Understanding Alcohol Use Disorder with Sarah Rusbatch
episode #287
I invited Sarah Rusbatch to the podcast to talk about Alcohol Use Disorder and share how alcohol impacts women as we get older.
Sarah is a Gray Area Drinking and Menopause coach, as well as the author of the book Beyond Booze: How to Create a Life You Love Alcohol-free.
Sarah and I discuss the importance of addressing alcohol use disorder for women in midlife, exploring coping mechanisms, societal pressures, challenges, and the benefits of an alcohol-free lifestyle.
We also talk about the effects of alcohol during perimenopause and how to emphasize self-care, empowerment, and building resilience for those contemplating reducing alcohol intake.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
What Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is, and how it affects women in midlife
Sarah’s drinking story and what led her to sobriety
How the culture around you and positive feedback from your friends can contribute to your drinking.
The differences between mild, moderate, and severe AUD.
How Sarah views quitting drinking as an experiment and helps women observe the changes over the first 30 days
Questions women can ask themselves to determine whether or not they may suffer from AUD.
Resources mentioned:
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Lori: [00:00:00] Hey, Sarah.
Sarah: Hey, Lori. Nice to see you.
Lori: Nice to see you too. Welcome to To 50 and Beyond. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today. First, I want to congratulate you on your book, Beyond Booze, How to Create a Life You Love Alcohol Free.
Sarah: Thank you. Yeah, it's a bit of a dream come true for me to have a book in the world.
So I still keep pinching myself a little bit, but it's even out there.
Lori: It's a big deal. It is definitely a big deal. I am so proud of you and so happy that it is out there because it's going to help a lot of people. So congratulations again. I wanted to kick it off with that news. We're going to talk about alcohol use disorder in midlife and you are a gray area drinking coach and a menopause coach.
Sarah: Yeah, so I support women at that tricky midlife stage where hormones are all over the place, stress is often quite high, we might be starting to feel more anxiety as our hormones start to change. A lot of women find they're turning to alcohol as a solution [00:01:00] and I provide tools and resources to move away from using alcohol and to find other healthier ways to support us through this stage of our lives.
Lori: Yeah. It's the best time to go alcohol free. I've been saying it since day one of starting the podcast. It is. And it, for me, it was an inevitable time because I was going through perimenopause and it was just that I was fighting myself. And so I had to come to the point where I gave up alcohol. It was, it was very much needed, definitely.
And it helps me greatly. And I want to hear your story. What brought you to doing this work?
Sarah: Yeah, so I was a typical gray area drinker. So, I started drinking in my teens in the north of England where I grew up. And the pivotal moment, I think, for me, when I first got drunk with a group of girlfriends, what I remember thinking and feeling was, Ugh!
This is how I belong. This is how I fit in. This, when the alcohol, when we're all a [00:02:00] wee bit drunk, this is when people are saying, you're hilarious. I love you. You're so funny when you're drunk. And you start getting all of this like positive feedback. And prior to that, my family had made a move from Scotland to England.
I was 13 years old. I had a very strong Scottish accent, a terrible perm, I was a bit overweight, very spotty, and we'd moved from this quite a rough local high school to a very posh all girls school where all the girls were playing hockey and netball and I just didn't feel like I fitted in at all. And the moment we got drunk together, it was like all those things disappeared and didn't matter anymore.
And I felt like I belonged. And I really wanted that feeling. And so alcohol created for me a bit of a neural pathway in the brain going, people like me when I'm drunk. It's a great way to fast track friendships. It's a great way to get a sense of belonging. And so it became my tool and my way of. [00:03:00] Getting that sense of connection that I really deeply craved and so that was, what it's like.
I'm sure it's the same in America as it is in the UK with the university culture. I went off to uni at 18. It was just 3 years of drinking and that was my way of, meeting people and making friends. And then straight after university, I moved to London and I got a graduate job working in sales and recruitment.
for having me. And the fourth stage of the interview process was doing shots of tequila and Sambuca in a bar to see how well I could handle my booze. Which says a lot about the 1990s in London, right? Which I'm sure was the same across the world in all major cities. And then you've got to remember as well that this was a really pivotal time.
