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Before we start today's episode, I just want to say that you are going to be hearing from some wonderful Mama Mea voices over the next few weeks as I work on another project. Hollyway and wright Claire Stevens, a Nama Brown, who is the executive producer of this show, are all going to be sitting in my chair for a few weeks and doing the same wonderful interviews that
you know and love from No Filter. There are some great conversations coming your way about red and green flags in relationships, sex and porn, addiction, escaping from a religious cult, narcissism, sobriety, and more. You'll be hearing from me soon.
Enjoy.
I went to a friend's fortieth I got really pissed and went outside for a cigarette because when I drank, I smoked, I was wearing high heels, which as a mum you don't do very often more. And I crouched down to put out my cigarette, was pissed and sway and I fell forward, but I didn't have any reflexes. And so I landed face first onto a concrete driveway and cut my lip open, cut my nose, blood everywhere, and my friend took me home and put me to bed,
and I woke up the next morning to scarlet. My daughter was five at the time, standing beside my bed, and she said, Mummy, Mummy, what happened to your face? And Oh, Holly, in that moment, I just felt such shame, such disgust, such self loathing.
So, Mama, Maya, you're listening to No Filter, and I'm Holly Wainwright sitting in for mea Friedman, and I am welcoming you back to regular programming. I hope that you've enjoyed our hot pod summer. But now we are off sun lounger and we are back at work. How are you going so far in twenty twenty five? Did you survive that party season, that holiday season? Did you choose a word of the year that might lead you into
a sober, curious place. Perhaps you're one of the many people who chose to get through the holidays sober, or maybe you're one of the people who didn't and woke up after Christmas and New Year and all that January fun going, You know what, I really need to address my drinking wherever you might be on that spectrum from mocktail to cocktails at five, this conversation is for you because my guest is author and health and well being
coach Sarah russ Batch, and she's lived it all. Sarah's written a book called Beyond Booze, How to Create a Life you Love Alcohol Free, because she has lived through her own what she describes as a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. But she's at great pains to point out you don't have to be hitting rock bottom to question your relationship with drink. She's not a preacher, She's not all luxury about these things. She's not here to judge you or
how much you are or aren't drinking. She just wants to talk to us about something that she calls gray area drinking and to let us know that if you're thinking that you would like to reconsider booze, but you don't know quite what life would be like on the other side, well, she wants to tell you that it's pretty good. Here's Sarah. Sarah, I heard that when you
were drinking, so before you gave up drinking, entirely. You had rules around alcohol, and they were, I don't drink Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I don't drink before five pm. I don't drink white wine on an empty stomach. Now those rules around alcohol sound very sensible to me, But you say that actually setting rules like that about alcohol can be a red flag. Tell me why.
So it's really important to put this into context. And I think there are some people who have their set rules and that just those are the rules that they live by, and that's that. But I think that for a lot of people who fall into the gray area drinking category, we have rules around our drinking then, and they really really govern our thoughts around alcohol. We're thinking about it a lot, and then we often find ways
to justify why we can break those rules. So I lived with this constant chatter in my head where it was like, Oh, I don't drink Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, But it is Wednesday, and I am seeing my friend tonight, so at least I'm not drinking at home, So maybe I could have a drink tonight, and then I won't drink tomorrow because I'm staying home tomorrow, so I could have Thursday's drink on Wednesday. I won't drink on Thursday, and then my units are all as they should be.
And there was this constant negotiation, this constant chatter, whereas people who are not gray area drinkers, they don't have that chatter, Holly, because they're just like, I fancy a drink and I'll have a drink. I don't fancy a drink, and I'm not going to have a drink, And that is it.
That is so interesting, I think, and leads us obviously to the question and the main point of a lot of your work, which is gray area drinking. So explain to me what the gray area drinker is, because obviously I think we'd all be familiar with what we problematic drinking, but where that line is, we don't know what's a gray area drinker.
So a gray area drinker sits in between the space of very severe problematic drinking, so someone who has physical dependency on alcohol and needs to have medical support to withdraw from alcohol, So someone who might be a ten out of ten on a scale of one to ten and the other extreme being the one, so someone who doesn't drink, or someone who has a glass of champagne at a wedding once a year, and that's their only use of alcohol. Gray area drinking is what's in the middle.
So we've passed the point of being a take it or leave it drinker, but we're not reaching or meeting the criteria for physical dependence on alcohol. We probably don't drink every single day. We can take short breaks from alcohol. We don't meet that stereotypical definition of an alcoholic that people have of Oh, if you're an alcoholic, you're drinking in the morning, you're drinking every day. You've lost your job,
you've lost relationship, you've lost your home. You're sitting on a park bench drinking out of a brown paper bag all day. Gray area drinkers are in that middle. I would say about a three or a four to maybe a seven, seven and a half eight on that scale would be gray area drinkers. And Holly, it's estimated two billion people across the world sit in the gray area. Because I don't know about you, but I don't know many people that are either at the ten out of
ten or the one out of ten. Most people are sitting somewhere in the middle.
And that was you, right, So to get to a little bit of why this has become such a big part of your life. You can't obviously ignore your story of gray area drinking. Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with alcohol and how it began.
