88: Beyond Booze with Sarah Rusbatch

Welcome to Dear Menopause podcast, where we discuss the menopause transition to help make everyday life a little easier for women. My name Sonya and I am the host Dear Menopause . Today, I am replaying a conversation that I had with the phenomenal Sarah Rusbatch back in 2022. The reason I'm replaying this is because Sarah has just announced the launch of her new book Beyond Booze, and it is available 30th of January. This is not a book about how to get sober, but a book about how to stay sober and create a life you love so much you don't even want to drink. It covers some incredible topics. A couple of these are how to navigate your friendships changing when you quit drinking, how to navigate your relationship when your partner still drinks, and how to manage stress without alcohol. I know you're going to love this conversation. Sarah really is an absolute powerhouse and I know that her new book is going to change many lives. Enjoy my conversation with Sarah. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today.

No problem at all. Thank you for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. And Sarah, let's kick everything off by you introducing yourself and what it is that you do.

So I'm Sarah Rusbatch and I am a grey area drinking coach, which is probably a term that not many of your listeners would have heard of before. Have you heard of that term before, Sonya?

No, I haven't, and it is one of the questions that's on my list to ask you.

So grey area drinking is, if you think about someone's drinking, as being on that scale of 1 to 10, so one is someone that very rarely drinks, maybe has a glass of champagne at a wedding once a year and that's it. And 10 is someone who is end stage physical dependency on alcohol. So they need to have physical and mental support in order to stop drinking, probably being monitored very carefully for withdrawal and is probably drinking every single day. What's in the middle and that is grey area drinking and people. I tend to think of grey area drinkers as being somewhere between a five and an eight on that scale. So, where drinking has crept up to becoming problematic, becoming a little bit dysfunctional, that relationship with alcohol, starting to notice that you're having a few questions about your drinking but you don't identify as being an alcoholic. And that is where the grey area drinking comes in.

Okay, and I would imagine there's a very high percentage of the population that falls into that grey area.

Oh yes, oh yes, I was a grey area drinker for many years, which is why I do what I do now because I didn't know how to get help, because I didn't identify as an alcoholic. So I didn't feel it was right for me to go to a meeting and stand up there and go hi, I'm Sarah, I'm an alcoholic. Because that wasn't how I identified. But at the same time, I knew that my relationship with alcohol was dysfunctional. I knew that it wasn't serving me, but there's not many places to go to actually get help when you fit in that category.

Yeah. So my question to you then is what did you do at that point when obviously I don't know, were there coaches available at that point? What was your kind of first step?

So I kind of probably 2017 was the first time early 2017 that I really really thought I need to do something about my drinking. I've always been a big drinker. I've always been the party girl. I've always been a big binge drinker. Like, growing up in Northern England, your kind of right of passage as a 14 year old was to drink a bottle of cider down at the local bus stop and kiss the local boys, and that was kind of my initiation into growing up. And then, taking uni, I moved straight to London. I was living the high life, making good money, drinking cocktails every night. Sex in the city was our role models of the area that we were living in. But I never at that point realized or thought that my drinking was problematic because I never did it on my own. It was something I always did when I was socializing. I just socialized a lot. The difference then came, I think, after having children, and my relationship with alcohol really changed. I just moved to Perth from the UK. I had two very young children. I was homesick, I was lonely, I wasn't working anymore, I'd lost my identity in my career and I didn't have any friends. I didn't have any family close by. And it all hit me at once, and that was when my alcohol consumption changed and became something I did more and more at home, on my own, and something that I was looking forward to, something that I was kind of coming to rely on, as that's what I just need to get to five o'clock, my husband's home from work and then I can go and have a drink. And that was my time, and that carried on for a long time. The problem with alcohol is number one, it's highly addictive. And number two we build up a tolerance, so we need more and more to get the same high, and so got to the point where a bottle just wasn't barely touching the sides. I didn't even feel pissed on a one bottle of wine and then I'd be cracking open the second. But I didn't drink on Monday and that's per night. Yeah, that would be per night, but it wasn't every night, so I had the rule to myself If I don't drink Monday, some Tuesdays, I don't have a problem.