For women, this was the end of the 90s, the early 2000s. We had the Spice Girls and Girl Power, the biggest girl band in the world. It was the girls can do it all. We had Sex and the City and we had Samantha and Carrie drinking their like, really kind of that independence and that liberation of, we can go [00:04:00] and have one night stands and drink our Cosmopolitans and your girlfriends are all that matter.
And I just lapped all of that up because that was very much being, being those messages were just constantly being, being shared for women. And so again, alcohol was really present. I went backpacking around the world. I went traveling alcohol again, met my husband, we got married. We, we had two children in very, very quick succession and then made the decision to move to Australia.
And this is when, for me, my use of alcohol changed, and it went from being something I did socially, to something I did as a person. a coping mechanism. All of a sudden I found myself on the other side of the world with two kids under two, with no family support, with no girlfriends, with no job. I'd had a very senior job in London.
I was earning my own money. I was whining and dining in all the best restaurants around town. And all of a sudden I was at home pureeing carrot, cleaning up baby sick, going to baby swimming lessons. And I was so homesick. I was so lonely. I was so [00:05:00] bored and confused because on paper. I had everything that it looked like I'd ever wanted.
I was living in Australia by the beach. I got to go to the beach and go swimming in the sea every day. I had two beautiful, healthy children. I had a loving husband who financially, we were in a position where I didn't have to work for that first couple of years so that he could go and set up a business and I could be with the kids.
So on paper, everything was perfect. But inside, I just felt so sad and so homesick. And I didn't want to tell anyone. I felt like there was something wrong with me. I felt ashamed that I wasn't embracing this new life. And I turned to alcohol because alcohol is a really, really easy, quick way of not having to feel our feelings.
Right. And I had never learned. Any other way to process uncomfortable emotions. No one had taught me that. I've been drinking since the age of 14. And that had been the thing that was [00:06:00] like, have a drink. And then of course, we've got mommy wine culture, which is going on at the same time, which is again, just reinforcing that message.
Mom deserves wine. I think we've normalized. alcohol as self care for mums. It's like everywhere you turn, those messages, tired, stressed, overwhelmed mums, go and run a bath and have a glass of wine and everything will be okay. So you're constantly getting that messaging that is normalizing everyday use of wine as a form of reward and self care.
And, and I felt for that hook, line and sinker because in the short term it works. In the short term, you don't have to feel your feelings. And in the short term, it's a new, you get a bit of a buzz and, and then it was something that I started looking forward to more and more. It was something, and the thing about alcohol, as Laurie, is it's, it's addictive.
We build tolerance to it. So what starts as a couple of large glasses ends up being a bottle. And before you know it, maybe you're opening a second bottle. Sometimes I didn't even feel drunk. I could, I was, [00:07:00] I build up such tolerance. That a bottle and a half of wine, I'd still like, go to bed and read my book.
Of course in the morning I didn't remember anything that I'd written, that I'd read in my book. I can't tell you the number of books that I've had to reread many chapters of because I was actually in blackout when I was reading. But I didn't even know that because I didn't think I was drunk. And then as I got older, and even at this point, I wasn't getting many of the negatives from alcohol.
I wasn't really getting terrible hangovers. I was feeling a bit meh. But I was kind of just put that down to being tired with raising two kids and, and all of those things that come with that. But slowly as I got into my late thirties and my early forties, I really started to notice alcohol was really impacting my sleep.
So every time I drank, I would wake up at two or three in the morning and really struggle to get back to sleep. So my solution, Laurie, was not, Oh, I should stop drinking. My solution was, I'll take a sleeping tablet when I drink and then I won't wake up at [00:08:00] two in the morning. So you can imagine how I felt when I was getting up with the kids at six, half past six in the morning.
I was utterly exhausted. I was foggy. I was demotivated. I was lethargic. By this point, I was running my own business from home, but there were some days where I would get up and I would get the kids to school and then I would go home, climb back into bed and play Candy Crush all day because I had zero motivation and zero energy.
And it felt like My soul was rotting. That's how I would describe it. I'm quite a driven, ambitious, outgoing person. And I was just a bit meh. But on the outside, no one would have suspected anything was going on. On the outside, I was the party girl. It was always my house that people came to. I was hosting all these events.
