Women, Menopause and Alcohol: Insights from Kate Baily

Kate is an ICF accredited Holistic Life Coach, Certified Menopause Doula and yoga teacher, a She Recovers Coach and an Addictive Behaviours Specialist coach and mentor, the author of two books and the founder of Love Sober and Love Sober Podcast.  She has supported women in their midlife from all over the world to  get off the hormonal rollercoaster and build happy, confident alcohol free-lives. ​You can find out more about her here Kate Baily

This is a HOT topic and a conversation I am so grateful for. SO many nuggets of goodness here around mindset, context, behaviour and tools! We discuss:

  • How “grey area” drinking may not be serving you right now

  • Some links between feminism, parenting and the wine times narrative

  • The “perfect storm” our livers and lives are handling

  • Shifts in social identity and community

  • The power and practice of holding our boundaries for ourselves

  • Some practical ideas to create change 

Prefer to listen to the podcast? Click here Alcohol, women and menopause, a conversation with Kate Baily.

Kate, thank you so much for making time this Friday to have a conversation. I am looking forward to diving into alcohol or rather the lack of alcohol in midlife and beyond and in any stage of our lives and the work that you do. So would you like to introduce yourself and tell us about what you do in the world?

Hi, Maude. Thank you so much for inviting me today. Where do we start with this? My goodness. It's something that's become, I suppose there's a personal connection and a professional connection here, which led me into this work. I am a midlife coach presently, and I specialise in the areas of habit change, grey area drinking alcohol.

I'm a holistic coach because we know that it's not all about mindset. A lot of coaching is okay, we're going mindset, we've got goals. But as a woman who is menopausal herself, if anyone was just to say to me, it's all just about the mindset, I would probably run at them with a fork because we know that there's a lot going on in the body.

There's a lot going on hormonally. To work holistically on a physical level, as well as a kind of mindset goal, organisational level, I found to be incredibly important in my life and in my work. So the background to the alcohol piece is that I set up a community interest company called Love Sober about five years ago. I was one of the two halves of the Love Sober podcast, which I set up about eight years ago, which was the UK's first Sober Curious podcast, it was two moms chatting about life, mental health, parenting, alcohol and all the intersections of that piece.

Then I wrote two books about alcohol and the female connection, the stress connection. And the second book was holistic, it's Love Your Sober Year, which is very much again, all the holistic tools to make sure we're regulated and well and nurtured so that we're not stressed out, dysregulated and then running towards our goal for that stress relief, which is mainly what I was doing back in the day. I've been sober about 10 years now.

But definitely what I was doing and what I generally saw, we weren't talking rock bottom addiction stories. We were talking regular, everyday woman coping with stress at the end of the day with alcohol and why now that doesn't work in our midlife so well. So I think we're going to dive into that.

You've said a couple of things that I want to come back to. So I've written down grey area drinking and stress connection as word combinations that I'd love for you to tell us more about.

What is grey area drinking?

Grey area drinking is this terminology which has really come into being over the last seven, eight years. There was a real cultural narrative that somehow there was this black and white situation. You're either a normal drinker, I'm doing bubble quotes, or you're an alcoholic. And this very unhelpful narrative for many, many people who didn't see themselves, didn't relate to being all the wheels off the wagon, needing a medical detox, but also knew that there was something up. I can't remember when it was, maybe 2012, the World Health Organisation really dug into alcohol and produced a great document about the spectrum of alcohol use disorder. And in medical terms, that's what we should be talking about now. It's not whether you're an alcoholic, it's talking about an alcohol use disorder spectrum. So on one hand, you might have an occasional glass of sherry, there's no problem, like grandma or at Christmas. On the other hand, you have a kind of almost classically understood rehab story, vodka on the cornflakes.