And isn't it amazing how we can set those little rules for ourselves and make ourselves feel better, when Actually there's an issue that needs to be addressed?

Yeah, absolutely, and I always say that to the people I work with. Now, if you've got to the point where you're making rules around your drinking, you've probably got a problem with drinking, because people that don't have a problem don't need rules. They just have a drink when they feel like it and they don't when they don't. But if we're getting to the point where we're going, I'm only allowed to drink at the weekend. I'm only allowed to drink after five o'clock. I'm only allowed to drink if I'm out with other people. I'm only allowed to drink if it's with food or whatever the book is about that we create. We're starting to set those boundaries, and that probably means that the drinking has been creeping up so fast. Forward for me to 2017, and I just was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. I celebrated my 40th the year before and that as well is when I started to notice alcohol starting to impact my mental health, the anxiety the next day. My estrogen was so high it was off the chart, but at no point had anyone linked estrogen dominance with how much I was drinking, drinking. But now I know that that is a very clear sign because your liver can't metabolize the alcohol and the estrogen. So I took a break and I took 100 days off and I only tended to do 21 days.

And sorry, before you go any further, do you mind if I ask was that a conversation with your doctor? Because if you knew you were estrogen dominant, then obviously you were having some blood work done. So was that a conversation with somebody else or was that literally something you just decided to do yourself?

So it's a good question actually. So the Christmas before that 2016, I had been going to see a naturopath because I was having horrendously heavy periods and he had done my hormone tests and he phoned me up that Christmas. I clearly remember it was a week before Christmas and he said to me Sarah, your estrogen is so high it's off the chart. You need to do a liver detox and you need to cut back on the booze.

And I was like whatever I didn't understand.

what he didn't do was explain to me why I kind of was like, oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Why does alcohol affect my periods? I couldn't kind of make that list.

You weren't able to join the dots yeah.

Yeah, so that was the 2016. And then, by early 2017, my drinking as I've mentioned before, I was getting really bad anxiety, so my mental health was really deteriorating, but at no point did I even combine that with the alcohol. I remember going to my GP and saying I've got really bad anxiety. This is not who I am. I don't know what's happening to me. I'm crying, I'm anxious, I'm doubting myself. And at no point did she ask me how much are you drinking? I'll help you out. But she happily wrote me a script for anti-anxiety meditation without ever asking me about my alcohol consumption.

But at that point. That's such a shame because that's such an opportunity to not have to go down the path of the anti-anxiety, mood regulating medication, which can cause problems down the track, as I've talked about before on the podcast, but to have actually identified a problem that you were having that could have been solved in such a different way.

Exactly, and the fact is, I also now know what happens when we drink alcohol, when we're on that type of medication, and the two are not meant to go together.

They're really not. So she was actually creating in many respects and not intentionally, but there was a creation of probably a bigger problem for you from a physical health point of view.

But I didn't take the tabloids because I just had this feeling in me that medication was not the answer and somewhere within me a calling came you just need to take a break from booze. This is just.

God, I love those gut instincts.

Yeah, I had a couple of big boozy nights where the hangovers had just been really, really bad, and the hangovers where you're laying on the sofa all day, you can't move, you're putting the kids in front of an iPad and then you just sat there going. This is not the mum I want to be. This is not the wife I want to be. I'm not being the version of me that I want to be, and yet every time I drank, I would always go. I'm only going to have one or two tonight, but it would always escalate more than that. I could never just keep it to the one or two, so I intended to take 21 days off. Thinking right, I'll just reset 21 days, that'll do.

Just an arbitrary number Sounds like a good number.

