Sober Curious: What Happens When You Quit Drinking with Vanessa Royle

There wasn’t a dramatic rock bottom in Vanessa Royle’s story. In May 2020, she was having a nightly glass of wine, joining Zoom happy hours with coworkers, waking up hungover, and experiencing intense panic attacks. Like so many people during that strange stretch of COVID, the days had started to feel like Groundhog Day. She wanted to understand what was happening in her body.

Vanessa decided to experiment. She cut out alcohol, caffeine, and sugar for two weeks just to see how she felt. Sugar came back quickly because she loves dessert, and coffee returned because she loves that too. Alcohol didn’t.

Six years later, Vanessa still doesn’t drink. What started as an attempt to understand her panic attacks eventually changed the way she thought about anxiety, relationships, socializing, motherhood, and the commitments she makes to herself. It also became part of the story behind Tilden, the non-alcoholic cocktail company she later co-founded.

That’s what made us want to have this “sober curious” conversation with Vanessa. Her story isn’t about alcohol destroying her life or one terrible event forcing her to quit. It’s about noticing something that had always felt normal and getting curious about whether it was actually making her life better.

Vanessa is the co-founder of Tilden, a premium non-alcoholic cocktail company she created to bring more sophisticated, intentional options to social drinking. Before moving into the beverage and wellness space, she spent years working with high-growth technology companies, including leading early communications for Cloudflare through its 2019 IPO. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a dual degree from UC Berkeley, and she now lives in Santa Barbara with her husband and young son.

When Drinking Felt Completely Normal

Before 2020, Vanessa describes herself as a fairly heavy social drinker. She was in a sorority in college, and drinking was simply woven into what she and her friends did. They pregamed, went to parties, played drinking games, mixed alcohols, and woke up hungover on Saturday mornings. None of that seemed especially remarkable because everyone around her was doing it too.

Vanessa remembers a therapist once telling her that some of what she described qualified as binge-drinking behavior. At the time, that assessment didn’t really land. From Vanessa’s perspective, she was describing a completely ordinary college experience. She had plenty of people around her whose drinking looked the same.

That part of her story felt familiar to both of us, though our individual experiences with alcohol have been different. Jenna remembered a period in her marriage when she regularly drank a glass or two of wine at night. When her then-husband commented on how much she was drinking, she immediately felt defensive. Nothing about it seemed unusual to her at the time.

Paige and her husband also found themselves drinking more during COVID while they were living in Washington with their kids. They were stuck inside through rainy days and the strange isolation of that year. After they moved to Arizona, they realized almost two months had passed without either of them drinking. They hadn’t intentionally quit. Their environment and routines had changed, and drinking simply stopped playing the same role.

For Vanessa, COVID created a similar interruption. Stepping away from her normal social life gave her enough distance to notice how alcohol actually made her feel. She didn’t like feeling out of control and she hated the anxiety that followed. She could see how often alcohol had contributed to arguments with her then-boyfriend, now husband. Once she removed it, she told us, her life became “so much simpler and easier.”

Questioning Alcohol Without a Rock Bottom

Several years before Vanessa stopped drinking, she and a friend went to an AA meeting after a weekend when they had both blacked out. They were asking themselves a question that felt much harder to answer than they expected: did they have a problem?

Vanessa has a lot of respect for the people AA has helped, but the particular meeting they attended didn’t reflect their experience. They heard women share devastating stories about the consequences alcohol had created in their lives. Vanessa and her friend listened and came away thinking, Well, that’s not us. They still had jobs and their lives still functioned. They weren’t facing the kinds of consequences they had just heard about.

That comparison made it easier for Vanessa to dismiss her own discomfort. If someone else’s relationship with alcohol looked much worse, hers could still seem fine. She didn’t need to love the anxiety, blackouts, or hangovers to tell herself that none of it qualified as a real problem.

Years later at Harvard Business School, Vanessa found a different kind of support. She joined a virtual group for students across different programs who were struggling with various dependencies: alcohol, marijuana, gaming, and other behaviors they wanted to examine. What she appreciated was the absence of a requirement that something terrible had to happen first. People could simply acknowledge that something wasn’t working for them and talk about it.