And then in between, the middle, you have this big grey area. And what's quite confusing is, especially in the UK and in the States, I don't know about other more Western societies, you have this huge grey area that's quite normalised. That whole conversation about women putting their feet up at the end of the day, having a couple of glasses of wine for stress relief would be seen through that lens as self-medicating and creating an unhelpful habit. So using it for emotional reasons as well. But culturally it's very normal. So there's that grey area. And what's very confusing for people is when you're in that, it might not feel right. It might make you go, hang on a minute, I really should cut down. It's those kinds of questions, hang on. I'm feeling really jaded this morning. Maybe I'll have a couple of weeks off.

So we start having those conversations and that's a really good indicator that you're in that grey area of drinking where it's not as harmless as you might think and it's probably good to just be asking a few questions at that point.

That makes a lot of sense to see it on a spectrum and find ourselves in there, just like many other places where we are, maybe neither here nor there, but somewhere in the middle. I'm thinking about is this supporting me right now, is this supporting my health right now? You talked about the female connection and the stress connection to alcohol. And when I heard you speak about normalising the five o'clock wine, I'd say I go even a step further and say not only is it normalised, it's almost glamorised, right? It's become sexy, fun, something we connect over, something that is widespread, we make jokes about it. What do you see as specifically female in the connection to alcohol or maybe that stress relief usage?

II think you're absolutely right. I'll just go back to that about the sort of glamorising, normalising, expecting, almost celebrating that. And I think with that, we go back a little bit further almost to the early 90s because, we're talking about Gen, Gen X women, aren't we here, who are in our 40s, 50s, probably 50s, late 40s, 50s. Who started to ask this kind of question, but back there in the early 90s, it was part of that feminist piece where there was a real feminisation, a feminist piece of the ladettes. We can drink like the boys, we can do what the boys were doing, work hard, play hard and all of that. So it got linked with feminism there. And then we skipped forward to a couple of decades and you've got the influences on social media and the real parent, almost honest parenting brigade who might be pushing a pram with a bottle of wine in it. Before that you had this yummy mummy almost perfect. So this was a backlash against that. But it was almost like it got then linked with this stress and and not having to be a perfect mom and not having to be a perfect parent and a bit of a two fingers up, which is brilliant. It's like we can't be can't be perfect.

But what it did is I didn't ask the right question. So rather than numbing ourselves down with alcohol and carrying on dysregulating ourselves further, like in our book, the first book, which was Love Yourself Sober, it was like, what's self-care looking like? What do I actually need? Do I need affordable childcare? Do I need to lower my hours at work? Do I need extra support here?

And let's ask, no shame, no blame on mums because we were doing heavy lifting often and running ourselves ragged. But let's ask better questions about what we need. And that is what empowerment looks like, not just saying, I'll just shut myself up at the end of the day with a glass of wine.

Really interesting to think about behaviour in connection to context and environment and what might be happening politically and the ideology behind it. And I love this positioning of maybe going another layer deeper of, okay, so there's a feeling of I don't want that, or I want to be part of this, or there's an energy that I want to belong to, or there's a freedom that I want to have, or there's a vulnerability that I want to share.

And so that we've stopped with drinking or we're having this behaviour. And is that really the problem to solve? Or is that really the thing that needs shifting and changing? I love that. Tell us why then in this window when we're maybe going into our late 30s and 40s and we're entering the perimenopausal window, why is alcohol so impactful on our hormonal health at that time?

We fast forward a little bit further and we start to have that perimenopause, the hormonal shifts and undulations, which there's a couple of things happening there in terms of, again, if we look at it through that psychosocial model, we are seeing drinking peak often and mental health. So when we have a maternal mental health crisis, peak in that or a female mental health situation peak, we often have the alcohol peak going with it.

We have that early motherhood with the loss of identity and the kind of the stress and off maybe with, it happened to me where I had to move to a new town. I stopped working. We shared the division of labour. My husband went out to work. We almost had that traditional set up, but I found myself suddenly ask, who am I? Identity crisis, bored, stressed, thinking I'll have a party of one with a glass of wine out on the patio at five o'clock because that's all I had. It was almost like that was all I had. So then we go again into those perimenopause and menopause years. That's another huge rite of passage for women, which until recently hasn't really been supported or talked about, but massive in terms of our identity shifting.

