Step Away from an alcohol problem.

Make a positive change.


What is Step Away?

Step Away is a smartphone-based system that helps people make a healthy change in their drinking.  It is a stand-alone, interactive app that will give you the tools, tracking and immediate help to succeed in what can be, for many, a very difficult task.

It will help you gain awareness of your specific type of drinking problem, learn new skills and strategies for managing drinking-related problems and importantly, to set a goal and continually monitor your progress.  Step Away helps users change drinking habits privately and effectively.

The features provided in Step Away stem from decades of research on effective interventions for reducing or stopping drinking.  Step Away has been the focus of numerous research grants from the U.S. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the VA Health Science Research and Development Service and the New Zealand Health Research Council.  These projects have  indicated that Step Away users drinking dropped from between 50 and 60% and that they found it,  on average, to be “very to extremely helpful” in changing drinking.  Step Away has been in a continual process of improvement with input from users and psychologists from around the world and now you can benefit from this background work as it is now available for public use.

Step Away will help you to:
  • Understand if you have a drinking problem and how severe it is.
  • Become aware of your specific drinking patterns and triggers.
  • Set an overall drinking goal, either to drink less or to stop altogether.
  • Learn new and helpful strategies for dealing with urges to drink.
  • Keep you on track with regular check-ins (daily or less often).
  • Give you a weekly report on your progress that you can share if you want.
  • Stay on track during your personally defined high-risk times for drinking.
  • Identify alternate (non-drinking) activities and schedule them directly into your phone.
  • Stay accountable to your goal, it will keep you on target.

 

Why use Step Away?
Step Away offers a way to make a healthy change to your drinking privately and independently. You won’t need to travel to a meeting with a group or a counsellor nor will you need to get over the somewhat difficult barrier of telling people that your drinking is out of control. Also, compared to traditional treatment, Step Away is very inexpensive. You can use Step Away for free for one week to see if it works for you and then if it does, you can set up a monthly subscription that you can cancel anytime. If you were to use Step Away for one year, it would cost less than one session with a counselor.
Step Away will essentially be your personal assistant as you go through the process of changing your drinking. It will provide the structure you need to stop drinking altogether or reduce to a safer level. You can also customize Step Away to meet your specific needs. Some people will want to check in every day, others once per week. Some will need help staying focused on Friday nights, others after their workday ends. Some people will want to set up a “support team”, others will want to use Step Away by themselves. All of these features and many more are customizable within Step Away.