You and I are both originally from England, as I'm sure listeners can tell by our voices and we I think it's quite fair to say that England and with similar age, we probably both grew up in a drinking culture, right and Anglo Australia is also strong on his drinking culture and it can often feel like, well, this is just what we do. Can you tell me a bit about your experiences with alcohol?
So I started drinking at fourteen. That was quite standard for where I grew up in the North of England, in Manchester.
My parents I'm from Manchester too. We were probably park drinking, not that far from each other at some point.
We're probably passed like one of the local roller rinks. So yeah, that was my initiation into alcohol, and I think prior to that, you know, looking back, mum and dad had a very active social life. So mom and dad often had dinner parties. And I grew up in Scotland before we moved to Manchester, when I was thirteen, So there was often parties with men drunken, men in kilts wandering around my house like pissed and happy and laughing.
And little Sarah grew up with this very strong, ingrained belief from a very young age that what adults do to have fun is get pissed and drink alcohol. And that was what I saw, that was what I witnessed. So for me growing up, it was never a case of if I would drink, it was when I would drink. And moving from Scotland to England at thirteen was a really difficult move to do. I had a very strong Scottish accent, I was a bit overweight, I had a
terrible perm. We moved from a really standard high school where there was no uniform to a very posh all girls school where the girls were playing lacrosse and hockey, and I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb.
So at fourteen, when we went down the park and got pissed on our diamond white and old English cider and Tenants super or whatever we could concoct in our parents' drinks cabinets in the soda stream bottles, it was music to my ears getting drunk with other girls because it was the first time I felt like I fitted in. I started getting this positive feedback. You're so fun when
you're drunk, You're hilarious when you're drunk. So when you start getting that, you start to create this identity in your mind of well, people really like me when I'm drinking party girl. I'm the person that gets the party going, and that became my identity. Then for years and years, went to university, moved to London. My first job in London was working in recruitment, where the fourth stage of the interview process was doing shots of sambuca to see how well you could handle your boots.
Oh my god.
Right, So this was the nineteen nineties in London.
Yeah, it's not unfamiliar to me. I was, yeah going to I mean, I don't know if the culture is still the same now, but certainly in England in the nineties and the noughdies, going to the pub after work was just a standard thing and at lunch time after and it was how you bonded. It was how you made your friends. It was the living room that you all gathered in like it was one hundred percent and alcohol focused. Experience.
Absolutely, and you know, we've also got to remember this was a time where there were real there was a real shift in femininity and in female girl power. We had the Spice girls, we had sex in the city. We had women kind of going, we can get paced, we can match the lad's pipe for pint down the student union. We're making our own money. We don't need a man to buy us a single drink for the night. We'll go and get wrecked with our girlfriends and have
one night stands and do all the things. Because that was that era that we were living in at the time, and it was really hedonistic and in many ways it was absolutely amazing. But it was also problematic, I think, and that's why we do have a generation of now women in their forties and fifties who have developed very dysfunctional relationships with alcohol, because it was kind of ingrained in us from that age that alcohol was just a
part of our life. It wasn't problematic. No one looked at you and went, oh, she's drinking a lot, because you just drank like everyone else around you. It was just very standard.
When did you start to question your alcohol use?
Honestly, not until my forties right.
So that's a long time, right, and there's no judgment in this sentence. I'm the same. I know many people who are. So we basically start drinking in our teens early is teens, and we're drinking pretty solidly, really pregnancies off, perhaps the odd feb Fast or whatever, and then we're here in our forties and beyond, and that's when you're like, oh, and what began to make you question?
Yeah. So I'd always thought, oh, I'm a bigger drinker than other people, but actually saw that as a positive rather than a negative. I had a big capacity for alcohol. I didn't feel hung over the next day, lying in bed vomiting like some of my friends would be. I was like, right, come on, let's get going. I who
was hair of the dog type thing. And then we moved to Australia and I had my kids some very quick succession, and that was when alcohol went from being something I did to socialize to being something I did as a self soooth it became something that was like, I was really lonely, I was really homesick. We'd moved to the other side of the world. I wasn't working for the first time in my life, and I'd got a huge sense of identity and achievement for my career
in London. I was pure and carrots, I was going to Baby Ryan time. I was desperately lonely, and alcohol then became something to look forward to at that five six o'clock when it was you know, witching, how I have a glass of wine. And this coincided with mummy wine culture, you know, all of that marketing that started to happen for young mums around alcohol. And then it was after my in my early forties, I just really started to notice the impact that alcohol was having. I
couldn't bounce back like I used to. Even just a couple of glasses of wine was really impacting my sleep, and I was waking at three am. I started to have really bad anxiety that I'd never had in my life before, had never been that person that had anxiety. And I remember going to my doctor and I was crying and I was a mess, and I said to her, I was shadow of myself. I don't know what's going on with me. And at no point did she say to me how much are you drinking? That the question
around alcohol didn't even come up. And yeah, I was just given a prescription for anti anxiety meds and told that I was just managing a lot. There was a lot going on and these would help me.