And come back a little bit before with the perimenopause, we didn't even know it was a thing. Until quite recently, we didn't know it was happening. But so at that point with this undulation of oestrogen, hormonal fluctuations, delivery is really important at this point in terms of metabolising whatever oestrogen, estradiol is available to us. If we are drinking alcohol at this point. The liver will prioritise removing the toxins from the body rather than metabolising oestrogen. So our perimenopausal symptoms will be worse. We'll have the low mood, the brain fog, whatever we've got going on, that will be worse. Then you add in the stress factor. If we're not dealing with the underlying causes of the stress at that point, we're getting even older.

I hit my menopause when I still had a child in primary school. So that was quite hard work and this idea that, okay, rest is quite hard. So if we're stressed as well, that cortisol connection, that's impacting even more because the system is flooded with cortisol and we're having to then also cope biologically with that. And that's going to interrupt the metabolisation of oestrogen. We've got this cluster of alcohol stress and hormones almost like a perfect storm at this point.

A perfect storm at a time where we are often stepping into bigger roles in career. As you said, we may have children that are growing up, different kinds of emotional needs, sometimes parents are ageing. And so there's a lot of external factors that we're carrying as well.

It's almost like we've got really got to be on our A game at that point, just at a point where physiologically it's more challenging for us.

At the beginning, you talked about this combination of yes, looking at mindset and what am I thinking and believing about myself or my place in the world or who I am, and then creating physical changes in what's my behaviour? What am I inputting to my body? How am I nourishing it? And in a way, we've also talked about the context, right? What is the environment around me?

What am I receiving from media messaging? What's my community like? One of the things that I see over and over again is that connection and support is so helpful over this time, right? Having good friends, having places we can be honest, having places where we have fun, having partnerships or friendships that feel trusting and deep. And one of the things that I see also is that often those connections involve alcohol, they involve having a drink unwinding with your husband, with a glass of wine in the evening or girls night out or weekends away, whatever it may be. Talk to us a little bit about decoupling that or starting to break the habit of can I have connection without drinking if everybody else is having a couple of glasses of bubbles because I think that's a big yearning for us at this time of being with our friends or being in community, how do we manage that? What are some ideas around managing that?

I love what you said about decoupling or uncoupling those because again, I think the thing that can be really helpful is that the grey area framework. It's okay to be asking those questions for a start. Then you're absolutely right about the connection piece.

What's happened in the last few years, if you go looking, if you're interested, what is great is on the internet, there are loads of sober groups now and they're very celebratory. My site's called Love Sober and I wanted it because that's what it says on the tin. It's like, we love being sober. You've got Soberistas, which are probably the first. You log on, it looks like a magazine. It's not frightening. It's just like, OK. We're fine. We can hang out with you and me, because we're used to it, like magazine reading demographic, aren't we? Generation. There's also a wonderful organisation called Club Soda in the UK. And what they really wanted to do, their mission statement was to work with the alcohol industry and with the pub industry to create an environment where drinkers and non-drinkers can just sit together at the same table. So they basically created a whole network to get all of these lovely alcohol-free options into pubs and into restaurants. They've got a shop in London, you can go tasting, mixology classes. So it's actually not a social death sentence that it used to be. It's actually a really thriving, one of the biggest growth areas that there is actually in hospitality is the alcohol-free market.

Flipping that mindset to like, okay, I'm one of these up and coming people, you know, I'm not just doing this. So, how can we have an amazing alcohol free mojito? It's almost like being a booze detective. Let's be smart about our choices. Let's ask for what we want.

We can curate our social lives to more than we thought, we can go for brunch together. We can try this. We could do an alcohol-free cocktail class together, you'd be surprised once you start looking, you probably see it absolutely everywhere. So that's what I would say is just be curious, be curious about it because there's no reason why this should be a social penalty.

I love this reframing of thinking about the love or the excitement or the adventure or the opportunity that might be possible with a different relationship with alcohol or a different relationship with socialising. One thing that I've noticed is that it also takes some time. So if your friends are habituated or your community is habituated to pouring your glass of wine when you walk in the door.

