Hello Sunday Morning Success of blog site to encourage sobriety

What started with a 22 year old waking up with a hangover has now developed into an Australian self-help initiative to encourage sobriety and to challenge cultural assumptions about alcohol, with thousands of supporters. The initiative has been so successful it is now going international.

In 2008 Chris Raine, a 22 year old from Brisbane, woke up after a night of heavy drinking and read that Australia’s national binge drinking culture - a culture that he was very much a part of - cost the country over A$15 billion and was responsible for the death of over 260 young Australians, each year.

He felt strongly that existing government communication (fear-based advertising campaigns) designed to tackle youth binge drinking was widely missing the mark. It seemed neither relevant nor meaningful to his life and motivations and, he was sure, to the majority of other young Australians.

He decided that this was important enough to him to try to think of a better solution. Chris spent 2009 researching and understanding binge-drinking culture in young Australians. Central to this process, Chris took the decision on 31 December 2008 to give up alcohol for the entirety of 2009. He felt this would be the best way to experience fully what it would personally take for a young Australian to limit, control and be genuinely non-reliant on alcohol in their life, emotionally, socially and psychologically.

Throughout the year, he candidly chronicled his journey through a blog, ‘Hello Sunday Morning’ (www.hellosundaymorning.com) attracting a following of over 1000 people. Over the year it evolved to represent a community of bloggers aged from 18 to 30, from all over Australia who have committed to an extended period of sobriety (3/6/12 months) in order to give them the space and motivation to honestly explore their relationship with alcohol through a period facing life’s challenges, and celebrations, without alcohol. The ‘participants’ of HSM are self-selecting and voluntarily participate in the program. Since its inception on 1 January 2009 the blog has grown from one blogger to 4600 bloggers or ‘HSMers’ worldwide and over 180 in the UK.

The programme
HSM does not operate a clinical service and the HSM programme is not consistent with traditional brief-intervention or population health campaigns. HSM takes a networked approach to health promotion. Rather than create and disseminate messages to an audience, HSM constructs a communication network across blogging and social networking platforms. That network of participants communicate with each other as they attempt to change their own drinking behaviours and broader cultural attitudes to alcohol. The blogging community is a highly connected community of individuals who discuss the process of challenging individual behaviours and cultural practices of alcohol consumption. These community connections are evident in the activity on the website with - on average – five new blogs posted each day, several with very active comment threads attached to them. Often, blogs take on a very personal narrative and focus on the specific life events of the ‘HSMer’ .

Evaluation of the HSM project has found that students undertaking the three month challenge have a significant influence on the drinking choices of their friends. This stage of the project allows this influence to impact a wider group through the use of social media.

The evaluation report presents a picture of HSMers’ motivations and achievements:

1. Key themes in HSM blogs Participants blog about their drinking practices and culture and their attempts to change their individual behaviours and influence their peers. Participants used the blogs to offer strategies and ideas for changing drinking behaviours and cultures. The blog analysis demonstrated how participants change over time from describing drinking behaviours to reflecting on their life, culture and attempts to change.

2. Motivators for commencing HSM Participants are motivated to participate in HSM by dissatisfaction with their current life circumstances, the desire to change, the idea of a personal challenge, or the need to intervene in problematic drinking behaviours.

3. Key goals in HSM blogs and how successful people were in achieving their goals Participants’ goals include an aim to improve their health (70.5%), improve their well-being (51.9%), change their individual drinking behaviours (26.9%), learn to socialize without needing alcohol (23.6%) and to save money (23.3%).

4. Challenges in completing the HSM process and abstaining from alcohol Participants indicated that social pressure, the length of commitment, and confronting aspects of personal and mental health that were previously masked by alcohol consumption were challenging parts of the program.

5. Consequences or implications of being in HSM for participants (if any) and consequences/implications of the research more broadly Analysis of the HSM blogs indicates that participants change their individual relationship with alcohol and their perceptions of drinking culture across the course of their HSM experience. The blogs offer a real-time and continuous commentary on the experiences and progress of participants. Information can be obtained from www.hellosundaymorning.com