For the first year after I quit drinking, every time someone offered me a drink at a party, I felt obligated to explain. I did not drink, but I would also explain why. I would gesture at sleep and mornings and the math. I would mention that it was a personal choice and that I respected everyone else's choices. I would smile in the way you smile when you are trying to make a non-standard answer feel comfortable for both of you.
I was over-explaining. I knew I was over-explaining. I could not stop.
The explanations were doing a specific kind of work. They were apologizing for the inconvenience my not-drinking introduced into the social interaction. They were trying to make the other person comfortable about the fact that I was being slightly outside the room's default behavior. They were a kind of social labor I was doing on behalf of the person who had asked.
Around month thirteen, I noticed that I had stopped. Someone offered me a drink. I said "I'm good, thanks." There was a brief pause where I felt the absence of the explanation that would normally have followed. The pause passed. The conversation moved on. The person who had offered the drink did not appear to need or want the explanation. They had been making conversation; I had been answering it; the answer had been sufficient.
This was the day I stopped explaining. Not deliberately. I had just run out of the energy to do it, and discovered that the explanations had not been doing any work the absence of them did not also do.
What changed
What changed was internal. The first year, I had still been treating my not-drinking as a position to defend. The defending posture required argument, justification, and acknowledgment of the asymmetry between me and the room.
By the second year, my not-drinking had become a fact about my life, not a position. Facts about your life do not need defending. If I had said "I'm gluten-free" or "I'm vegetarian" or "I don't eat shellfish," nobody would have expected a sentence-long explanation of how I came to this decision and why I thought it was reasonable. The fact would have been the answer. The asker would have moved on.
The same applies to not drinking. The fact is the answer. The asker, in nearly every case, was not actually requesting an essay on personal decision-making frameworks. They were doing a social check-in. The check-in is completed by an answer; the answer does not need to be elaborated.
What this changed in practice
After I stopped explaining, social events got easier in a way that surprised me. Most of my pre-existing dread about drinking events had been about the explaining, not about the actual drinking. I had been bracing for the conversation I felt obligated to have, the one where I justified my choice to a near-stranger in a way that did not make either of us uncomfortable.
Without the obligation, the events were just events. People offered drinks. I said no thanks. The interaction took two seconds. The thing I had been bracing for did not happen, because the thing I had been bracing for had been mostly my own production.
A small number of people, even now, push past the brief no-thanks and ask the longer question. I have a short answer for them, the "I just feel better without it" line. Almost nobody pushes past that. The conversation moves on.
What this means
If you are early in not drinking and you find yourself over-explaining, the over-explaining will probably continue for a while. This is normal. You are still adjusting to the new social posture, and the explaining is the scaffolding you are using to feel comfortable in the new posture while you are still learning it.
The scaffolding eventually becomes unnecessary. You stop reaching for it because you no longer need it. The transition is not deliberate; it happens because the new posture has become secure enough that the scaffolding is in the way.
Some markers that the transition is happening: people stop asking the longer follow-up question, because you are no longer signaling that you expect to give an explanation. The room stops noticing your not-drinking, because you have stopped highlighting it. Your own dread about social events declines, because you have stopped bracing for a conversation that mostly is not going to happen.
The day you stop explaining is not a day you can plan. You will discover it has happened by noticing the absence of the explanation you would have given. That noticing is itself the marker that the work has settled into your life properly. Not a position you hold. A fact about who you are.