Well, there's to just put a pause in there. There was a lot going on. And it's interesting you might use the phrase mummy wine culture, and I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit more, but to be kind to the women who've kind of fallen into that. You know, now we're very roundly dismissive of mummy wine culture,
and rightly so because it's proved to be dangerous. But the world that you were just describing where you're suddenly isolated, and that happens whether you've moved to the other side of the world or not. Your life changes very suddenly. There's suddenly everything you're doing is not about you. It's
about these people you're caring for. You're often on your own a lot and for a lot of people, that glass at that bad time glass of wine becomes there's mummy me and then there's grown up me, and this is the marker of it. And it feels like it's your friend, right Like, it feels like it's your friend, and it's the thing that will bond you to other people all those things, and yet as you are discovering
it isn't really your friend. It's making things harder. Like what do you say to women who are at that particular moment who are like, but I, you know, I need it to get me into that who I used to be, you know, that kind of mindset.
It's a really valid point, and I think that more needs to be said about the fact that the transition into becoming a mother is not talked about enough in terms of the mental side of things, where you do go from you know, if you've had a career and you've been working and you've been surrounded by your friends all the time and having complete independence and spontaneity, to suddenly having these little people that are relying on you. It's almost as if you can't say that you're struggling
because everyone else out there is going it's amazing. Motherhood is the best thing ever, and of course I'm not saying it's not. But it's also freaking hard, and there is so much shame that comes with feeling you're struggling because on paper, I felt like I've got everything I could ever have asked for. We've moved to Australia. I live by the ocean. I've got a boy and a girl. We are happy, and we are healthy, and I have
everything on paper. So why am I not happy? Why is there something inside of me that is struggling with this? And I felt shame around that, and I've spoken to so many women who have felt the same. And that's where alcohol. Alcohol is great at making those feelings go away because it numbs us so we don't have to feel them anymore.
Until maybe it becomes part of the shame. Right, So is that what happened for you at that point?
Yeah? Absolutely, And I say to everyone that becomes a gray area drinker. Alcohol is not the problem. For many of us. Alcohol is the solution to whatever the problem was. And for most of the women that I work with, I've got a group of twenty thousand and I asked them why do you drink? Or why did you drink? And there were three main reasons and it was awed and stress and loneliness.
Right, that's so interesting. Boredom, stress and loneliness. So they're not Those are all obviously negative emotions, negative places that you want to escape from, and alcohol appears to be the key to another place where you're not stressed, bored, or lonely.
Right, And so because number one for stress, alcohol in the short term gives us a depressing relaxant effect, so it minimizes that stress with boredom, and I find with boredom tends to be my ladies who have their kids have started growing up. They don't need them so much anymore, but they've given all of themselves and all of their lives to raising these kids, managing the juggle of work
and home and everything. Suddenly they have all this time, but they don't know what to do with it, because they haven't focused on themselves for so long that this time is almost daunting. So they drink because they don't know what their help with hobbies are anymore, they don't
know what they love doing. And loneliness because we are the most disconnected we have ever been as a human society, and alcohol nuns uncomfortable emotions, and so for all of us, alcohol was it might eventually become the problem, but initially it's the solution to whatever the problem is, and we're using it to escape that emotion. And so whenever we do come to the point of wanting to look at okay, how am I going to change my relationship with alcohol?
We have to look at why we're drinking in the first place.
Absolutely, So back to your story. You are, as you just described it, living this supposedly idyllic life, your relationship with alcohol. Did it escalate or did just the effects of it get more? I mean you were saying, how you are anxiety and you're going to the doctor. What happened next in terms of you beginning to put these pieces together that maybe that alcohol was the problem.
Yeah, And I wouldn't say it escalated. I went through phases where there would be significant drinking and then phases where I would cut back. But it was always there in some way. And whenever there was a day where things were really hard, there was a big stress at work, there was a problem, my husband and I had an argument, whatever it was, alcohol was always my solution. And then in twenty seventeen, I went to a friend's fortieth I got really pissed and went outside for a cigarette because
when I drank, I smoked. I was wearing high heels, which as a mum you don't do very often anymore, and I crouched down to put out my cigarette was pissed and I fell forward, but I didn't have any reflexes, and so I landed face first onto a concrete driveway and cut my lip open, cut my nose, blood everywhere, and my friend took me home and put me to bed,
and I woke up the next morning to scarlet. My daughter was five at the time, standing beside my bed, and she said, Mummy, Mummy, what happened to your face? And oh, Holly, in that moment, I just felt such shame, such disgust, such self loathing. I lied to everybody and told them that we'd been out on the boat and the boat had gone over a big wave and I'd fallen forward and landed on my face. Because I felt so ashamed that I had this drinking accident. I was
forty one. I was like, what is wrong with me? And I went to the chemist to get some I said, I was like, I have to go to the school concert this week. I have to go to all these things. You have to make me look normal. So she gave me all these ibuprofen and arnaca and all these things, and then she slipped me a card for domestic violence.
Oh and honestly, light it was like someone that punched me in the stomach, and I stood there and my eyes just filled with tears, which probably made her think even more that she had done the right thing.
