A few millennia ago, pagans in northern latitudes realised that a right old knees-up featuring roasted roadkill and proto-Jägerbombs was needed to cheer up the populace during the bleak midwinter. Christians later horned in on this annual shindig, claiming counterintuitively that our Redeemer was born at this special time. Finally, capitalists carved out a piece of the action. And so it came to pass: the season of gorging, gouging and guilting was born. God bless us, every one.

But what none of these visionaries foresaw is that January, February and most likely March are at least as dismal weather-wise and otherwise as December. They couldn’t have envisaged that the need for cheering up the populace doesn’t stop at the conclusion of the three most harrowing words in the English language: Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. They couldn’t have known that, in 2019, rail prices would go up 3.1% from 2 January. Still less did the ancients foretell that Theresa May would postpone parliament’s vote on her EU withdrawal agreement until the week of 14 January, almost as if she and her lackeys had planned to maximise already rampant levels of seasonal affective disorder.

In such depressing circumstances, what we need is comfort and soothing. Instead, though, we’re exhorted to jump off a dietary cliff, to go cold turkey after weeks of eating cold turkey, to submit to ye venerable ritual of self-administered punishment to atone for ye presumed seasonal sins. We’re enjoined to do ostensibly improving things: give up alcohol; strip down to our pants and get shouted at by British Military Fitness in the park; put the Hobnobs back on the supermarket shelves; enrol for grade 3 bassoon; join a book club reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

I’m no doctor – but surely, just as it’s madness to stop taking antidepressants suddenly rather than weaning oneself off them, so it is folly to give up booze and biscuits in January if you were enjoying them only hours earlier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It is folly to give up booze and biscuits in January if you were enjoying them only hours earlier.’ Photograph: Alamy

One in 10 Britons who drink alcohol, though, are expected to give it up this month, many of them having downloaded Alcohol Change UK’s Dry January app that lets you track the units, calories and money saved by not drinking. The charity’s website includes inspiring stories, such as the woman who went on a journey from boozing to dry January to running the New York marathon.

If these initiatives help us save money (apparently the average Briton spends £50,000 on alcohol during a lifetime), lose weight, sleep better, reduce the strain on the NHS, improve our complexions and raise money for cancer research, that’s all good. But hold on: wouldn’t a dry December app be a better idea than a January one? It’s during that month, after all, that people can far exceed the recommended daily allowance. Some figures put the average Briton drinking 67 units of alcohol a week, and a recent study found young Brits drank 26 units of alcohol a day over the festive period. It’s then that we need to resist the social pressure to drink – possibly by means of an app I’m thinking of developing that will administer electric shocks of increasing intensity as your blood-alcohol ratio gets higher.

Lauren Booker, author of Try Dry: The Official Guide to a Month off Booze, recommends you clear out your alcohol for January. “You don’t need to pour it down the drain,” she counsels. “Either lock it away in the shed so you’re not tempted, or ask a friend if you can leave it at their house until the end of the month.” And then what? On 1 February, after the seasonal ceasefire, you can resume the war on your liver.

That’s the risk – that for all those inspired by dry January to give up binge drinking and become marathon runners, many more will undergo a short-term purge that will have negligible long-term benefits. What’s needed is not the crazy switchback from drunk December to dry January, the booze equivalent of yo-yo dieting. We need to learn not the virtue of short-term abstinence, nor to desperately hope that a month off the pop will catalyse a lifestyle revolution, but something much harder – the way of moderation.

But the prevailing rhetoric goes another way. “Can you go dry this January?” asks Cancer Research. “Take on the ultimate test of willpower by going booze-free for a whole 31 days and raise vital funds to help beat cancer.” Like the bushtucker trial, it’s a gauntlet I refuse to pick up. I’ll give money to charity, but not narrow my lifestyle options.

Almost a century ago, TS Eliot said, “April is the cruellest month.” Maybe it was back then, but nowadays it’s January. So it’s time to fight back, and to make this month not the time for sadomasochistic rituals like Cancer Research’s Dryathlon, but for Jaffa Cakes dunked in dessert wine.

• Stuart Jeffries is a freelance feature writer

• This article was amended on 3 and 7 January 2019 to give further information about estimates of alcohol consumption over the festive period.