I think I'd read somewhere that that's how long it had taken to. That would what it would take to clean out my liver a little bit. So I thought, yeah, that'll do. But at the same time I read a book that someone had recommended to me. Oh, that was it. I was scrolling Facebook on my hangover day and someone in my running group because I was a runner as well, I ran half marathons, because that was my way of going. Well, I must be okay, I can't have a problem with alcohol because I can do this. So that kind of contradictory lifestyle that many of us are familiar with. And someone in my running group had posted about this book that they'd read about alcohol and it had changed their relationship with alcohol. So I was like, right, I'm going to read that and do 21 days. And that book was this Naked Mind by Annie Grace. So I read the book and I was like, oh my goodness, this is a game changer. This is really changing those my perception of alcohol. It's helping me to understand why I find it hard to stick at one or two, like all of this stuff started to happen and I got to 21 days and I was like, no, I'm going to keep going. I feel amazing because this is the first time in my adult life, apart from pregnancy, where I'd taken a break from alcohol, and it was like, wow, this is the version of me that feels happy every day, that wakes up with energy every day, that sleeps well, that has mental clarity and positivity and confidence. And I was like, nah, this is it, I'm staying like this. But I didn't. There was no real. There's not the level of support back then that there is now. This was five years ago in Australia, which I think is very behind the UK when it comes to this sober movement. So I did. I didn't join a group that time, so I did. I got to the 100 days and I went okay, I've done 100 days, I've done a detox, everything will be fine now. Now I'll be able to be a normal drinker. So that was my goal. I'll be a normal drinker. I'll be that person that can just have one or two and doesn't need to drink the whole bottle. And I don't know why, but I thought that drinking not drinking for 100 days we're fixed me in some way. And so I went back to drinking and probably took, I'd say, a month and I was back to drinking the same levels as before. And then what happened was that carried on for two years for me, where I kept taking breaks and feeling amazing. And then trying to moderate, going back to drinking, never quite being able to. And then, at the same time, I joined a couple of Facebook groups that were in the UK, that were set up for women who were removing alcohol and were going on this sober journey and I connected with some incredible women and they really, really helped and supported me. I started listening to podcasts that were starting to pop up, talking about how to remove alcohol, how to live a better life without it and what are the benefits of it. And finally, April 2019, I had my last drink.

And did you know at that point that that was your last drink? Yeah, it was a conscious decision.

I knew, because I knew I'd spent two years trying to moderate and not being able to, so I knew that moderation was never going to be an option for me. So I had two options, and the options were carry on drinking at the level I was, which was making me miserable and ill, or embrace this life of sobriety, because the thing was that every time I took a break from alcohol I felt amazing. There was nothing bad about it. So, why do I keep going back to doing the thing that makes me feel crap, when actually, when I don't do it, I feel great?

It's like being in a bad relationship. You know, we hear the stories of the women that get trapped in those those bad, toxic, narcissistic relationships and they, until they address the underlying, you know issues that are causing them to be attracted to that person, they do that. That's the same cycle they end up in.

Yeah, but it's addiction, right, and that's the thing is that there is a level of addiction, and some people feel uncomfortable when I use that word, but we're happy to say, oh, I'm addicted to coffee or I'm addicted to paper or I'm addicted to Netflix. Yeah exactly, but when it's alcohol it feels a little bit icky.

Yeah, for good reason.

Yeah, yeah, because we have this connotation that if you are having addiction with alcohol, then you're going to. You're like a homeless person that sleeps on a bench and loses their family and loses their job, and loses their car and loses their home. And, in actual fact, from now, the work that I've been doing for the last two years in grey area drinking coaching is that the actual idea of someone who's addicted to alcohol is none of those things. It's mostly middle age professional women that are using it as a crutch to cope with stress because their life is so full on.

Yeah, yeah, so true. So talk me then through you your last day of drinking, april 2019, to into the coaching side of things. So how did you make that transition?

