An Australian businessman who advises employees at the world’s biggest tech companies how to make better choices around alcohol believes he can help tackle Ireland’s unhealthy relationship with drink.

Benny Wallington has devised 101 Tokens, a free mobile phone app that helps people to identify the times when drinking is worthwhile – or not.

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Each user is allowed 101 ‘tokens’ per year. Every time you have a drink, a token is knocked off your annual allowance. Each drinking experience – whether it is a sip of alcohol or several glasses – equals one token. The next morning, you simply ask yourself: “Was it worth it?”

The model helps to find patterns in your drinking habits and directly links them to how you feel the next day, enabling you to retrain your brain to pass over binges in favour of feel-good experiences.

As Wallington explains: “Many people feel they might dislike some of their drinking habits and yet they don’t need Alcoholics Anonymous. There is nothing to help the people in this grey space where most fall into.

“The app can help people discover their personal optimal number of drinks where you only get the positives out of it. Maybe you can find a point where drink is a social lubricant that makes you relaxed and able to talk to guys or girls, but without going too far or nursing a throbbing head the next day. It’s not taking the fun out of drinking – it’s taking away the pain.”

Mr Wallington says people usually go through the experience of trying to make the most of their tokens by clocking up drinks, before the self-reflection questionnaire highlights the negative impact it has caused the next day.

“Big alcohol brands talk about ‘drinking responsibility’ but they don’t even know what it means. We need to talk about ‘mindful drinking’ so we can ask ourselves ‘did I go out and drink accountably and with consideration for my body first and foremost, while also having consideration for those around me?’

“It makes you sit down and look at your experience in the cold light of day. The kicker with 101 Tokens is that it gives you free agency over your drinking, while changing your future decisions through self-reflection, which is effectively a mental muscle – the more you train it, the stronger it gets. So you might say: ‘I drank last night and it was worth it.’

“It allows you to identify why and then mark the experience down as a ‘yay’ so you make similar future choices. The goal is to get 101 ‘yays’ in a year and reduce your ‘nays’, and then you are killing it.”

Absenteeism costs Irish businesses about €1.5bn a year, according to findings published by Ibec. About 4pc of companies quizzed said alcohol and alcohol-related illness was the top cause of short-term absence for male employees. Meanwhile, the cost to the Irish economy of the alcohol problem is estimated at €2.3bn annually.

Now, 101 Tokens has participants from Australia, Europe and South Africa, and Benny Wallington says he wants to get Ireland to follow suit.

“I would love to get Ireland on board. You guys led the way on the plastic bag levy and on outdoor smoking.

“With alcohol, it’s just about being realistic and meeting people where they are at, rather than telling them not to drink. We just need to change habits.”

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