Through that experience, and later through meeting Tilden customers, Vanessa began to see just how broad the spectrum around alcohol really is. She has met people who experienced enormous consequences from drinking. Others simply noticed they sleep better without it, don’t like the taste, don’t want the sugar, or no longer enjoy how it makes them feel. Her own experience showed her that questioning alcohol didn’t require her story to look like anyone else’s.

Starting Over as Someone Who Didn’t Drink

The timing of Vanessa’s decision gave her an unusual opportunity. She stopped drinking in May 2020, then drove across the country to Boston in August to begin business school. Instead of changing her identity within an established social circle, she met an entirely new group of people who had never known her as a drinker.

COVID also changed what that first year looked like. Students started virtually, underwent frequent testing, and socialized in much smaller groups than they would have during a typical year at Harvard Business School.

She leaned into smaller dinners and gatherings, and those settings gave her room to talk openly about not drinking. The more she mentioned it, the more other people shared their own stories. Some were allergic to alcohol, training for a marathon, trying to cut back, or simply not interested in drinking anymore. Vanessa began to realize there were far more people living somewhere along that spectrum than she had noticed before.

She suspects there were also events she didn’t get invited to because people no longer saw her as a partier. Over time, she stopped seeing that as a loss. If the main purpose of an event was getting drunk and she didn’t want to do that anymore, she probably wasn’t missing out.

Her social life began to shift toward things she genuinely enjoyed. Things like small trips with girlfriends, puzzles, apple picking, dinners, and time together that didn’t need drinking to become the activity. Business school itself felt different too. Without hangovers, Vanessa could focus, commit to Saturday morning plans, and take advantage of experiences she might previously have spent recovering from the night before.

Realizing That Drinking Had Become the Activity

One of the most revealing parts of our conversation came when Vanessa described what she actually missed after she stopped drinking. Sometimes she missed a glass of wine during a board game night with girlfriends. Other times she would find herself at an all-day sports event wishing she could have a few beers.

Eventually, she recognized something underneath those cravings: alcohol had helped her pass the time. At a long party or event, drinking gave her something to do and made the hours move differently. Looking back, she realized she had often used alcohol to “speed up time.”

That realization forced her to get more honest about boredom. In college, drinking itself had often been the activity, whether that meant beer pong or another drinking game. As an adult, the setting looked different. Nonetheless, she could still find herself standing at a party wondering what everyone was supposed to do besides keep drinking.

Without alcohol filling that space, Vanessa started noticing which environments she actually enjoyed. If she needed to drink to make four hours at a party interesting, maybe the party simply wasn’t for her. That didn’t mean she stopped wanting alcohol altogether, especially in those early years. However, it did help her understand what she was really craving in certain moments.

What Changed When the Anxiety Cleared

When Vanessa did want a drink, she reminded herself why she had stopped. She would write down the positive changes she had experienced. What could happen if one glass became two or three? She knew one drink wouldn’t automatically lead to the worst possible outcome. However, she also knew what alcohol had historically brought into her life, and for her, the tradeoff stopped feeling worthwhile.

The biggest difference was anxiety. Before she stopped drinking, Vanessa sometimes woke up with what she described as a kind of existential dread. She knew alcohol had caused it, but knowing the source didn’t make the heavy feeling disappear.

Without alcohol in the equation, Vanessa felt more able to understand what her body was telling her. If she felt anxious, she could ask whether she had slept badly, needed water, felt overwhelmed, or had something else going on. Removing alcohol didn’t remove anxiety from her life, but it took away one major source of confusion around it.

That clarity extended into her relationship too. Vanessa noticed that the fights she had previously had with her husband largely disappeared when she stopped drinking. Looking back across six years, those changes became part of the evidence she returned to whenever she wondered whether she wanted alcohol back in her life.