I'm now at the point where they ask me if I want some tea or some sparkling water or sometimes they'll even get me a special drink and they'll be so proud of the ginger beer that they organised for me which is really lovely. But it's taken a couple of years of me repeatedly saying, no, it's fine. I brought my own or no thanks, not today for that to normalise. And so I think also there's a piece of recognising that sometimes when we set boundaries, it is a change in the dynamic and it may take a little bit of time for others to come along with that. And so we've got to be really committed to that or devoted to it in a way. When you think about somebody who's listening and thinking, I am curious, I would like to maybe make some change. Don't know if I like where I am in the grey. What is some of your advice around both steps.

I think that to almost say well done for even questioning it, because if we're not going looking for it, we can still be operating on all those old received messages, especially this time of year. So that's one thing.

I would say get connected with a group as well. Do some research, read some books, listen to some podcasts. Get a bit aware and informed about it. Because I think, knowledge is power. I would also say if you're in your midlife, there's a few different, there's some sort of some practical suggestions. But again, I feel like there's a holistic piece around our mindsets here. I think the midlife, what is amazing about the midlife and challenging about that midlife perimenopause transition. So transitions are tricky. That's the nature of them. But what they can do is they can shake things up and give us an opportunity for growth. And so it's a brilliant time. It's such a great time of life to be looking at your habits and saying, okay, I'm going to just update the cache here. Is this still working for me?

I haven't got to this age because I don't have skills. I've got loads of life experience. I've got loads of skills. A lot of us have done jobs, had families, maybe traveled the world, whatever. So, kind of big yourself up for a start and just say, look, I'm landing in my life right now. And I have an opportunity to have a little look forward to the next bit and say, how do I want to feel? What do I want to do?

We can actually have some choice about this. I know for me, when I was drinking habitually, I had a bit of a loss of hope. I was quite bored actually. I was like, what is really, is this what it's going to look like? This is socialising. Then me feeling jaded the next day, is that what's going to look like? And I have to say one of the things that I didn't expect when I stopped, and for me it was just, it needed to be a stop. What is possible? And the feeling, hope and excitement. was like, wow, I know what kind of 20 years of that looked like. I have no idea what this is going to look like. It was really exciting. I went to tap dancing lessons again. You know, I booked a horse riding session. I picked up hobbies that I hadn't looked at, so it can be this real time of exploration where you say, actually, how do I want it to be?

So that's one aspect. And then the kind of the practicalities would be thinking about what do we want to maximise? Time is really precious. So we don't want to waste it in hangovers. We don't want to waste it not remembering half the night. Energy is really important. So I don't want to be jaded. I want to maximise the gifts of youth that are waning,

I want it to be celebratory. We don't want to be miserable. So what really lovely drinks have you got? What do you like? You know, do you love that? There's some really lovely kombuchas and Fortnum and Mason sparkling tea. What kind of vibe do you want? Those kinds of things. And I would say the other thing to do is you probably think, gosh, not drinking for a bit that will be really hard. But actually, if you have a look at it, you might just find it's a bit tricky around five o'clock because that's when your habitual thing is. You don't get up and think about it in the morning. So having a really good look at your day, trying to be quite mindful and thinking, well, when does this kick in? Because if it's just a case of getting through from five to seven and then I know I'm going to have a great night's sleep you'll actually be able to resize it just to a small window rather than it feel really big.

And it also sounds like once we maybe have done a little bit of time or done a few rounds of it and we realise as you were saying maybe the energy or the benefits or the curiosity or the different mindset it makes it much easier to have that be sustainable.