More of my conversation with Sarah respect after this shortbreak stay with us. It was like she sensed there was some shame here or some distress here, that this wasn't just an incident on the boat, but she misdiagnosed its source.
So I decided there and then I'm going to do a twenty one day reset, because everyone says it takes twenty one days to break a habit, and in my mind, I just had a bad habit. I wasn't an alcoholic. I'd googled that many times and I had, you know, very happily said to myself, No, I do not fit those criteria. I'm not an alcoholic, so therefore I don't have a problem with alcohol. So it's fine.
Do you agree with the statement I've heard before, which is, if you're googling am I drinking too much? Or am I an alcoholic? Then the answer is almost certainly yes. Do you agree with that statement or not?
So the first one that you said, yes, if you're ever googling am I drinking too much? You're drinking too much? Do I think I was an alcoholic? I don't like that label. I don't like that term. It depends in what definition you call an alcoholic. But yes, I was definitely drinking too much.
I don't think it's even used anymore, is it. It's not so it's now that you have alcohol use disorder? Is that what it's called now? And do you is there one of the reasons you don't like that term because it's stigmatizing, but also because maybe it's a bit too easy to not include yourself in it. Why do you not like that?
I think it's really unhelpful because I think we've although we don't use that term anymore, and we use alcohol use disorder, as you said, and we call it mild, moderate, or severe, and severe alcohol use disorder would be the equivalent of what the old term would have been around being an alcoholic, and most people's stereotypical view of an alcoholic it's someone who drinks every day, someone who drinks in the morning, someone who's lost their home. And I
didn't tick those boxes. And so because I.
Didn't, vodka hidden under the sun, they've got yet.
I wasn't drinking hard spirits. I wasn't Suellen from Dallas sitting around in my silk neglige a all day drinking hard liquor. I was a mum who drank a bit too much a few nights a week. I wasn't what I would have called an alcoholic. And so because I didn't give myself that label, and there was no other label that i'd heard of, because I hadn't heard of gray area drinking, I just thought, well, I'm just a
social drinker, so I'm fine. Whereas that That's where I think the term gray area drinking is helpful because it gives people more like ownership of where they sit on that alcohol scale.
So you going right twenty one days? So had you tried that before? Or was this the first time you decided to do a proper break other than pregnancy.
So yeah, I've done my breaks in pregnancy, and back in London, i'd done a couple of dry januaries, but this was my first break for quite some time. So I did twenty one days and I sailed through it like I was literally really, I think that I was so ready for change that and this is twenty seventeen. There wasn't the books, the podcast, the support communities that there is now. I read Annie Grace's book This Naked Mind,
and that was it. And I got to twenty one days, and I couldn't believe the difference, Like my anxiety much disappeared. I was sleeping eight hours. I felt really positive, I felt really energized. I was really making headway. I had my own recruitment business here in Perth, and so I got to twenty one days and I was like, well, I'm going to keep going because I'm feeling fricking awesome.
So I kept going and got to one hundred days, and do you know, in that three months, I made more money in my recruitment business than I made in the entire year the year before.
Because that's amazing. So the benefits were in all areas of your life. I want to ask you about socially, but maybe we'll get to that in a while, because that's I always think that must be one of the biggest barriers. So anyway, you get to one hundred days and then I.
Go, well, I can't never drink again because that would just be weird. Because I'm Sarah the party girl and I hadn't done any work on myself to think about identity shifts or anything else, which is a part of changing our relationship with alcohol. But I didn't know that. So I thought, I've done one hundred days. I clearly don't have a problem with alcohol, because if I did, I wouldn't have been able to just do that. Everything's fine.
I've now reset. So now I'm going to be a normal, moderate drinker, and I'll just be someone that goes and has a glass of wine every now and then like other people, and everything will be good. And so that first night, I remember going out for dinner with my best friend and my husband and her husband, and I had a glass of wine and I was sat there going, oh,
look at me, I am a reform drinker. I had a glass of wine, didn't want any more, felt okay, went home next day super proud of myself, and within a month I was back to drinking how I had been before. It crept up slowly. There was always another reason to justify it. Was like, as soon as I'd opened the door and inch, it flew open a mile and I was shocked.
Yeah, do you think that's because I think we're in terms of the stories we tell ourselves about alcohol. You know, we just talked about some of them. What a problem drinker looks like? One of them is also, can you just have a couple and stop That's another one of those stories we tell ourselves. Or we say, I'm not an addictive personality. She over there definitely an addictive personality because she can't stop it too. Do you think that's true?
Do you think moderation can work for some people and some people are just not built for it, or do you think moderation is another one of those kind of traps that we we fall into.
