Sinclair Method coaching and clinical support in IrelandStop fighting alcohol. Start rethinking it.

Rethink Drink is a coaching programme for people changing their relationship with alcohol, using The Sinclair Method (TSM). We work with people in Ireland and the UK. We focus on the behavioural and habitual side of change; prescribing doctors make every medical decision, and in Ireland your own local pharmacy dispenses.

It’s designed for people who want to change how they drink and are looking for a different approach from the ones they’ve been offered before.

It meets you where you are. You don’t have to pick up the phone, and we won’t ask you to change everything overnight.

• Start in your own time. Our free mini-course explains The Sinclair Method from the beginning, privately, at your own pace.
• If it feels right, on sign-up you complete a medical questionnaire and then have a private online consultation with a doctor who fully understands The Sinclair Method protocol. If medication is suitable, the prescription is sent to your own local pharmacy.
• Then the coaching starts, built around your real life, not a week away in a clinic.

Prefer to talk it through first? You can book a call whenever you’re ready.

The Sinclair Method is half the deal. The other half is you: your routines, your triggers, your Friday nights, and the story you tell yourself after a bad week.

That’s what our coaching works on. You get 1-2-1 coaching, group coaching calls and a private community of people doing the same thing, led by expert coaches, including coaches who have lived it themselves. The community is on your phone too, through our dedicated app, so support is there between calls. Nobody is expecting a perfect week. It’s about progress, not perfection.

The Sinclair Method, often shortened to TSM, is an approach to changing your relationship with drinking, in which a prescription medicine is taken before drinking. This reduces the rewarding effects alcohol can produce. Over time, the brain can change its relationship with alcohol.

Rather than removing alcohol from the equation, The Sinclair Method keeps the choice to drink in place and uses the process to change your relationship with it. It’s named after Dr John David Sinclair, the researcher who developed it.

There’s no single success rate. The figure you’ll often see is 78%. It comes from Dr Sinclair’s own clinics in Finland in the 1990s, and it counts only the people who stayed in treatment long enough to be assessed, so it can’t tell you your own chance of success.

The controlled trials give a more useful picture. People taking the medicine before drinking cut their heavy and binge drinking more than people taking a placebo, and the benefit was clearest for those who also had support to build coping skills. That’s why coaching sits at the heart of what we do, and why the success rate that matters most is yours: we track your drinking with you, week by week.

Read the full picture: what the research shows.

Fair question. You should ask it.

It isn’t a miracle. It’s an approach with published research behind it and real limits, and we’ll show you both. What we won’t do is promise you a result. What we add is the coaching: the habits, routines and hard moments that decide whether change sticks.

Yes. That’s the whole point.

Rethink Drink doesn’t start with a promise never to drink again, and we won’t ask you for one. Your goal is your goal: fewer drinks, more alcohol-free days, or stopping altogether if that’s what you choose, now or later. Most people who come to us don’t want a lifetime of avoiding the pub. They want to be able to take it or leave it.

Control is the goal.

If you’re asking, it’s worth taking seriously, and that isn’t a judgement.

The HSE’s weekly low-risk guideline is up to 11 standard drinks for women and 17 for men, with at least two to three alcohol-free days and no more than 6 standard drinks on any one occasion. A pint is about two standard drinks. But the number is only part of it. Are you drinking more than you meant to? Making rules and breaking them? Thinking about the next drink more than you’d like? Our calculator above shows you where you are in a couple of minutes.

Source: HSE, weekly low-risk alcohol guidelines

Dry January. The breaks. The rules. “Keeping it social.” The promises at 3am. Matt did all of it, for years. It never meant he was weak; he’d been given the wrong model.

Willpower on its own asks you to fight the desire to drink every single day. The Sinclair Method works on the desire itself, and our coaching works on everything around it.

Our programme prices are on this page, because we’d rather you see them up front than hear them for the first time on a call. The mini-course is free, and so is a call.

Medication isn’t included in the programme price. Your prescription goes to your own local pharmacy and you pay them directly. Pharmacies set their own prices; our clients in Ireland tell us it’s typically somewhere between €25 and €55 for 28 tablets.

Yes. Online programmes like ours let you keep your work, your family and your life going while you change.

Rehab is the right choice for some people, particularly where there’s serious dependence or a risk of withdrawal, and a medical assessment helps decide what’s safest. Your GP is a good first step, and the HSE lists the supports available.

Source: HSE, alcohol treatment and recovery

Your conversations with our Rethink Drink coaches are confidential and are separate from your GP medical records.

The medical side of the programme is handled by the prescribing doctor and is subject to the same confidentiality rules as any other medical consultation.

If you drink heavily every day, speak to a doctor before you make any sudden change. Stopping or cutting back sharply can cause alcohol withdrawal, and the medicine used in The Sinclair Method does not treat withdrawal.

• Call 112 or 999, or go to your nearest emergency department, if you or someone else has severe withdrawal symptoms: visible shaking, confusion, seeing or hearing things that are not there, or a seizure.
• See your GP if you get symptoms like anxiety, difficulty sleeping, sweating or feeling sick when you try to cut down.
• For confidential advice, the HSE Drugs and Alcohol Helpline is on Freephone 1800 459 459, Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 5:30pm.

None of this has to rule you out. It means starting safely, with medical support, from day one.

Source: HSE, alcohol treatment and recovery

That worry is heavy, and you’re not the only one carrying it.

You can’t change someone’s drinking for them. But you can change the conversation: less blame, more curiosity, and a way of seeing this as a learned pattern rather than a character flaw. You can download a free copy of Matt Brindley’s book, Supporting A Loved One.