Because we know the rewards and we have experience of the rewards. So yeah, it's getting going and really hone in like really zoom in on the kind of gifts for that dopamine because we need dopamine. Reinforce habits. So when I wake up in the morning and I open the back door I let the dogs out and I get that first thing in the morning that first hit of cold air at the moment. And I just look up into the sky and I just go, this is beautiful. And that makes me sound really Pollyanna-ish and it's not, it's just it genuinely, that thing of waking up without a hangover never ever gets old for me. 10 years on, it still isn't boring. And you get more and more sensitive the less that you're using something like alcohol, it does nuke out all the neurotransmitters. It is like hitting yourself overhead with a mallet in terms of what's happening with your neurotransmitters. So once we find our levels, we get more sensitive to smaller pleasures. Just visually, exploring the senses and really honing in on the gifts of it, I would say, really make sure we amplify those.

Really anchoring into like, these are the benefits and look at me, I'm able to do it and create it for myself over and over again. So you've talked about a couple of challenges that we might face if we continue on with maybe outdated ways of drinking in ways that our body can't digest anymore. You've talked about symptoms, maybe being exasperated, hangovers, loss of energy, exhaustion.

When you think about your clients and the point that they come to you, what are their main challenges that they're working with at that moment?

Mostly it will be low mood. It will be anxiety. It will be that awful anxiety the next day that we get because if we drink alcohol, like I said before, kind of hits out, whacks out all the neurotransmitters. And so there's one we have called GABA. You probably know this, but the GABA that's kind of inhibitory and helps us calm down.

Our brain is so brilliant. If we get a massive whack of that, the next day it says, well, I don't need to produce it. So we will have anxiety the next day. So you feel worse. And I think for my clients in the midlife, the benefits and the costs are not balancing. It's just not worth it anymore.

One thing I noticed definitely once I went into my 40s was the sleepless nights. Even if I had one glass of wine, I mean, generally I wouldn't, I'd probably have two, I would be struggling to stop it too. I'm not saying everyone does, but that would be me. But even a moderate amount of alcohol culturally, normatively.

I would not be able to sleep. I'd wake up at three o'clock in the morning and have heart palpitations. So that's another thing. And this, I think often it's this kind of just unease that's been growing for a few years where people have gone, but I don't really want to stop, actually I am worried about it. So it's this feeling that they can't ignore it anymore. It's not losing a driving licence or children taken into care. It's not on that level, but it's significant to the individual enough to be impacting our way of life, quality of life.

In a way quite radical to be able to give ourselves permission for support with that. I know that that's something that I see in my work in burnout prevention and leadership actually is when women carve out the time and the energy and the money to invest in support for themselves, for their own health, that can bring up a whole lot of feelings of, is my health worth it? I'm sure I can just struggle through. I can do this by myself. It's not such a big deal. And actually can be really revolutionary when they say, no, this is important. This is a change I want to create. It's something that I want to do for myself. And I love the frame that you had around thinking about that investment in changing behaviour as a foundation.

If you're thinking about 40, 50 years on, how do I want to live that life and what could I be doing now to support my 75 year old me or my 85 year old me?

Absolutely. I love what you said then, I felt that self care is self leadership for quite some time and it is radical. It's that whole, rest is resistant. It brings up those ideas of self worth and one of the beautiful inevitable consequences if you identify as being in that grey area of drinking and feeling like it is a bit of a struggle and it's not quite right.

One of the beautiful inevitable consequences of choosing alcohol-free living is basically you get to catch yourself succeeding every day. If you say, okay, well, I'm not gonna drink today. And then you do it at five o'clock. It's another little chink in that self-confidence. Cause you're like, man, I said I was gonna do it and I didn't. It's like, there's a disconnect. There's a dissonance there. But if you do, it's like an upward spiral and that's another thing I wasn't expecting was the clarity around other boundaries, the self-confidence, the kind of quite sheer sort of bolshiness that came in where I was a real people pleaser before that and I don't I don't like that song because I think this is a bit almost shamey, shaming with that but I really didn't have good boundaries in other areas so once I took away the alcohol it was almost like, I can feel my edges. And that gives me agency to then do something about the other edges. So it is pretty badass, I think. It's a good platform for self leadership, I would say.