So that first year I did a lot of deeper work because I knew that if I wanted to build a life of sobriety, I needed to kind of get to know myself much better because you don't really know yourself when you're drinking all the time, your people pleasing, you're not living by your values, you're doing things that you wouldn't do if you weren't drunk, and so you're saying things like all of this stuff. So I went into therapy and I did some intense therapy, which was incredible, hard, beautiful, painful, emotional. All of those things All the things gave me such a deeper level of understanding of myself, and then I wanted to. I noticed how there was so much support available for people in the UK and yet there wasn't here really in Australia. And so I, at the time, had my own recruitment business. And then, early 2020, covid hit and that meant that my recruitment business was going on hold because no one was hiring, and that was when I decided to retrain. I got my professional certificate in health and wellness coaching, and then I went on to get my certification in grey area drinking, and then I set up my business, thinking I'm just going to see what happens, like this feels like a calling for me, I'm going to go with it, I'm going to see what happens. And it has just been insane because it turns out that there are so many women like me who have been on the outside, high functioning, looking like they've got everything together they're running a family, they're holding down a career, they are looking after their health, they're cooking bone cooked meals, they're doing the book club outfits that you know everything that's going on on the outside, but inside they're dying and using alcohol as a crutch to be able to fall asleep, to be able to switch off to be able to just give themselves 10 minutes escapism. But then that starts to have repercussions in many ways.

Yeah, and I know that you know there is. You know Australia has you know a little bit like you talked about that. You know you grew up in Northern UK and there was that rite of passage when you were a teenager. Australia is very, very similar to that and we. There is still so much shame and stigma attached to choosing not to drink and I've gone through periods of drinking, not drinking. Right now I'm not drinking. I do it from a, I feel, better health perspective. I never had, you know, I would not, I would not, I would have been on your probably about a three or a four on your scale of my drinking prior to, you know, dabbling in and out. My cancer background obviously has a component in there as well. Where I've discovered the whole Australianism come out is in my husband's experience, and my husband is six foot four. You know he's a unit, he's a, you know, high functioning corporate job holder and he has also dabbled. He's often done dry July and he's chosen to not drink and he has been at functions and where you know they've, you know, been drinking and he'll go. No thanks, can I have a, you know a sparkling water or whatever. And the way that he is spoken to and bullied and made fun of because he's choosing not to drink is disgusting.

Absolutely. It's absolutely disgusting and that's why I'm on such a mission to normalize sobriety, to normalize people. So it's as common to say I don't drink, being treated with, I don't smoke, because if you say you've given up smoking you know, good for you, hold on. But you say you've stopped drinking. I don't be so boring, just have one. And you know. We've got to remember that alcohol is a class one carcinogen and it's, you know, directly causes seven types of cancer. But yet we're ridiculed for choosing not to. Yeah, but I just think there's so much has been done to try and cover up some of the the impact of alcohol, because I mean that's a whole other discussion that we could have. But yeah, it's a difficult situation and I think, like I was at a dinner party and there was a woman I'd never met her before and she went to fill up my wine glass and I said, oh, no, thanks, I don't drink. And she just looked at me and she went why? And you were an alcoholic. And I was like she never met me. And that was the first Wow. Like her first assumption was well, if someone doesn't drink, there must be an alcoholic.

And then there's the judgment that she obviously associates with that. For that to be her first point of call, which you know, hey, if we put our coaching and our counselling caps on, would say a lot more about her than it does about you.

Exactly exactly. And you know, I had friends at the start who would say to me oh, let's catch up when you're drinking again. And that's not. I don't put any emphasis on that. In terms of that, that was a sign that the friendship wasn't going to last. But when people haven't, I was. That was my identity, that was who I was. I was Sarah, the party girl. It was my house that everyone came to and I naturally surrounded myself with big drinkers because it made me feel comfortable, because I was with other people that drank at the level I did. So, I probably would have said the same. You know, like in my drinking. I remember saying to a friend when it was my birthday well, you're not coming to my birthday if you're not drinking because I did have a problem with alcohol. But I couldn't understand someone who could have a good time and not drink. I just assumed anyone that didn't drink would have a terrible time and be terribly boring. And now I'm on this mission to go. Actually, that's so not true.