I was the one always at the pub. Come on, let's not go home. Let's stay out and go to another bar. People were like, I was fun Sarah, right? Who? And, and then I started to get really bad anxiety. [00:09:00] And I went to my GP, my doctor, and I said, My anxiety is so bad, it's through the roof, I've never really had this before, I'm worrying about everything, I'm overthinking everything.
And at no point did she ask me, How much are you drinking? And yet, happily gave me a prescription for anti anxiety meds, and just said, Oh, you just need these to take the edge off. And I now know that would have not been a good combination for me to be drinking As much as I was and taking prescribed medication.
It's really not a good combination. And that's where, for me, there's a real lack of duty of care in the medical system where so many women I speak to in midlife are on either anti anxiety meds or antidepressants. and drinking quite heavily. And no one's talking about the fact that it's not, it's not going to help you.
The anti anxiety and the antidepressants are not going to support you if you're drinking that much because alcohol completely messes with the neurotransmitters in the brain and will leave you feeling more depressed and [00:10:00] anxious than anyway. So it's, it's bonkers. But anyway, I, I didn't take the tablets and I decided, I'm going to take a break from booze.
I'd had a 40th birthday party where I'd had a spectacular drunken episode, fallen over, landed on my face, cut my lip open, cut my nose open, blood everywhere. And I was just like, I've got to do something about this. So I decided I would take 21 days off because everyone says it takes 21 days to break a habit.
So I was like, yeah, 21 days. I'll do 21 days off booze. And I did that and everything changed. So my anxiety disappeared. So my sleep was really good. So as a result, I was waking up in the morning, feeling really positive. And then my self talk went from being, well, you're a loser. Well, you're absolutely rubbish.
Look at you. You can't even just stick to one or two drinks. I was waking up in the morning with a sense of pride. I was feeling hopeful. I was showing up in a way with my kids that I was really [00:11:00] present with them. And the weekends were like stretching out with all these activities we could do that wasn't just me lying on the sofa, putting them in front of an iPad while I scrolled Facebook all day.
Like everything changed. So I kept going after the 21 days. Cause I was like, wow, this is great. Never with the intention that I would stop drinking forever. And I got to a hundred days. And by this point, everyone's peer pressure. Well, when are you going to drink again? Like, how long's this going on for?
Oh, are you still doing that non drinking thing? I even had one school mum say to me, Oh, let's catch up when you're drinking again. And so you end up with this, and of course, coming back to what I got from alcohol was connection, what I craved as a little girl growing up, my trauma wounds were very much around not fitting in, not being included, not being one of the girls, and then all of a sudden, all of that was happening again, because I wasn't drinking.
So I went back to drinking. And I [00:12:00] thought I've taken a hundred days off. I'm clearly not an alcoholic because they can't just take a hundred days off on their own. So clearly there's nothing wrong with me. Now I'll be able to be a normal drinker. And I'll just go and have one or two drinks every now and then, like those normal people.
And within two weeks, I was back to drinking the same amount as before. Two years followed of taking breaks, going back to drinking, taking breaks, going back to drinking. But the thing was, I never ever forgot how good I felt when I didn't drink. And finally, in April 2019, so almost five years now, I had my last
Lori: drink.
Oh my goodness. Congratulations. I love Everything about your story. Cause there are so many things that I relate to, and I know there are going to be so many things that someone out there right now, gal out there listening is going to relate to. And just the, I started drinking at 14. I've met so many people since I've started the podcast, since I started coaching women [00:13:00] come to me, I started drinking at 14, I relate to your story so much, and because of that connection, and, And then when you take it to the point where you were alcohol free, you're feeling great.
And somebody says to you, let's connect when you're back to drinking again. Oh my gosh. I felt that this is the only time that we can connect is when you're drinking. So honestly, I feel that. And I get why you went back. And it's so, refreshing to hear and we need to hear this more that it doesn't happen overnight for most of us.
It takes time to really work through it. And so it was another two years. of kind of trying to moderate going back and forth. How old were you when you drinking?
Sarah: So when I stopped drinking, it was 2019. So I was 43. 43.
Lori: Were you experiencing any kind of perimenopause or have you experienced any kind of perimenopause?
Before you stopped drinking?
Sarah: Yeah, but I put everything down to alcohol. So the hot flashes, I was putting down to alcohol. The anxiety, I was [00:14:00] putting down to alcohol. The constant headaches, I was putting down to alcohol. The lack of sex drive, I was putting down to alcohol. Like, all of those things, to me, were just hangovers.