Some people will always happily moderate some I've got a friend who is just a take it or leave it drinker. She's a two on that scale of one to ten. You say to her, hey, han, what can I get you from the bar? And She'll be like, do I want a whine? Or do I want a diet coke? You know, alcoholist doesn't? It just doesn't feature for her. I always say, if you've crossed the line and gone from being a take it or leave it drinker to a gray area drinker, you've then created neural pathways in
your brain that associate certain things with alcohol. So when I'm stressed, I have alcohol. When I'm tired, I have alcohol. When the kids are driving me bonkers, I have alcohol. Those neural pathways don't disappear no matter how long you take off. And that was what I found, was that as soon as I'd opened that door a tiny bit, the neural pathways almost started firing up again. And then it was like, oh, you're stressed, you must have a drink. Or it's Friday, so you must have a drink. And
all of those associations come back. And I have supported thousands and thousands of women now, and I see it day after day after day that people think, Okay, I've taken a break, I've reset. Now I'll be able to moderate, and it often doesn't happen, don't. I can't think of anyone actually who I know who's gone from being a gray area drinker to being someone that is just a complete take it or leave it drinker.
Yeah right, okay, So then at this point you're back drinking as you were before. Was it an obvious given the good experience you'd had of sobriety, Was it an obvious decision now too? I need to actually become sober.
Oh no, I was in denial because and I kind of shoved away all the thoughts and all those little voices going you were so much happier when you were sober.
Everything was so much better when you so But I just pushed all of that away and I just had then two years that followed of taking breaks, going back to drinking, taking breaks, going back to drinking, And finally twenty nineteen, a dear friend of mine said to me, why do you keep going back to it when you always tell me that everything in your life is better without alcohol? You show you are the mum you want to be, You are the wife you want to be.
You are happier, your health is better, your smashing goals at work, your mental health improves. Why are you fighting so hard to keep it in your life?
That's so interesting? Why are you fighting to keep it? What was your answer?
I hung up on her.
Concerning conversation.
Yeah, well yeah, who asked you? Friend? Yeah? And so yeah, I didn't want to hear it. That what she said to me never went away. And that was in the March, and I then set a date for the April, and I said I'm going to take a year off because I've never done a year before, I'd done two stints of one hundred days. I've done a few thirty days,
but said I'm going to do a year. But in my heart of hearts, Holly, I knew that that would be it because she'd just put up a mirror to me, and everything she said made sense, and I had proved to myself time and time again that moderation was never going to be an option for me, so that wasn't There was no third option, So the two options were simply carry on drinking like you are, which is causing you more and more anxiety the older you get, impacting
your sleep. I was at the point where even two glasses of wine, I was taking half a sleeping tablet to override the three am wake up that would come from the two glasses of wine. So you can imagine how you feel in the morning that half a bottle of wine had sleeping tablet. And then you can't show up as your best self and be the mom, the worker, the friend, the wife you want to be when you're just feeling ooh like I never felt hungover, but I just felt four or five that at ten most days, Yeah.
I want to go back to your friend who held up the mirror, because one of the things I really would love us to dive into is kind of the social aspect of being the person who stops because you've I've heard you say that Gray Area drinkers hang out with Gray Area drinkers because we don't want that mirror held up to us necessarily. And if everybody's doing the same thing, then you don't have a problem. These are friends you know that you I'm sure you know from
all different kinds of walks of life. Was it hard socially to be the person who when you're at one of your Sunday lunches or you're at a you know, one of the many social occasions that come with having families and friends and stuff. Was it hard to be the one who said, oh, no, I'll have a soda order?
Yeah? Really hard, because I didn't expect no one, like everyone says, to not drink around me, Like I can't go, oh, I'm not drinking, so therefore no one else is allowed to. So you kind of put on this show that it's not hard and yeah, yeah it's fine, and you feel this pressure to still pretend that everything's still the same but inside you're feeling really clunky, You're feeling really awkward, you feel a little bit paranoid, You're worried what people
are thinking about You're not drinking. Am I being funny enough? Am I talking enough?
Oh?
No, I'm being really quiet. Like that doesn't happen now, by the way, But that is what it's like at the start, in.
The early days. And what do you tell your women that you work with and support will help them get through that tricky bit? Because I know it seems sad to say out loud, but I just think that, given what we've talked about about the culture that we've been swimming in for thirty years, often by this point the idea of going to a Saturday lunch with the girls and not drinking, or Sunday afternoon barbecues with the kids and not drinking actually seems can seem impossible, almost, like
because that's just not what we do. What's your best advice for getting through those weird early days?
Yeah? And I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book because it's the area that comes up time and time again. And I and my advice in my book is what I'll say to you now, as well, which is I wish I'd been more honest at the start. So I felt shame and I felt like I was letting people down by not drinking, because my story that I told myself was well, people want me to be the life and party and people expect me to always have wine in the fridge when they come to my house.
So I didn't want to say to people, are my mental health really suffering? I really am not going well with alcohol, because I felt ashamed that I'd got to that point. So my line was, Oh, I just want to lose a bit of weight, but then you leave yourself open to a well have a occur and so do them because there's no calories in that, or you don't need to lose weight. What are you talking about? So I probably did give myself set myself up to make it a bit harder than it needed to be.
And if I was to have my time again, I would have been way more honest and open with how alcohol was impacting me from a mental health perspective with the people that I trusted and asked for their support.
Did it make some of your friends uncomfortable? Absolutely, because it made them feel judged, Absolutely, and even though you weren't judging them, but that's how they it can feel, you know.