And I'm so pleased that you're on this mission. It is so needed and particularly in the demographic of women that I speak to here. On Dear Menopause, you know you've touched on, you know it's that after being a mom, it's the having the kids, the juggling of the career and it's, you know it's also often a relationship that's perhaps become difficult. And unfortunately, the relationships often become more difficult when we are drinking because we're not aligned with who we are and we're not being our true selves and we're not showing up as the best version of who we can be.

Yeah, Exactly, and I think as well that once we're getting into the 40s and those menopause symptoms are starting to hit in which can increase anxiety and increase brain fog and leave us, you know, losing a bit of confidence and all the rest of it, alcohol can be you know, it makes it all worse, it does. But at the time it feels like a really good solution.

Solution exactly, and you know, and one of the facts that you know, when I speak to women and we're talking about osteoporosis and bone health and the you know the fact that you know there's so much work that you can do in your years leading up to perimenopause and enduring perimenopause and even into your older age to protect yourself from osteopenia, osteoporosis, falls, the injuries that are associated with falls is strength training and nutrition. And you know, looking at our calcium intake and our vitamin T intake, and that there's some work that we can do to protect our bones. But what many people don't realise is the damage that's done to our bones as a result of alcohol is not reversible.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the same with the damage that is done to our gut. Like I did a talk, I'm running an alcohol-free program this July and I did a talk yesterday with a gut health specialist and she was saying there is so much that people don't understand about what alcohol is doing to the gut lining that it's the number one cause of leaky gut. And actually when we permeate the gut lining, we're also permeating the brain lining and then things that get into our brain that are not meant to be there. The same with things that get into our blood that are not meant to be there. And it's all related to the fact that the body is not designed to cope with the amount of alcohol that we are generally drinking.

Yeah. So let's talk about your program, because I am really keen to share this information with anybody that is listening. That is maybe having a few light bulb moments and going, wow, actually, yeah, that's resonating with me. I'd like to know how I can reach out and get some help. So tell us about your program.

So I offer. Four times a year I run an alcohol-free program which is just for women and it is 30 days or 31 days of daily support. So every single day there is a talk to watch. Some of them are live, some of them are uploaded of guest expert talks that I've done in the past. But it's all about changing our mindset around alcohol. Because if we take, if we go around doing 31 days without alcohol and we kind of brace ourselves and go, oh my God, this is going to be awful, I'm not going to leave the house, I'm just going to sit in and eat chocolate all day and just count down the days that I can drink again. That's a very different mindset to the mindset that we take in my program, which is let's notice all the incredible things that start to happen when we remove alcohol. Let's notice our energy, let's notice our sleep, let's notice our mood, let's notice how we manage stress. Let's start building a toolkit of the other things that we can do instead of turning to alcohol at the end of the day when we're feeling stressed and overwhelmed. And I bring in lots of guest expert talks where we talk about alcohol and hormones, alcohol in the gut. We talk about how to socialize without alcohol. We talk about alcohol and our relationships. We talk about alcohol and sex, we talk about alcohol and friendships, and it's basically 30 days of so much information that helps you to really get that clarity on. Well, if I'm taking this break from alcohol, what might my life be like? Because for lots of people, if we've got past a five on that scale of one to 10, we are very we're never going to go back. So if you're a five, you're not going to become a two. It's only going to go in one direction, and when we get to that point, it's likely that we can't moderate very well. It's likely that we always have intentions of just having one or two, but we finish the bottle and most people come to me and go oh Sarah, I want you to make me a normal drinker and I just want to be able to have one or two glasses of wine once a month with my roast dinner and not think about it any other time. And what I do is I help to really explain the neural pathways and the neuroscience around addiction, around what alcohol is doing, understanding those dopamine hits that we get from the alcohol, how we can start improving our brain health and our mood and our mental health so that we're reducing the cravings and we're starting to get a view of well, this is what I'm like without alcohol, Because so many of us don't know we've never, ever, taken a long enough break from alcohol to even know who we are without it.

Or yeah, exactly, and or if we have taken those breaks. It's what you just described as that white knuckling your way through to get to the 30 days. If you're doing dry July or something like that, as opposed to what I love, which sounds like such a beautiful experience to have somebody guide you each day to go okay, so you know what did you notice? That was different today. How amazing would it be if you could experience that every day and that was your normal.

