Anne Hathaway stopped drinking because her last hangover lasted five days. The wellness industry saw an opportunity. Enter: the sober curious spa weekend.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 star, Anne Hathaway, stopped drinking in 2018. She didn’t put it down because her drinking was a problem — yet, she told Tatler in 2019, “My issue is I just love it. So. Much. But the way I do it makes me unavailable for my son. My last hangover lasted for five days. I’d earned it: it was a day drinking session with friends that went into an evening birthday party with one of my drinking buddies. I will never be that person who can nurse a glass of wine throughout an entire evening.” The decision, she said, has been a good one. Everything is better.
The distinction she was drawing — between sobriety as recovery and sobriety as preference — is the one the wellness industry has been working around for the better part of a decade, with increasing sophistication. The word for it is “sober curious,” coined by the author and journalist Ruby Warrington in her 2018 book of the same name — Time called the movement it seeded a genuine cultural shift rather than a Dry January stunt — and it describes something more ordinary and more quietly held than the terminology suggests: a growing number of people who drink, or who used to drink, who have started to ask whether the alcohol is actually adding anything. According to a Gallup survey published last August, 54 percent of American adults now say they drink — the lowest figure in the pollster’s nearly 90-year record. For the first time, a majority of Americans said that moderate drinking, meaning one or two drinks a day, is bad for health.
The science helps explain why. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis found that even a low dose of alcohol — approximately two standard drinks — delays REM sleep onset by nearly 18 minutes and reduces REM sleep duration measurably, with effects worsening at higher doses. Alcohol also elevates cortisol and suppresses heart rate variability, two markers that wellness programming spends the rest of the week trying to improve. The guest who arrives for four nights of breathwork and massage and has wine with dinner is, by the data, working against roughly a third of what she came for.
What a dry property actually delivers
At The Ranch Malibu, a six-to-eight-night stay on a private estate above the Pacific operates on a schedule that is structurally incompatible with hangovers: pre-dawn hikes through the Santa Monica Mountains, daily massage, plant-forward meals calibrated for recovery, and evening discussions on nutrition, sleep, and the body’s response to stress. The property holds twenty-one cottages and a maximum of twenty-five guests at a time, runs fifty-two weeks per year, and serves no alcohol, and limits caffeine and sugar for the duration of the stay. The policy is presented not as asceticism but as logic — the argument being that the nervous system cannot genuinely reset in an environment that keeps stimulating it, and that the point of coming is for the nervous system to genuinely reset.
Canyon Ranch, across its properties, maintains a similar standard. Miraval takes a different approach that may suit a different type of guest: alcohol is available, but the zero-proof cocktail menu is serious, the programming builds in workshops on drinking as a behavioral pattern — not in the framework of addiction but in the framework of what is and isn’t working — and the assumption running through the schedule is that guests are present to examine their habits rather than continue them. The sober curious property, in Miraval’s formulation, is one that holds space for the question without requiring an answer.
What these destinations provide is something the home environment rarely can: consecutive days in which not drinking is the default rather than the exception. No one is ordering a bottle at dinner. The mocktail on the menu is not a consolation; it is simply what is there. The social friction — which operates on most people more powerfully than they tend to acknowledge — has been removed by design, replaced by an environment in which the choice has already been made collectively, in advance, by everyone in the room.
Hathaway’s description of her own shift was less about willpower and more about subtraction — removing the variable and observing what changed. “If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it,” she said. “So I stopped arguing with it. Everything is better.”
What the best sober curious properties understand is that this is what their guests are actually after, whether they say so directly or not: not management or treatment, but three or maybe seven uninterrupted days to find out what remains once the alcohol is no longer in the room. “It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves,” Hathaway says. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks — but without the hangover.”
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