One of the things that has surprised me in my journey, pathway, journey makes it feel magnificent, but just way of living, where I don't drink a lot of alcohol is also the letting go of some situations or social interactions or even quote unquote friendships, right? That are based around chit chat, small talk, having drinks. And that started feeling just boring for me, not nourishing. I'd rather do something else. I'd rather go for a walk. I'd rather read a book. And then a bit of grieving and loneliness that came along with that and almost needing to find, as you say, places and spaces that feel welcoming and encouraging and exciting and different. But I think that piece of sadness also as we transition out of something maybe that doesn't serve us anymore. It's also there and we often don't talk about that piece, would you agree?

I would agree, yeah. And I think that that, where you've got the menopause piece and the alcohol piece as well, I think that's true of both. My second book is a seasonal guide to alcohol-free living. And within that, those seasons, it's like seasons of our lives, seasons of the year. And that winter, you know, the wintering, the shedding, well, the autumn shedding, and being able to almost process, acknowledge, accept, metabolise the sadness, the grief, the letting go in order for new growth is something psychologists have seen when we look at the grief cycle or whatever or the grief curve and within addiction models, it works pretty much the same. And I think there is wisdom to it

If we have frameworks around it, so for example, for me, the seasonal thing is very comforting. How do I comfort myself? How do I resource myself in those times? Because that's the times of life. There is grief. People do die. We do grow out of things. We are not fertile anymore.

If we're using those kind of frameworks to understand our physiology and our habit change, so we might go to that place of having to let go in a bit of mourning. But what comes out is new growth is a second spring, with alcohol or with menopause, it's like this these areas for new growth. Yeah, that can be comforting for sure, because they're not necessarily comfortable feelings, are they? But then that's where growth happens, I think.

And I sometimes also think knowing that that might be a part of it or allowing ourselves to have feelings about it. And at a time where we're often quite pressured, quite squashed, rushing from thing to thing, lots of lists in our minds, lots of action items to do, having little moments of allowing, this is hard, or I do feel a bit sad or I notice that I'm a little bit lonely and also feel like it honours what our internal experience is at the same time as maybe needing to be a lot of things in the world.

You know, I really love what you said just then. I think it's so wise and well observed. And I think our diary is our weapon of choice in this situation, because if we don't carve out that time, other things will crowd in and vie for our attention. So I feel like one thing that's helped me is almost like bookending. It's like rituals and routines. So how can I get a bit of time for myself? Maybe I just write something, do the morning pages or whatever or maybe I think about something in the evening. There's a lovely planner called the positive planner which is, if you don't have a lot of time, we don't have to spend hours and hours but you can bookend your day really nicely with a little bit of a check, mindful check-in. And also those kind of more nurturing, we might change our exercise routines to include some things that may help to come out of the sympathetic nervous system into parasympathetic, like Tai Chi, like yoga, like walking in the woods, and to see them as valid because we can't be doing the full pelt. We can do something that needs to be managed by that sort coming down, otherwise the cortisol stuff that I said before and helping to repair and sort of digest, repair and keep us regulated.

I think your piece about allowing space and time for the internal world and our physiology to come down is vital actually. It's a key point.

It's a key point and thinking about one of the women that I had conversations with as part of this series of conversations was talking about how we arrive into perimenopause or menopause. What are the energy levels or the reserves or the habits or the capacity or the hormonal makeup that we have at that time? If we have been working on the edge of what we have to give, of that really high level do, do, do, hit workouts, training for marathons, we're often at an edge where depletion is just around the corner from us. And then you throw in that fluctuating hormonal situation. So being able to pull back and build in times of recovery, even before we're at the end. Having moments of breath or yoga or relaxation or walking, even when we're not broken, having moments of coaching or support or connection when we're feeling okay, is almost another revolution, right? Because what I see often is women wait until it's too, quote unquote, too late, until they've got a problem, until it's chronic, until they can't anymore. And then there's permission to create change. But before that, it's like, well, everything is kind of working. Maybe I don't feel so bad or maybe I'm not functioning at my optimal, but I can make it work and their capacity almost becomes the problem.