When Not Drinking Makes Other People Uncomfortable

Jenna has also experienced periods when she decided not to drink. There were “dry Januarys” and other stretches when alcohol simply didn’t appeal to her. She remembers people responding with questions like, “Just have one,” or asking whether she was pregnant. Nobody necessarily meant anything harmful by it. Even so, those moments revealed how noticeable it can become when one person opts out of something everyone else considers normal.

Vanessa understands that reaction partly because she remembers having it herself. In college, there were women in her sorority who didn’t drink, and Vanessa thought their choice was strange. Drinking felt fun and normal to her, so she couldn’t understand why someone would voluntarily sit it out.

After she stopped drinking, she began interpreting those questions differently. She noticed that another person’s choice can sometimes make us reflect on our own. This is especially true around something as socially normalized as alcohol. Vanessa also understands why a group planning to get drunk might feel differently with a completely sober person in the room. When everyone is participating in the same kind of night, there’s an unspoken comfort in knowing everyone is on roughly the same level.

Six years later, Vanessa doesn’t feel much need to explain herself. She usually keeps it simple: “I don’t drink.”

Why “Sober Curious” Leaves Room for More Stories

The phrase sober curious leaves room for people whose relationship with alcohol doesn’t fit neatly into one category. Vanessa has a more complicated relationship with the word sober itself. Although she technically is sober, she has found that the word can carry assumptions about addiction.

Sometimes when Vanessa describes herself as sober, people assume they shouldn’t drink in front of her. That isn’t her experience. She can comfortably sit with someone who has a glass of wine, though others may have very different boundaries or triggers.

For Vanessa, saying “I don’t drink” feels simpler. She thinks of sober curious people as those who might experiment with periods without alcohol. Curiosity creates room to notice what alcohol is doing in our lives without requiring a permanent label or dramatic declaration.

Drinking now seems to exist on a much wider spectrum than the simple categories of “drinker” and “sober.” Vanessa meets people who never drink, people who stopped completely, people who participate in “dry January,” and people who alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks during the same night. Her work with Tilden has given her a front-row seat to just how much that culture has changed.

How a Wine-Tasting Trip Eventually Became Tilden

On Vanessa’s drive to Boston for business school, she stopped in Colorado and went wine tasting with her sister. Her sister had beautiful glasses of wine while Vanessa sat with a canned sparkling water. She remembers looking at the experience and thinking, This kind of sucks.

Vanessa mentioned to her husband that she wished there were a good non-alcoholic wine option. He pointed out the obvious problem: she came from the technology world and knew nothing about making beverages. At that point, it was little more than an idea.

A few months later, Harvard Business School offered a startup bootcamp during the January holiday. Vanessa had nowhere to go because of COVID, so she signed up and pitched her non-alcoholic drink idea on Slack. A classmate with an operations background joined her Zoom call, other students with finance and marketing experience joined the team, and what had started as a casual idea began turning into a real project.

Vanessa and her future co-founder continued working on the business through a summer fellowship, then raised money after graduation. Eventually, the idea became Tilden, a premium non-alcoholic cocktail company built around original recipes rather than alcohol-free versions of familiar cocktails.

Vanessa wanted something that could hold its own beside a beautiful glass of wine or an aged scotch at a dinner or networking event. She had grown tired of being handed a Sprite while everyone around her received drinks that felt intentional and adult. She also didn’t want the overly sweet mocktails she kept encountering, so Tilden developed lower-sugar drinks with more complex flavor profiles, including cucumber, basil, and lychee in one and orange, tart cherry, and ginger in another.

Watching Drinking Culture Change in Real Time

Building Tilden gave Vanessa a front-row seat to the cultural shift around alcohol. When she and her co-founder first pitched investors, they often encountered skepticism about whether enough people wanted non-alcoholic drinks. Vanessa would share data about how many Americans didn’t drink, only to hear investors respond that everyone they knew drank.

She saw the same resistance during early product demos. Vanessa remembers standing in Montecito Village Grocery in Santa Barbara and meeting shoppers who couldn’t understand why anyone would want a non-alcoholic cocktail. To them, removing alcohol removed the entire point.