Whereas what I realized in sobriety was, yes, some things changed, but some things didn't. And so I went on to, I started taking bioidentical HRT about Nine months ago, and also, I did a lot of study around menopause and about what the body needs most when we're going through menopause, and I had a massive overhaul of my diet, I had a massive overhaul of my sleep routine, of my stress levels, of how I was exercising, and this has all made a massive difference for me.
Lori: Yeah, definitely. And that's one of the main reasons why it is so important to go alcohol free in midlife, especially when you're going through perimenopause or your postmenopause, we can't differentiate when we're drinking. We cannot decide or even [00:15:00] identify what is happening with us. We're mixing alcohol with menopause.
So to be able to take that break and take time off. And I loved also that you said, you always remembered how good you felt. Yeah. When you took that a hundred days off, that's what it is like, if somebody out there is listening and thing, always go back, always go back, but you're never going to forget how good you feel when you're off of alcohol.
But we all get to that point where we start to romanticize. We start to say, oh, well, maybe I didn't have a problem. I'm using my air quotes. I can go back. I can have one or two drinks. There's so much hope there. We want to have the best of both worlds. All right. We want to feel our best and we want to drink.
And for most of us, especially our guests here on the podcast and myself, it just doesn't work that way.
Sarah: Exactly. And, and, I would say 90 percent of the women that come to me when they fill out my form online about before they like book a call with me or embark on one of my programs, I have a question.
What do you want your drinking to be like? And everyone [00:16:00] says, I want to be a now and then drinker. I don't want to cut it out. I want to be able to have a drink every now and then. And I, I'm always like, well, when were you ever able to do that? When were you someone that just had a drink and didn't think about it at all until six months later and then had a drink again?
And most of the time people are like, well, never, so what makes you think I can make you become that person? Like I'm not a magician and your neural pathways, there are so many factors here. It could be your dopamine deficient. So you get massively lit up by alcohol. So when I work with clients, I do a neurotransmitter assessment to see are they deficient in dopamine?
There's so many factors at play that we can really start to look at that can. And if we, I believe if we've ever created a neural pathway that says, When I'm stressed or overwhelmed and I drink alcohol and it makes that feeling go away, we're in trouble because stress is never going anywhere. And so if our constant neural pathway, the moment we start drinking [00:17:00] again, our brain goes, ah, she's let that alcohol back into our system again.
When I'm stressed, I must drink alcohol because your brain's wired for survival and your brain is not thinking, Oh, how's she going to feel at three o'clock in the morning when she wakes up with a, a pounding heart and full of anxiety, the brain is going drink alcohol. That's what makes you feel better when that's what I do in this situation.
And so I think as soon as we've got past the point of being a take it or leave it drinker. And we've moved to a point where we're using alcohol as a release as an unwind as any of those things. It's unlikely we will ever go back to being a take it or leave it drinker.
Lori: I agree. Since we're going to talk about alcohol use disorder, can you describe what that is?
Yeah, so it's interesting. So prior, like a long time ago, if you think about the terms around alcohol use, it used to be someone was an alcoholic or they weren't. So when we think about an alcoholic and I'm sure you'll remember this. I used to watch Dallas growing up and Sue Ellen was in.
Sarah: And I just remember this, this woman that used to sit in her silk [00:18:00] nightie and start drinking whiskey out of a bottle at 10 o'clock in the morning. That was my first exposure to what an alcoholic was. And so if so, because we've created that vision in our mind, most of us go, well, I'm not drinking at 10 o'clock in the morning, hard liquor.
So therefore I'm not an alcoholic. So what the, the health system now doesn't talk about alcoholics. They talk about alcohol use disorder as being mild, moderate, or severe. So alcohol use disorder is pretty much anything above 14 units a week. Now, 14 units a week is about eight large glasses of wine. I could have that in a night, right?
And, and I always get my clients to start thinking about how much am I actually drinking? Because a lot of us are in denial about how many units I go when I only had one glass that's one unit and actually my pores were probably that was three units right in one glass but we get ourselves a bit so mild moderate severe severe alcohol use disorder would be that.