Exactly, exactly, and that's what we do over the 30 days and also just being in a group, the support that the other ladies have, like everyone, will be going in. They're going oh my God, it's Friday. It's a real trigger day for me. I always drink on a Friday. What's everyone doing right now and within 10 minutes? you've got so many messages and comments from people going well, I've just poured an alcohol free champagne and I'm going to have a bath, and someone else will be like right, I'm going to a yoga class and just building that community and support.

Community and support Because, if you feel so lonely.

If everyone around you is still drinking, if your partner is, if all your friends are, you feel like so ostracized and so alone. So doing it with a group of others makes such a difference.

Yeah, that community and that support is so important, isn't it? And I think, as women in particular, we need that.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely, because it's hard. You know like we are so conditioned to believe that we need alcohol. It's, you know, that subliminal, unconscious thinking that's been with us since we were little kids that you need alcohol to celebrate, to commiserate, you should have it at every big occasion in your life. And we're starting to break that down and we're starting to question that and we're starting to go. Well, actually, I can still go out and have a good time without alcohol. Oh, actually I can still go to a wedding or a birthday or a celebration and not have to have alcohol in my glass and it still is a great time, because big alcohol doesn't want us to think that. They want us to think that we need alcohol at every single occasion so that we carry on drinking.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, exactly. So let's then talk about something you just touched on, and that is the availability and the growth of the market around non-alcoholic drinks. So you know and we're not talking about sparkling water and lemon, lime and bitters, but you know, for example, when I chose not to drink last night, I had a couple of non-alcoholic beers instead.

And that's what I say to my ladies all the time is keep the ritual, change the ingredient.

Yes.

So if you're used to having a drink at five, o'clock on a Friday have a drink at five o'clock on a Friday, but pour an alcohol-free champagne, or pour an alcohol-free gin and tonic or something that you absolutely love but doesn't have the alcohol content in it.

You know, in my house I refer to it now as an FGT. I'm like, hey, can someone grab, can someone pour me an FGT while I'm, while I'm making dinner? And you know the boys are like, yeah, sure, no dramas. And it's the same glass, it's still got everything in it and it's for me, it's replaced that ritual of having to have a gin and tonic.

Yeah, absolutely, and some people say, oh, but I'm worried that it will trigger me to want to have the real thing and what I say to everyone is experiment and try Some of my ladies don't want to drink the alcohol-free drinks because they think it will make them want to have the real thing, and others absolutely love it, so it's just whatever works for you.

What works for you. Yeah, yeah, I love that Brilliant. What's next for you? You obviously have this coaching program, which I think is incredible, and I'm so glad to be able to give you this platform to even get that news out to more women. But what's next for Sarah?

So I'm starting to do more and more in the corporate world, so starting to educate people about the impact of alcohol on mental health, the impact of, because alcohol causes anxiety and it causes depression, and yet so many of us are using it as a solution to those things without realizing it's actually causing it. And so I'm doing. I was flown around eight mine sites by one of the big mining companies in WA to go and deliver talks around alcohol and mental health, alcohol and sleep and just really starting to how to know whether your drinking has become problematic. So I'm doing a lot more in that space, as well as building my community and doing, you know, sharing more and more information. I'm hoping to launch a podcast by the end of this year as well, just to be able to get more information out there, because there's such a myth that you have to have a rock bottom to decide to stop drinking. You have to be an alcoholic to decide to stop drinking, and I'm here to say, you know like in your situation, you don't have to have any of those things. You can choose that. You just want to feel good every day. You can choose that you want to have energy and mental clarity and positivity every day, and you're never going to have that if you're hungover and so like it's about starting to choose the kind of life that you want to have.

I love that so much and I love that you're getting into that corporate world as well, because I think that that's, you know, so important to reach those ears as well.