And it is it's almost like we were allowed to do emergency self care if we're in burnout. But what we need to be doing is routine self care to head it off at the pass to get in front of it. And having those supportive, almost like scaffolds of well being built in. And there's a thing that I found really, really useful, because I saw that was that was very much me, into not really knowing until I was in burnout that I needed to pull things back because that's again if we've been using alcohol we might not be aware until we hit that we've not been used to. It's almost like spotting the amber flag so if you've got green amber red we'll be maybe used to stopping at a red so by slowing down, we're giving ourselves an opportunity to spot the amber flags and pull back at that time. So we're titrating into it, pumping the break throughout the day. Like you said, maybe you'll wander around the block at lunchtime, don't eat at your desk, taking a few mindful breaths, having a bit of a yoga nidra on your headphones on the way back from work or whatever it is. And it medically, this is, I find this interesting. If you imagine this stress building up to a syndrome, so in medical terms, that red, flashing red light is a syndrome. And what you have before that is you have prodromes, which are the little indicators along the way that you're heading towards a syndrome. So seeing your stress buckets throughout the day, checking in so that you can check in on your prodromes and your amber flags, pump the brake, pump the brake, so you don't get to the end of the day in burnout in a fuck it button, doing things that you don't want to do that are going to make you feel even worse the next day.

I think that's what I've heard you saying, being able to say, to advocate for our needs and say it's valid, I am valid, this is important. If you understand, knowledge is power, if you understand that that's where it's heading, it almost validates the break before you've hit the red, because that's where it's heading.

Two things that I'm thinking about. Number one is breaking these stress digestion practices down into the tiny. And we're talking here about taking a few deep breaths or walking around the block. That often feels much more manageable than sitting down for a 45 minute deep meditation session, which most of my clients would rather eat their own toenails. And so also seeing those stress digestion practices as being able to fit into your day and thinking about them in the micro can be so useful. The other curiosity that I have and that stays in my mind often is this relationship between wellness and capitalism, right? It benefits people making money for us to be drinking, people making money for us to be anxious and burning out. And it's also quite revolutionary and stepping into our kind of activist selves to say, my health is important and I'm going to do this differently.

I'm not sure that there's a question there. It's just something that I think about with regards to the alcohol industry, right? This constant selling and marketing to us of what it's going to be doing for us, what it's going to be giving to us, and how that can be quite challenging to step away from.

I think you're absolutely right and I love the fact that it wasn't me who brought up capitalism.

I think what might be useful though for people is that if you're looking at some kind of habit change, so you're looking at this health, wellbeing, a holistic support for your wellbeing so that you are not trying to self-soothe with all the stress and all the things that you're carrying and all the balls that you're juggling in maladaptive ways that kind of come back and bite you, which is essentially what we're talking about. If we're we're putting down on the alcohol or we're stopping the alcohol. It could be sugar, it could be smoking, it could be whatever, but to almost work with our values. So whatever your value, if you like, if you have got that activist side of you, peg the new behaviour to that value. So yeah, get a bit kind of, yeah, bloody capitalism. You're not going to get me drinking at the end of the day. So I keep doing that. Maybe you have a real spiritual sense. So you're like, okay, well, I'm going to really drop in and think of it in terms of mind, body, spirit connection and lights and candles. If you are fitness based, just thinking about, OK, well, how can I attach this new habit to things that are important to you and working with your values and that might make it easier to build in because you're already making a little bit of time for those if they're important to you or maybe you're just identifying it which is useful anyway.

Which is almost making me think back to that identity investigation that can often come up around these times of transition and coming back to, what is important to me? And sometimes that's changing, right? Sometimes our values are shifting and changing. We're noticing things that are becoming more important. So thinking of this behavior or our relationship with alcohol as another way that we can strengthen and pay homage to the things that we feel are important as this time as we go forward.

I could carry on talking to you for days. So thank you for the time, Kate. I really appreciate your voice and your perspective and your experience. Thank you so much for being here.

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Maude Burger-Smith