We're getting into that place of [00:19:00] dependency, physical dependency, where we need to have medical support to withdraw from alcohol. And, we've got to remember, alcohol is one of only three substances that the human body can die from withdrawal from. And so it is a very, very toxic substance. It is poison to the human body.
So that's the severe alcohol use disorder. Not that many people are in that category. I work on people, gray area drinking is that mild to moderate. Disorder. It's estimated there are three billion people across the world that sit in this category. And the problem is what keeps us stuck and I was fully in this category is we don't identify as being an alcoholic.
We're not drinking in the morning. So therefore we go, well, I just drink like everyone else around me. And what I find most gray area drinkers do is they surround themselves with other gray area drinkers. So then your point of reference becomes, well, I just drink like everyone else. So therefore I'm just the same as everyone.
So [00:20:00] therefore it's okay. And we're not drinking at such a level that it's massively impacting us in a really, really significant way. So we can still get up. We can still go to the gym. We can still go to work. We can still raise our kids, but we're probably getting more anxiety. We're probably just feeling a bit demotivated.
The negative self talk is really starting to creep up. We don't have so much energy. We lose that joy. We lose that spark. I always say like alcohol kills your, your, your light, that light inside of you, those things that you look forward to, like I stopped looking forward to anything other than when I was next going to get pissed.
And so it's. It's important to remember, and this is why I always say to people, give yourself the opportunity to know who you are without alcohol in your system for a decent period of time, because most people in the Western world will never know what their energy would be like, what their mood would be like, what their relationships would be like, how they would feel, what their self talk would be like if they weren't [00:21:00] drinking.
You don't have to be drinking every day for alcohol to be really impacting those key things.
Lori: What challenges are women who are coming to you, what are they facing other than the fact that they are aware of the fact that they're not yet to that severe point and they're saying exactly what you just said, they're able to function, they're able to get up, I feel like that's a challenge because then, it's I don't have to quit drinking.
What are some other challenges that you see from your clients?
Sarah: I think the biggest challenge is that many women that I work with don't have anything else in their toolkit to deal with any kind of adversity in their life. So if they don't work with a coach, it can be, we often go back to drinking because the moment something hard happens, we don't have resilience because the problem is that alcohol stops us building resilience.
So we're not able to sit there and go, Oh, this hard thing has happened. How am I going to support myself through it? Because we've never done that before because most of us have just gone, I'm just going to drink the moment something hard happens. And that's why I think [00:22:00] working with a coach like you and me and other people out there and joining a community with other women is so powerful because it's hard to learn the skills to sit with your feelings, to sit with your emotions, to not instantly escape them the moment something hard happens.
And that's one of the biggest challenges, but it's also. The part of my job that I love the most is really being able to give women some tools, some strategies to be able to, to learn to sit with really uncomfortable emotions.
Lori: Yeah, so true. Because like you were mentioning earlier, we didn't learn how to process our emotions.
We didn't learn how to just be with ourselves and appreciate ourselves. What you were saying when self talk, you're a loser, all that that was me. I was just so mean to myself and I just wanted to drown it all out. And so really giving yourself that time and alcohol robs you of your resiliency, your joy.
And so it feels really flat at first when women come to you and they say, okay, I'm ready to take a break. from drinking. What are the first [00:23:00] steps that you work through with your clients?
Sarah: Yeah. So often I will just say to them, we're not looking at this forever. We're looking at this as taking a decent amount of time off booze so that we can be curious.
So I say, see it as an experiment. And start to notice let's, let's get a benchmark now, before you stop, what's your energy like, what's your sleep like, what's your mood like, what are your relationships like, what's your motivation like, and, and let's score it out of 10. And then, let's embark on this challenge, let's look at why we want to do it.
What are the reasons that we want to make this change with alcohol? And then I support them with a lot of tools and strategies around all the different things that come up in those first 30 days or so, like suddenly we get an increase in sugar cravings. Maybe some of my ladies really struggle to fall asleep because they've been using alcohol to fall asleep for many, many years.
Maybe it brings up. And I don't know if you have this, but I get it a lot where suddenly women [00:24:00] realize with the clarity of taking a break from booze that they're actually really unhappy in their marriage. They might realize that they're really unhappy in their job, like they've actually realized I've been drinking because there are quite a few things in my life that I'm not happy about.
