Okay, Maybe It's Time to Quit Drinking

Here’s a hard but necessary truth: if you’re dealing with anxiety, reaching for the nightly wine probably isn’t helping.

Okay, Maybe It's Time to Quit Drinking

On February 15, 2020, Meg Porter* celebrated her 35th birthday in New York City with her girlfriends. The next morning, she had her usual Sunday hangover, but dragged herself to the gym. By the time she met her sister for brunch, she was ready for her tried-and-tested remedy—a Bloody Mary. “I was just a normal young woman, enjoying city life,” Porter says.

Less than a month later, on March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and it wasn’t long before NYC went into lockdown. No bars, no gym, no carefree hungover brunches. “My social life—my *life—*stopped,” Porter says. But her drinking didn’t. In fact, her weekly alcohol intake increased rapidly. “I felt isolated, and was worried about everything,” she says. “Wine was my go-to, and because I was now working from home, I found myself reaching for the bottle earlier and earlier.”

Porter is one of millions of people who turned to booze to cope with the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, and this itself became a public health issue. After stats were released revealing the extent of the collective boozing (online alcohol sales increased 262% from 2019), the WHO warned that alcohol use during the pandemic may potentially exacerbate health concerns and risk-taking behaviors.

According to research published in JAMA Network Open in September 2020, people drank more frequently during the early stages of the pandemic, compared to their typical drinking habits from a year earlier. For women in particular, they drank more heavily and experienced more adverse effects.

In Glasgow, Scotland, the start of lockdown coincided with one year of almost complete sobriety for Jane Bailey*, 46. “I stopped drinking in April 2019, after going through a difficult separation and seeking a little too much comfort in wine,” she says. “When my children started to notice and comment on my drinking, I knew I had to stop. I had to tackle my problems and set a better example for my kids.”

Bailey had entered 2020 with a newfound enthusiasm for life. “It was going to be my year,” she says. “I had a new job and a new flat—the future was looking bright. Then lockdown happened. Work was a worry, nobody could visit my new home, I couldn't share my new attitude with the world. I felt invisible. I only had TV and social media for company and suddenly every show featured a large glass of wine and every Facebook post was a meme encouraging me to drink excessively. I guess I felt: why not?”

Alcohol and your anxiety

It’s no secret that alcohol is not exactly good for you. A large body of research has established an association between alcohol consumption and a variety of negative physical health outcomes, including heart disease, liver disease, lung disease, and high blood pressure. But it’s not just the physical: The relationship between alcohol and mental health has become apparent—and concerning—during the pandemic.

Drinking to ease your stress (which there’s no shortage of these days) is a vicious cycle. Alcohol is often used to cope with anxiety, depression, loneliness, and physical isolation—all of which have increased during the COVID-19 era. But alcohol use can actually make anxiety and depression worse. If you’re already living with mental illness (that’s nearly 1 in 5 of us, according to the National Institute of Mental Health), the risk is greater.

People with anxiety and depression are perhaps unsurprisingly more likely to report drinking more alcohol during the pandemic than those without mental health challenges, according to a study published in January in Preventive Medicine. “When we looked at the data, we saw that women were less likely than men to be drinkers,” says Ralph J. DiClemente, Ph.D., from the department of social and behavioral sciences at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. “However, among drinkers, women were more likely to report drinking more than men.”

The extraordinary burdens placed on women by the pandemic likely have something to do with that, DiClemente says. “Women, in general, have shouldered the additional household duties, child care, and home-schooling, often while juggling employment and/or caring for elderly parents,” he says. Add to that the looming threat of COVID-19 and the caregiving concerns that come with it and it’s no wonder alcohol has become a common coping mechanism.

In the moment, the relief can be at the bottom of the wine glass—or the bottle. But it’s fleeting. Alcohol affects the levels of the mood-modulating neurotransmitter serotonin in your brain (along with other crucial chemical messengers) and this can worsen anxiety. That’s what causes the dreaded hangover “fear” when you sober up—and it’s not unusual for it to last an entire day after you stop drinking.

Bailey says her lockdown experience with drinking has confirmed what she already believed. “Drinking steals joy, time, self-confidence, health, even your mind,” she says. “But sobriety gives you it all back. Relationships improve and flourish. And for me, perhaps the greatest gift of sobriety is sleep.” A study published in JMIR Mental Health in 2018 examined sleep quality in people who consumed different amounts of alcohol, and found that in women who drank more than one serving of alcohol per day, their sleep quality decreased by 39.2%. Even moderate amounts of alcohol (which is just one serving per day for women) decreased sleep quality by 24%.

How to cut back

Quitting alcohol is Porter’s goal but she’s not quite there yet. “I’m not drinking half as much as I was at the beginning of the pandemic, but I don’t feel strong enough to stop—it’s become my crutch,” she says. Reevaluating your relationship with alcohol is an important part of addressing your anxiety.

Step one: being aware of problem drinking, says Simon Chapple, U.K.-based sobriety coach, speaker, and author of The Sober Survival Guide and How to Quit Alcohol in 50 Days. “Problem drinking” isn’t an official diagnosis and there is some room for subjectivity, so good place to start is by being really honest with yourself about whether your drinking is negatively impacting your life—i.e. you’re showing up late to meetings, not sleeping well, snapping at your partner, or waking up embarrassed about how you acted the night before. “When we are able to acknowledge and accept the problem we become able to do something about it,” Chapple says. “When we stay in denial, we stay stuck.”

The next step is to get mindful about your drinking. Chapple suggests writing down how much you’re drinking, noting how you feel before, during, and after you drink. Maybe what you see in black and white scares you realize you need to think about removing alcohol from your life entirely. Maybe you notice that a habit of weeknight drinking is ruining your productivity and you commit to marking the end of the workday with a mocktail.

You don’t have to do this evaluation alone—there’s a whole new genre of “quit lit” out there (just ask Chrissy Teigen, who recently shared her newfound passion for sobriety, aided by Holly Whitaker’s New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol), and therapists are always a great option. Bailey also recommends seeking out alcohol-free communities on social media—making sober or sober-curious friends can be particularly beneficial if your IRL friends are all drinkers.

For most people, the process involves a few slip-ups. But you can use these to your advantage, Chapple says, as opportunities to come back stronger, by learning and understanding what you need to do differently in the future. Any day can be “Day One,” whatever else is going on in the world.

*Names have been changed.

This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Claire Gillespie