Hi I am so glad you are here. I'm Kate Baily and this is Love Sober, a Community Interest Company with community, courses, my books,  coaching and info to  helps women love their lives sober. It began as my blog back in 2016 and grew in stature when I met Mandy Manners and we started a podcast together. You can listen to over 200 episodes we recorded on Apple music or Spotify.  Please feel free to look around the site, join the membership community or sign up for a courses or coaching.  All my written content and any new recordings or interviews now live on Substack, w ..read more

Funny, as wrote that title the words jarred with me. Sober still has the connotations of being staid and boring, serious and restrained. My experience of sobriety has been anything but. The first year of the sheer rollercoaster of white knuckling, the blowing wide-open fierce North Wind of hope which took my breath away, the intense friendships of others I was meeting online, in this secret club called Soberistas. I felt like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up a mountain and at other times I was flying on a carpet, other times I was crying and doing labour breathing in my garage before Xmas as ..read more

One barrier people have to getting sober/staying sober is upcoming holidays and special occasions – that wedding, that trip away – ‘I will start after the bank holiday, bank holidays are too hard.’ The reality is that there will always be high days and holidays. There will always be birthdays, parties, Christmases and bank holidays to navigate. Rather than seeing them as a barrier to getting started on your sober life, get yourself and your toolkit equipped and set your intention. You can manage these events and come out stronger, prouder, and more determined than ever to stay and love being s ..read more

Last night I spent my Friday night at my home from home, the beautiful Be Yoga, owned and run by two dear friends Bryony and Silas. As I approached the door, lit up with fairy lights, anticipating the scent of aromatherapy and the pit pat of Clover’s (B and S’s dog) waggy welcome, I felt rich. I thought about Friday nights - what they used to mean, the welcome mat to inevitable hangovers, then how I used to struggle in early sobriety to work against that socially-bound muscle power of the end of week ritual. And I LOVE rituals. Now I love Fridays again and I am usually to be found watching a ..read more

And .. Breeeathe....I know I am starting to feel the overwhelm, despite this being my 9th sober Christmas. Each year I try to dial things down as much as possible but it still creeps up! Remember the power mantra : I AM SOBER AND THE REST IS GOOD ENOUGH! Something that has helped my this year is carving out little moments of stillness and setting an intention of what is important to me this Christmas. The festive season can be a complex time of year. We welcome our joyful and meaningful traditions, but our spirits may wilt under the bombardment of advertisements, competing invitations and soci ..read more

Winter is often a super social season – this may go against our natural rhythms but it has become important in connecting with others and as a way of cheering the spirits in colder months. In the summer we looked at other areas of socializing – our micro-connections, our summer burnout, and JOMO. In winter, we are focusing on going out-out, because Sober Cinderella can go to the ball if she wants to. Reclaiming this fairy story as a sober metaphor is going to help us get our sparkle and glam on, and having sobriety as your fairy goddess mother means you will never turn into the drun ..read more

Have you heard of Sobriety Fatigue? It's that MEH feeling you get sometimes when the sober mojo starts to fade and before you know it your mind is racing forward to Christmas or a party or holiday and you suddenly feel like you are missing out, you are obviously making too much of this sobriety thing, it would be fine to chill out with a glass of wine, or have a night off, after all you have proved you can do it, right?  This is the Wine Witch or the 'Addictive Voice' and it is literally old, learnt behaviours, habits and neural pathways activated at times of stress, imbalance or if we ha ..read more

I have been thinking about cycles and nature and working intentionally with them since writing Love Your Sober Year. An important foundation of my recovery has been to put all of my ideas through the sober filter. I use and adapt the things, resources, ideas and tools that give me and have given me inspiration over the years and apply them to the sober journey. So tonight is a full Hunter’s Moon in the Northern Hemisphere. So what.? What’s this got to do with sobriety? Firstly using symbols and myths uses the creative more emotional side of the brain which is proven to be powerful in habit cha ..read more

‘Sanity is a cosy life.’ SUSAN SONTAG Hygge, or the Danish art of happiness, hit the mainstream in 2018. Spoken aloud, this little word that sounds a bit like a hug – ‘hue-ga’ – means ‘a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or wellbeing,’ and is regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture. According to Hyggehouse.com, another definition of hygge is, ‘an art of creating intimacy’, either with yourself, friends or your home. While there’s no one English word or simple definition to describe hygge, several can be used interchangeably ..read more

‘Alcohol helps me relax’, ‘People will think I’m boring’, ‘Drinking is sophisticated’, ‘It’s what adults do’, ‘But what will I do at Christmas?’, ‘People will assume I have a problem.’ . . . Do any of these beliefs sound familiar to you? We have great news for you – an alcohol-free life is the best kept secret! But first we need to do some myth-busting . . . Because alcohol is what we call ‘socially normative’ we have all kinds of unconscious beliefs about how normal it is to drink and how abnormal it is not to. These drivers governing our habits and behaviour are our unconscious beliefs, whic ..read more