Of course. And you know when I was drinking, I was the one that was like, oh God, what do you mean You're coming to my birthday and you're not drinking. You have to drink. There's no point you coming if you can't drink. Like I was terrible for putting that kind of pressure on people because I had a problem with alcohol. So it made me uncomfortable if someone was able to go and have fun and not drink, like I just thought they were weird and they were not
my people. And so I really do not my people.
That's such an interesting phrase that we using.
Yeah, And so it was a process that I do think that the more open and honest we can be, and then we have to be really selective with what we choose to go to. Like I had a client email me the other day and she was like, I don't think I'm ever going to have fun again. I went to a beer festival with all my friends and I actually just found everyone really irritating them or because
they got the more annoying they were. I just sat there thinking, oh my god, I'm never going to have fun again, and I was like, Han, what the hell are you doing going to a beer festival if you're not drinking beer? Like, you've got to be really selective with what you do and where you go, because you can still have fun. My life is probably more fun, more adventurous, more fulfilling now than it ever was before. But you have to be selective with what you do.
You can't just do what you did and not drink, because it turns out being around loads of people who are getting absolutely shitfaced and when you're still sober, laughing at things that are not funny just because you feel like you have to fit in is actually really hard work and not that much fun.
And drunk people are indeed boring and annoying when you are not drunk yourself exactly. Of course, what about in your close relationships? So I've heard you say that you and your husband, for example, used to have a drink together at the end of the day, Like I assume not a binge drink, but you know, you would sit down and have a beer or a win together at the end of the day and it was an important
reconnecting time. And there are moments like that that we probably lots of gray area drinkers would have in our lives where we go. You know, it's the mark between Friday and the weekend. It's the mark between summer, or it's holidays or it's whatever. How did that play out in your relationship and your intimate relationship.
Yeah, it was hard, and it actually led to us being in couples therapy and going through quite a challenging time because we hadn't recognized the importance of that ritual of connection that came with him coming home and I would hear his truck pulling into the driveway and I'd be like, it's wine time, and then I would get my wine, I'd get his beer. We'd go sit outside, we'd have a drink, and we'd be like, how are you, How was your day? So when we stopped drinking, he
stopped at the same time that I did. We didn't do that, but we didn't realize the importance that that ritual of connection had had just in that few minutes of having eye contact and going how are you, how was your day? And you know what it's like when you're both working. We have our own businesses. We've got two kids that seem to do every fricking sport under the sun. So every day you're going from one logistical
thing to the other. And because we didn't have the alcohol is the thing that was like, oh, let's go sit down and have a drink together, we stopped doing it and we went to the couple's therapy and I remember the therapist going, do you not see what has changed with you not doing that anymore? Because it's more than just sitting down having a drink. It's a way of saying to that person you matter. To me, you're important. Let's just sit down and have a drink together and
let me ask you about your day. And we'd stop doing that. So our new ritual became, you know, not quite the same as having a drink, but equally as important. Every night, after dinner, we went for a walk and on that walk, how are you, how was your day? Because just setting that time, sometimes it was five minutes, sometimes it was forty five minutes, depending on how much we wanted to talk about that day. But in that process of doing that, you are saying to that other person,
you're important. I want to spend a few minutes with you, even if that's all it is.
So it's about it's not the alcohol. And I imagine that was probably in some of your friendships too, because I'm thinking about some friends I have that when we go, we're going to have a catch up. What that means is we're going to go and have a wine, right, And so if we don't go and have a wine, like, does the catch up happen? I guess that again, it's fine and the other thing. So it's go for a
walk together, go and do something else together, exactly. And is that what you started to do with your friends?
Totally? Totally so. And if they were going out and getting pissed, I was always happy to be the driver and I would be like, I'll probably stay for two hours when you all start spitting in my face and repeating yourself, I'm going home and I'll catch up with you again soon, so don't be offended if I do. And it was having the courage and the confidence to go.
It's not fun for me after they pass a certain point of pissness, but because there's any judgment from me, but just that's when we're on different wavelengths completely, So I would just go home. But equally, we started doing more things and I'm quite a proactive person. So I'd be like, right, let's go to this comedy show, let's go to this theater. Who wants to comes to this yoga class with me? And I do lots of walks with girlfriends at you know, five six in the morning
and put the world to rights. And so it's really really important that we maintain some form of connection with the people that really matter to us, because it can feel you can feel really isolated and really lonely when we live in such an alcohol centric society to be the person that's not drinking.
The rest of my conversation with Sarah respect when we come back. You said that your husband stopped at the same time as you. Was that a deliberate thing? Did he have a similar relationship like with alcohol part of your relationship apart from the wine at night? Do you think you kind of had to stop together? Do you think it would have worked otherwise?
Yeah, it's the question I get asked the most I get most, you know, is how do I navigate if my partner's still drinking? I mean, we met when we were twenty four, and my chat up line was do you want to come and play my drinking game? Like our life was started on.
So the answer was yes, alcohol was part of your.