And that can be confronting, but it's also yeah, but, Now with the clarity, the energy, and the mental headspace, you might have the power to change that and then you might be able to create a life where you become happier. So I get a lot of journaling. Journaling is massive for me with my clients to actually start exploring their feelings and their emotions.
I think it's really important to stay inspired. And I always say to my ladies listen to a podcast every day, keep up, make sure you've got a sober book on the go because subconsciously we're being exposed to information all the time that is coming into our brain saying alcohol's great, alcohol's a relaxing, alcohol's your reward, alcohol's how you have fun, and we've got to start getting new information into the brain.[00:25:00]
And that new information needs to be actually, alcohol kills your soul, alcohol impacts your sleep, alcohol causes anxiety, alcohol, we can even go the hard facts and some of my ladies need to hear the hard facts, alcohol causes seven types of cancer, alcohol, like really start absorbing different information to what you're exposed to on a daily basis.
I think it's really important to join community because. If, like most of my clients, all your friends are barely consistent drinkers, you can feel quite lonely and it can feel quite hard. And I've written an entire chapter in my book on how to navigate the friendship side when you take a break from booze, because it is tricky.
And so I think joining a community of other women who are doing it too can make a big difference.
Lori: Yeah, definitely. I love all those tips. I have to ask you because I know there's somebody out there saying, okay, now I'm eating a lot of sugar. Now I'm having a hard time falling asleep. What are your best give me a tip for the sugar.
What tip do you give to your clients?
Sarah: Eat the sugar if you need to eat the sugar, but make [00:26:00] sure you're eating a really great diet as well. So make sure you're nourishing your body with really good nutrients that your body needs, and then have the sweet thing afterwards if you need.
I find the supplement L glutamine is very, very useful, and just a caveat here, always speak to a practitioner before taking any kind of supplements, but L glutamine I did an interview with Dr. Brooke Scheller and she's in New York. And she was, she's a nutritionist that supports women in sobriety.
And she was saying L glutamine is a great supplement to take. And then for sleep, I really work on that sleep routine. What are we doing those two hours before we get into bed? I use essential oils so much. They have, I, you will never see me not with an essential oil near me. The sense of smell is one of the fastest ways to send a message to the brain to calm and to relax.
So there's a, my top tip is the essential oil vetiver. Vetiver, they call it the horse tranquilizer of essential oils. Like it really relaxes you. So I put two drops in a little bit of body [00:27:00] lotion. I rub it in my hands and then just spread it all over my neck, the top of my chest and my shoulders.
And it just works so well to relax. I put it in a diffuser. I put a couple of drops in a bath. And so I find it really, really helpful.
Lori: I'm going to find it and I'm going to link it in the show notes. Don't worry. Now I'm going to find it. That sounds fantastic. I've never heard of that before.
Sarah: Yeah. I'm all for
Lori: trying something like that.
That's amazing. I'm thinking, what are some of the questions that somebody who is listening to this, who is just not really sure where they fall on that scale, , with alcohol use disorder? What can they ask themselves?
Sarah: Yeah. So a few useful questions. Do I often drink more than I intend to?
Do I often regret my drinking? Do I find that alcohol is impacting me in a negative way? But I'm still doing it. Do I have a lot of internal chatter around alcohol? So the, my brain [00:28:00] was constantly filled with discussion around alcohol. I, so my rules were, I don't drink on a Monday and Tuesday. And then suddenly I might find myself in a situation where it's a Tuesday and I really want to have a drink.
So then the, the negotiations would start. I'm going to start in my brain. If I know it's Tuesday, I know I'm not supposed to drink on a Tuesday, but I could have a drink tonight and then not have one tomorrow night. Oh, but I am going out tomorrow, but maybe I'll just have one tomorrow and I'll drive and then I could have two tonight.
Like it was constant. Just the, if you find like people that don't have a problem with drinking, they just don't have this chatter in their heads. So if we even notice that we're negotiating with ourselves, we're making rules around our drinking, but then often negotiating with ourselves how to break the rules.
We're, in that gray area.
Lori: I know that chatter. And I know that there's somebody out there listening, at least one person. I know there's many more that know that chatter. It's exhausting. It's wearing you out.
Sarah: Yeah. And the thing I want to say, Laurie, is something that kept me, I was filled with so much shame.