And the other big thing for me is I want to be able to educate women more and more about the impact of alcohol, because I think so much is not talked about and that there's so much information out there that women are not able to physically metabolize alcohol in the way that men do. We have led. We actually produce less of the enzyme that breaks down alcohol, so more alcohol goes into our bloodstream and more and we're more likely to suffer heart disease. Liver disease and all of the impacts of alcohol are much, much more likely to happen for women than they are for men.

Yeah, and, and I think you're right that not many people would realize that I think you know when, if I think back to when I'd heard you know the whole alcohol would affect me as a woman differently to how it would affect my husband as a man. I always put that down to well, of course it would. I'm smaller and lighter and he's you know he's. He's bigger and therefore he can drink more. But it's actually not as simple as that.

It's really not, and and you know. The other thing to think about is most men are drinking beer at 4%, whereas most women are drinking wine at 14 or 15% or spirits at 35%, and so we might be matching them drink for drink and get the actual units of alcohol that we're having are so much higher than what a man is having, and our body can't metabolize it in the same way. So it's about time that we started educating women as well, just on understanding some of this information.

If we've talked about a lot, but if we were to take your one biggest tip that you would love to give to a woman that is listening today, that's thinking, wow, is that me? What would that be For?

me, the biggest thing is just if you've ever started questioning the role that alcohol has, if you've started noticing that it's taking more than it's giving that for a couple of hours of fun, you really feel so dreadful for 10 hours the next day and it's disrupting your sleep and all the rest of it. If you're just starting to notice that, give yourself the opportunity to take a break and just get to know how you feel, because alcohol stays in our system for 72 hours. So even if you drink two or three nights a week and it's every third day, you're still never ever really experiencing who you are without alcohol. So just taking that clean break can be such a brilliant opportunity to really give yourself the chance of going okay, this is what it's like to not have alcohol in my system for 30, 60 days, something like that.

Yeah, brilliant, and obviously I'll link through to your social media, your program and everything in the show notes. But obviously a woman could find you and just follow along and, if the timing's right, join your program and get that additional support as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think from our conversation the biggest takeaway that I would have as well would be if you are sitting down with your GP, your doctor and this is something that I talk about a lot from a self-advocacy point of view and you get into that situation where they're starting to talk to you about, well, maybe you need an anti-anxiety drug or you need an antidepressant or something, something mood regulating, to make sure that they're aware that you are drinking on top of that to that point.

But there's so much that needs to be done in the healthcare system as well. Around the discussion around alcohol, I've got a client who was asking for help with her drinking and wanted to be referred to a rehab facility. And she was drinking a bottle of wine a night, so that's about 70 units a week, where the recommended for women is 10. And she was told you're not drinking enough to get that referral. Because she was drinking a bottle of wine a night like most people that I work with and myself, a bottle of wine a night is nothing, but when you look at the facts that's 70 units a week, which we're meant to be having 10. It's the recommended guideline, and I've got another client who said to her doctor oh, I've stopped drinking, completely thinking that he would go well done. He said what have you done that for? A bit of red wine is good for you that old chestnut?

Yeah Well, we won't go down that path because I have. You know, I come up against that with my clients around perimenopausal symptoms and everything as well. And, yeah, it's such a shame that we are in this situation where we're not getting the support from our GPs and who are often the first port of call for many women, you know, and that that is something that I'd like to see change. But, you know, by raising our voices and making more people aware that that is the situation as well, and to question and to respectfully ask questions, to advocate for yourself, is just so important. Yeah absolutely Amazing, Sarah. I have loved our chat so much. I've learned a lot. I hope everybody that's listening has also learned a lot.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening today. I am so grateful to have these conversations with incredible women and experts and I'm grateful that you chose to hit play on this episode of Dare Menopause. If you have a minute of time today, please leave a rating or a review. I would love to hear from you, because you are my biggest driver for doing this work If this chat went way too fast for you and you want more. Head over to stellarwomencomau slash podcast for the show notes and, while you're there, take my midlife quiz to see why it feels like midlife is messing with your head. My full article in altogether.