Pace, right, And so we've grown up together. And his relationship with alcohol, in some ways was different, in some ways was the same. He had never taken breaks during those two years when I'd done one hundred days and stopped, he carried on drinking. But he was observing. And that's what I always say to my ladies is you don't have to say anything, but if anything, if you're going to say anything, you can't tell someone what to do. You can't tell them that they have to stop drinking,
like it's their choice to make. But if you talk a lot about the positives you're getting from not drinking, it does impact them more than your real life. So I'd be like, oh my god, I can't believe the change in my energy. I can't believe how productive I am. I can't believe how much clearer my head is. I can't believe how much happier I feel. And when you're
saying all of that, they can't help but notice. And he then just got to that point, although he hadn't taken all of these different breaks, where he was like, Yeah, I'm going to join.
You, and it's stuck for him too.
He's dabbled a little bit since, but is realizing again that moderation is not that he hadn't gone through what I've gone through in those two years, and so he had got to that point of wanting to test it and then just was like, it's not worth it. Like I'm forty eight now I can't drink like I used to do. The impact and the hangovers and everything else. It's And that's what I say to everyone, is you don't have to call yourself an alcoholic to decide to
stop drinking. But we can remember that in our forties and fifties, we're never going to be able to metabolize alcohol like we can in our twenties, and it's going to have way more of a trade off. And then that's where we get to that point of going is it worth it? Or have I passed that tipping point where it takes more than it's giving and it's simply not worth it.
Yeah, we're talking in the middle of summer. It's been Christmas, it's holidays, it's a highly social time. It's often a time that women are questioning, well, people are questioning their alcohol use, even if they love it. You know, even if they don't, you get to a point where you're like, is it serving? Isn't it serving? What do you think of the questions to ask yourself about whether or not you are a gray area drinker?
Yeah, so there's a few signs. So number one, as we started this whole conversation, do I have rules around my drinking? And do I have a lot of internal chatter about my drinking? Am I constantly negotiating breaking my rules and finding ways to justify doing that? Is a sure sign that we're in that gray area.
It's almost like alcohol is a character in your story, you know what I mean? Whereas if you didn't have any issues with it, it wouldn't.
Be achter, It doesn't take up heads, would.
Be a cameo. It just turns up every now and again.
And yeah, exactly exactly do you find that alcohol is your go to every time you're experiencing and uncomfort motion? So is that the only thing in your toolkit? Which is what I find with most of the women I work with, is they don't have anything else. They've been using alcohol for a really, really, really long time for any kind of adversity, and that's when it can become problematic as well. Do we often drink more than we intend to? Is it always I'm just going to have
one and then it usually ends up being more. Have we started to notice the negative impact of alcohol on us? So? Have we started to notice that it's causing us to wake up at two or three in the morning? Have we noticed the next day we might not feel hungover, but we might have a bit more anxiety, we might be feeling tired, we might be feeling that five out
of ten. Here's another really great question. If I said to you, to any of your listeners and all of your ladies listening now, and then right today, we're going to do nighty days off booze. So from today going forward, nighty days off booze. Let's see how we go. If you're a gray area drinker, I can pretty much guarantee that there will be something that's coming up in your head as resistance, because people who are not Gray area drinkers just be like, yeah, sure, I don't know. A
days off, I don't mind. But if we've got a relationship with alcohol in some way, I can't go to that wedding, I can't go to that party. I can't go on that holiday, I can't do any of those things without alcohol, then we've definitely formed some kind of either emotional dependence, social dependence, whatever it might be.
Can I ask you, because there will be lots of people listening to this who when you ask that question, have that reaction? As you say, one of the reasons why you're passionate about Gray Area drinking, as you've said several times, is that you know, we've told ourselves this story that people who have a problem look like this, and the rest of us are over here and we
just like having good time, whatever it might be. You've talked about the mental health benefits of giving up alcohol, certainly for you, and the physical benefits of feeling great. Tell me about some of the risks of alcohol that we understand more now than we perhaps used to.
Yeah, I think the most alarming thing that I learned when I started researching my book and and getting very involved in this world is that women cannot metabolize alcohol in the same way as men. Women are very, very vulnerable to the health risks of alcohol because we produce less of an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenates ald H, and this is the enzyme whose job is to break down and remove alcohol from the body as quickly as possible.
So women have less of this, which means we have whenever we drink more alcohol enters our bloodstream because our body can't metabolize it as effectively. This means that women are more susceptible to liver disease, heart disease, stroke, cancer, brain health issues. I interviewed and Dasett Johnson, who's an incredible health journalist from Canada who's written a book on women in alcohol. She said, alcohol related stroke happens in both men and women, but happens seven times faster in
women because we cannot metabolize alcohol as effectively. So that's one situation we've got. And then the next is as women age, our levels of ALDH drop even more, plus our liver volume begins to shrink. Plus we've got perimenopause issues going on. So women and men metabolize alcohol differently anyway. And then you've got a woman in her forties and
fifties who's struggling even more to metabolize alcohol. So this is why you start to see for women in this age group where they're starting to get more affected by anxiety. The next day, they're starting to get more affected by sleep. Women's risk of breast cancer related to alcohol. One in five breast cancer deaths in Australia is caused by alcohol. And people think that this is if you're drinking like
Suellen and Dallas and hard liquor every day. But Hoberman did a podcast that states very clearly three units of alcohol or more per week increases your chance of developing cancer by fifteen percent. So it's not we don't have to be drinking huge, huge, huge amounts start to have the impact the negative impact on our health from alcohol.