I thought, It's my [00:29:00] fault that I can't moderate. It's my fault that I keep having more than I intend to. And the number one thing I say to clients when I work with them is, Alcohol's up there with the top five most addictive substances in the world. And we build tolerance to it. And so we need more and more.
So if you have become in some level of addiction, like we, we balk at the word of addiction for alcohol, that it's filled with so much stigma. Like it's okay to be addicted to your phone or addicted to caffeine or addicted to shopping. And that's funny and that's okay. But say that you're addicted to alcohol.
Oh, shame on you. Right. And that is the society that we live in. And I was addicted to alcohol, but I didn't drink every day. There was a level of addiction and it's a scale, like I said, but it wasn't my fault. Like alcohol is addictive. Plus, if we've got a brain that gets really lit up by alcohol, it's interesting.
I listened to a podcast [00:30:00] with Huberman and he was saying He could put a group of like young 20s in a room, and he would be able to tell, when they were drinking, which ones were likely to go on to develop alcohol use disorder. Because there would be two groups. One would drink, and then they would kind of be a bit like I've had enough now, I might just have a cup of tea, I'm ready to go home.
It doesn't massively light them up. And the other group, They get lit up like a Christmas tree, they become more animated, they become more loud, they become, and that was me alcohol really lit me up, and the thing to know is, everyone's brain responds differently to alcohol, so it's not the same, it's not like every single person gets the same amount of dopamine released when they drink alcohol, it's different for everyone.
And if you are someone for whom there's a big dopamine release when you have alcohol, you are going to be more prone to developing alcohol use disorder. Again, it is not your fault.
Lori: I'm right there with you. I'm raising my hand. That was me too, for sure. And it's not our fault. And when [00:31:00] we're around other people who are drinking and we think they're drinking moderately, that's when we feel the shame even more.
When we're around people who just can take it or leave it, there's shame there as well, because we can't. I mean, there's shame all around when it comes to your drinking, but if we can remind ourselves that we are not the only ones, it is not our fault, and alcohol is super addictive. And, if you're there, you're among a really great group of people around the world who are giving up alcohol and forging ahead without it and building a lifestyle out of it, of living alcohol free.
And I'm super happy. To meet you and know that you're out there doing this work because we need more of them in midlife. Absolutely.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Lori: I want to ask you because I know you're in Australia now. Do you see a change there as far as, I'm seeing different articles coming out in the UK, bars are closing down, because of our younger generation, they're really choosing the alcohol free route.
Are you seeing any kind of change there? [00:32:00] The
Sarah: Australian drinking culture is pretty strong. There are, you've got to remember you've got a country where there's a lot of sunshine and cricket and sport and barbecues and beach time. And there's a lot of, drinking goes hand in hand with all of that.
They see it as the Australian way. So whereas in the UK, I feel like a lot of drinking historically has happened in the pub. That was the local village community space. That was, people would come together to have a drink together in the pub. Whereas in Australia. It's a lot more at home. It's a lot more in there.
They're buying it themselves. So it's cheaper to do that. You you're actually penalized for buying alcohol in small amounts. It works out cheaper to buy a big carton of beer than it does to just buy six. So of course, you're always going to buy the big carton. But then it means you've got more available to you to just keep drinking.
And so there's there's changes that need to happen. That's for sure.
Lori: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's so [00:33:00] interesting. I want you to talk about what is next for you. What do you have to offer the listener today? And then I want you to send us out with some final words to anybody out there who is really questioning their drinking and curious and really wanting to take a break.
Sarah: Yeah. So I would say definitely get a copy of my book. I am getting the most incredible feedback from women all over the world about my book. And I think it's because there's no other books. I deliberately wrote a book. where there aren't many, any other books like it. It's a book for middle aged women. It is a book not about how to get sober.
So there's loads of books out there that say, how to take a break from alcohol in 30 days. And there's lots of memoirs out there, people's stories about, whereas this is not that. This is a book about what do you need to add in when you take alcohol out. This is a book for midlife women on, and I break it down into chapters, there's a chapter on the physical side, what are the things we need to do to physically support ourselves to remove the cravings for alcohol.