A couple of years later, the conversations sounded different. People who once might have dismissed the category started telling Vanessa they had cut back themselves or knew a daughter, friend, or partner who didn’t drink. Even people who continued drinking had become more open to ordering something non-alcoholic.

Vanessa initially assumed younger people would drive most of that shift, but her experience with Tilden challenged that idea. She began meeting people across generations who had different reasons for drinking less. Some wanted to sleep better or stay active as they aged. Some had children and no longer wanted to parent through a hangover. Others simply realized alcohol wasn’t adding much to their lives anymore.

Keeping the Ritual Without the Alcohol

As we talked about Tilden and the growing number of non-alcoholic options, we kept coming back to something bigger than the drink itself: the ritual. “Let’s get a drink” often means something closer to I want to spend time with you. Having something special in your hand can make dinner, a date, happy hour, or an evening at home feel different, even when alcohol has nothing to do with it.

That distinction matters to Vanessa because she genuinely loves beverages. She likes coffee, tea, lemonade, water, Tilden, and the experience of having something to sip. She didn’t want to give up that part of social life just because she no longer wanted the alcohol.

Jenna has noticed a similar shift in her own life. She never made a permanent decision to stop drinking, but her preferences changed as her lifestyle changed. Going to a bar became less appealing when she realized she wanted to wake up in the morning, go for a run, or take a walk with a friend instead.

Paige has found that sometimes even sparkling water gives her the experience she thought she wanted from a beer. None of us arrived at exactly the same relationship with alcohol, and that was part of what we appreciated about this conversation. Vanessa’s story gave us space to talk about what each of us has noticed without turning one person’s choice into a rule for everyone else.

Sobriety, Motherhood, and Being Present

Vanessa had already stopped drinking by the time she became a mother, so she doesn’t have a version of motherhood with alcohol to compare it to. Her son is two, active, and hasn’t always been a great sleeper. She and her husband have talked many times about how grateful they are that she doesn’t drink and that he drinks very little when parenting can mean waking up at the crack of dawn after a difficult night.

For Vanessa, the bigger difference comes down to emotional regulation. She has noticed that her son picks up on her emotional state, especially when she feels anxious or overwhelmed. Parenting while underslept already stretches her, and she believes adding alcohol to that equation would make it harder for her to regulate herself in the way she wants to.

Motherhood has also made Vanessa more aware of what Paige called “mommy wine culture,” where alcohol can become shorthand for surviving the stress of raising children. Vanessa understands the desire to take the edge off. At the same time, her own experience has shown her that alcohol would make parenting harder rather than easier for her.

She also doesn’t pretend that removing alcohol removed every coping mechanism from her life. Vanessa laughed about drinking a lot of Diet Coke and spending more time on her phone than she would like. Her experience with sobriety hasn’t been about becoming perfect; it has been about recognizing one thing that wasn’t working for her and noticing what happened when she removed it.

The Commitment Vanessa Made to Herself

Near the end of our conversation, we asked Vanessa what six years without alcohol had taught her. She talked about confidence, but not in the way we expected. She felt proud that she had made a difficult commitment to herself and continued honoring it.

Vanessa didn’t arrive at that commitment easily. She had questioned her drinking years earlier. She has gone back and forth internally, and experienced moments after quitting when she badly wanted a glass of wine. Continuing anyway showed her that she could trust herself to follow through on something that mattered to her, even when the culture around her often made drinking the easier choice.

Over time, she also learned how to communicate those choices more clearly. Instead of only telling her husband or family that she wasn’t drinking, she became better at explaining why she didn’t want to drink. For Vanessa, that ability to understand and articulate her own experience became another form of confidence.

We started this conversation talking about alcohol, but by the end, it felt like we were talking about something broader. What can happen when we get curious about something we’ve always accepted as normal? For Vanessa, that curiosity began with panic attacks and a two-week experiment in May 2020. Six years later, she can look back and see a different relationship, a different social life, motherhood without hangovers, a company she never expected to start, and a deeper sense that she can trust the commitments she makes to herself.

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Connect with Vanessa and Tilden:
Tilden | LinkedIn