his experiment further:
“If I can do two months off, then I can prove to myself that I don’t have a problem. Two months go by and I was still really struggling. I felt like I couldn’t be social… I felt like I couldn’t go to the pub and have a lime soda. I couldn’t go out for dinner. I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem.”
Tom reached six months of being alcohol-free, and he was a bit stunner to realize he was “the happiest I would ever been in my life. I could sleep better. I could handle problems better, things that would go wrong on set, that would normally set me off, I could take in stride. I had so much, such better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter.”
And that feeling, that realization, made him question what he was “so obsessed by the idea of having this drink?”