There's a section on your relationships your [00:34:00] friendships, how to navigate socializing, and this is whether you want to take a break from alcohol, remove it forever, just cut down, it's there. There's a section on your marriage. If you, if your partner still drinks, there's a section on sober sex because a lot of my women in midlife, they actually really struggle to have sex with their partners without having a couple of drinks to relax.
There's, we've got more anxiety and everything. So there's a section on that. And my favorite chapter in the book is what's your fun plan. And it's all around what, what do you do for fun? When you decide to make a change to your drinking because I, my theory was always, Oh my God, I'm never going to have fun again.
I'm just going to be sitting at home on my own every night. And actually the opposite is true, but it can feel quite daunting. So I've got so many tools, so many resources in the book. It's not a book about how to get sober. It's a book about how to create a life you love so much. You don't even think about turning to a drink.
Lori: I love it. I'm going to get it and I'm going to read it and I'm going to tell everybody I know about it because I know a lot of midlife [00:35:00] gals and, that is why we are here today. They're your audiences here definitely. And we need that. I love it. What was it with the fun? The chapter? What is your fun plan?
I love it. I would have loved to have read something like that. And at the time when I quit drinking, I would have said, I don't have one. I'm just like you don't have one. I'm not going to have fun anymore. I can't drink. It's no fun. And I know I can say that now and I know that's a legitimate feeling a legitimate concern, but we do find our fun.
But having somebody guide us to creating a fun plan. Yeah, I would have been all over that.
Sarah: Yeah. And there's so many tips in there. It's just full of all the things I've done. And just to see it as an experiment, I'm going to try that and see if I like it. I'm going to try that. If I see, if I like it, there's just lots and lots and there's a whole section on how to manage stress.
So it's got my 10 top tips of what I have tried and tested that work really well for me when I'm feeling stressed and overwhelmed to do instead [00:36:00] of reaching for a drink.
Lori: Nice. Awesome. Okay. Well, of course, I'm going to have that linked in the show notes.
What else do you have going on?
Sarah: So on the April the 8th, I will have a women's alcohol free challenge starting. So it's 30 days where the women all over the world, so there's women in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, we all come together for 30 days to take a break from booze. And through that 30 days, you get daily support from me.
And we have fun. We laugh together. We cry together. We have so many tools, so many resources. And there is such a sense of camaraderie in the group. And it's always amazing. And it's often life changing. And so for any of your clients that want to come in together with a group of like minded women, most of my women tend to be between the age of 40 and 65 and all on this journey in midlife of going alcohol's not serving me anymore.
I want different, but I don't know how to get different. And I say, come with me. Let me show you, let me [00:37:00] hold your hand through this process and teach you everything that has helped me to create an incredible life without alcohol.
Lori: Awesome. I'm going to have that linked in the show notes,
sarah, what can you leave us with today? Some empowering words, not that you haven't already given us a lot of empowering words, but a message to anybody out there who's really thinking, I'm so curious about going alcohol free. I've tried it before and I just feel like I keep going back. What can you say to this person?
Sarah: I was there and that is part of the journey. And, and keep going. And at some point you reach the point where I just got sick and tired of my own bullshit. I got sick and tired of the own, my own like excuses that I was making. And I was, and I just reached a point where I was ready to commit and to go, I deserve this.
I get to matter. My life matters. And do you know what? Making this decision was the greatest act of self care I've ever shown myself because the, the differences of what have unfolded in my life. But we have to make sure that we're looking at this [00:38:00] with the, with an abundant mindset of what am I gaining?
Because if we go into it going, what am I missing out on? What am I losing? It's going to feel awful. And we're going to go back to alcohol. Whereas if we actually look at what am I gaining? And that's what my book is speaking to. It's all about what are we adding in? When we take alcohol out, and that is the heart of the work.
And if you've been, and that was what I hadn't been doing, I'd been focusing too much on what I was missing out on. Whereas I've written this book to show this is what we can gain. And there is so much to gain. And so I think it's, it's just the goal is not to be sober. The goal is to love yourself so much.
You don't need to drink. And those would be my parting words.
Lori: Beautiful. Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you.
Hey, there! I’m Lori, the host of the To 50 and Beyond podcast.
Where aging and living alcohol-free are celebrated.
To 50 and Beyond is about self-discovery, living for today, and designing an alcohol-free life that alcohol can’t compete with.
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