And I think that a lot has been done by the alcohol industry to try and muddy the water here, you know, the whole red wine's good for the heart, and everything that they'll try and put out there to make us think it's not damaging and.
Please drink responsibly, and the number of units in a bottle and all those kind of things. From your journey and your experience and from this ever increasing knowledge, we know that younger people are drinking less than ever before. Is your general position that alcohol just shouldn't be a part of anybody's life, that that is not really a safe level and that we've kind of been a little bit exploited by the alcohol industry. Is that your general position.
Yes on the exploitation, right, So yes, there there's evidence now that has come out that showed about thirty years ago the alcohol big wigs in the alcohol industry sat down to talk about how can we make more money? We are not making an money from women. How can we get women to drink more? And this was where we saw the introduction of alcopops and we saw the introduction of feminine specific marketing campaigns to get women to consume more alcohol. And it's worked.
Something we would all be familiar with, right, we would all be familiar with girls lunches, bottomless brunches, rose all day. You know, it's marguerite to time, all that stuff. It's very much aimed at women.
Yeah. And my position is not you must never drink. Everyone has free will. I am not advocating for prohibition and saying we should, you know, make alcohol illegal at all.
What I want is for there to be more information available for women to make informed choices and decisions, and for them to be more awareness around the health impacts of alcohol, specifically to women, and for them to be more awareness and support and information out there about how to actually change your relationship with alcohol if you don't
fit that criteria for ourlcoholism. Because I've even got a client who went to a medical rehab facility because she was worried about how much she was drinking and she wanted help, and she was drinking two bottles of wine at night, and she was turned away and told, you're not drinking enough to be admitted here. You just need to cut down. Now, alcohol's the fifth most addictive substance in the world. It is highly addictive. If we've passed the point of being a taker or leave it drinker,
it's simply not as easy as going. You've just got to cut down, Like, we need to have more support. And there's only one of me, and I'm trying to do an awful lot which I do to support midlife women, but there's so much more that could be done around this area.
What do you tell your kids about drinking?
Yeah, it's an interesting one because my son's nearly fifteen, and so you know who's the age I was when I started drinking.
Yeah, it's and it's in there. It begins to be in their world.
Totally and I've said to him, it doesn't bother me if you drink alcohol, because it doesn't. But he will be educated and told about the risks of alcohol in a way that I never was.
Yeah. Absolutely. If there are people listening to this who are like, yes, that is me, that is me, but they're like, I literally cannot imagine my life without the five o'clock glass of wine or whatever, it is a little bit about the sort of support that's out there from you and other organizations like you mentioned before, that we are now living in a world that's much more open to being sober curious as people say, and you
know there's more support out there. What do you say to the woman who's like, well, yeah, I know it's a problem. I know I'm not living my best life, but I just can't imagine a world without alcohol.
Yeah, and I couldn't. And I think, don't go that far, don't think too far ahead, just baby steps and just go right. I'm just going to take a thirty day break, and I run women's thirty day programs throughout the year where we come into a group together. We've got women from all over the world who are doing thirty days off together because that that's what just starts us on that path of going ah, and then we can ask ourselves the questions, Okay, well is my sleep there, has
my anxiety disappeared? Do I feel more positive? Have I got more energy and my calmer with my kids? Is my skin looking better? Maybe I've lost a little bit of weight. Maybe I'm going back to doing some more hobbies and I've got the exercise to go to the gym,
and I'm doing all of these things. And those are the things that we can just ask ourselves to get information, because what I find is most people are just living on autopilot and their life is just passing them by, and they're never pausing to go well is this still serving me or not? And that thirty day break can
just be the first starting point of going okay. I'm just going to see this as an experiment because all those things that I just said, I can guarantee you that they change in thirty days and plus so much more.
This has been marvelous. I hope you really enjoyed that conversation. I did. Look, as I said to Sarah, I'm not a sober person. I do drink. I did drink over Christmas but I find it really interesting that it's becoming so much more mainstream and acceptable to question your relationship with booze, and that sobriety is coming out of being something that all, most weirdly in Australian culture we think is strange, and that this far less stigma attached now
to choosing to be alcohol free. Both Australia and the UK are big drinking cultures, and when you really start to notice that, you notice it everywhere. And if you're the first in your family, or your friend group or your circle of friends to make that change, it can be daunting, isolating, and Sarah's conversation I hope will help
you with that. As I say, I'm certainly not a sober person, but I know that I am much more interested in moderation now than I was in my twenties, and I find these kind of conversations like the one I've just had with Sarah it's so interesting. I hope it's been helpful for you too. And if you want to learn more about what Sarah does, links in our show notes here to tell you more about her programs and also more about her book, So go and check that out. The host and creator of No Filter is
Mia Friedman. Our executive producer is Niama Brown. Our audio design and sound production is by Jacob Brown. And I've been your guest host Holly Wainwright. Cheers to you friends, whether it's shampas or sprite in your glass.