Millennials discover the joys of ‘mindful drinking’ as party season gets under way

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It’s 6.30pm on a Friday evening and Spitalfields market in east London is filled with people of all ages, drinking, dancing and laughing. There’s the typical end-of-the-week “let your hair down and relax” feeling in the air. Only one of the usual ingredients to a weekend night is missing: alcohol.

This is Club Soda’s second mindful drinking festival (the first was in Bermondsey in the summer).

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“The number of people either giving up alcohol or reducing their intake is definitely growing,” says Laura Willoughby, who co-founded Club Soda with Jussi Tolvi in 2015. “Yes, it’s partially that younger people don’t drink as much, but it’s also a case of older people cutting down. There’s definitely a sense that people are thinking, I can eat as much kale as I like, but it’s no good if I’m drinking five glasses of wine before bed. The idea behind mindful drinking is that you treat drinking as a special occasion and think about why you drink and how much. You don’t simply slug something down mindlessly in front of the TV.”

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“There is definitely a generational aspect to the change – millennials certainly don’t drink as much as we did when we were younger,” says Rosamund Dean, author of Mindful Drinking: How Cutting Down Can Change Your Life, due out at the end of December.

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