SUMMARY KEYWORDS

drinking, drinking, women, alcohol, wine, culture, toxic, mom, day, life, messages, article, books, night, pandemic, feel, helping, fucking, mommy, parents, cope, wrote, bought, self-care, Drinking is not required, you can get out of it, modern empowered woman, brave

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson 

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Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hi there. In this podcast, I want to talk about the wine mom culture. And the messages that surround us that say that women need to drink to be empowered and to cope with life. I want to talk about why it’s bullshit. Why the wine mom culture is dangerous and toxic. And why the messages and the jokes and the means about mom needs wine or wine helps me adult make it incredibly hard to quit drinking. It’s something I’m really passionate about talking about, because it’s a huge issue. And it’s also something that stopped me from quitting drinking for a really long time. advertising, social media and popular culture have been encouraging women to drink for years, telling us that we should drink that we need to drink, the drinking will make us feel better, and that we should drink more and more often. And in this podcast, I want to dig into why mom’s drink.

The Mommy needs wine culture and the messages that for women in general. It is sophisticated and empowering, fun and badass and required to drink so that you have the information you need to recognize it for what it is and to say to yourself, I’m not falling for that fucking crap anymore. Look, we live in a culture that tells women that drinking is their treat for getting through the day. It’s our reward for working so hard and taking care of our kids. We’re told that drinking wine and kicking back with a cocktail or opening a beer at the end of the day. That is what is self-care. That is what we’re rebelling with, and against being an adult and having responsibilities that we need it to cope with our lives that we deserve it. And it’s not just moms, women in general and working women in particular, are surrounded by messaging and endless opportunities to drink alcohol. There’s rosé all day, hot yoga and happy hour and beer at the end of 10Ks. It is actually incredibly hard to find any place to go where alcohol isn’t served or pushed or highlighted. Even at my daughter’s soccer lessons, a place called arena sports that has indoor soccer lessons filled with 2-year-olds and 4-year-olds and 7-year-olds. It serves beer on tap and wine for parents who need to drink during a 15-minute lesson for their kids. We are told that alcohol is what we should consume to signify that we’re cool and relaxed and fun. We’re taught that drinking wine or beer or cocktails at the end of the day will make us less frustrated, less angry, less tired or less bored with the monotony of being an adult.

Women in particular are bombarded with messages that we should drink. We’re actually taught that we need to drink to cope with our busy lives, to relax from our stressful jobs, to tolerate the demands of our children, to bond with our girlfriends to connect with our partners. We are conditioned since birth since childhood. that alcohol is special and celebrated and it occupies a privileged place in society, it is a rite of adulthood. And it’s addictive, and it’s really bad for your health. And it surrounds you everywhere. And then we blame ourselves for not being able to moderate or cut back or drink less of an addictive substance. We are told that alcohol will help us, but the reality of our experiences, it doesn’t match up with the lies we’ve been fed. When you wake up, sweaty and queasy, thirsty and tired, and are running out the door to work.

Drinking doesn’t feel like it was self-care when you’re anxious about what you said, or what you forgot to do the night before. Drinking doesn’t feel empowering. When your partner is upset about whatever it is you said or did last night, it doesn’t feel like drinking actually helped bring you to closer and when you have a hangover in the morning, drinking does not feel like it’s helping you to cope with the demands of your children. And trust me, I am not judging anyone here, I’m really not.

Back in the day, I was the queen of hosting brunch with mimosas, and play dates with adult beverages of having beer and wine and my son’s four year old birthday party, and even making sure that the group get togethers for the parent education and support group I joined when my first child was an infant was held at my house with a fully stocked bar so that the adults could drink while holding our 12 week old babies. While we chatted about the joys and the challenges of becoming a parent. In the first meeting of that group, with a group of newborn parents of 3-month-olds, it was hosted at the house of the woman who had volunteered to lead the group. She had Diet Coke and apple juice and sparkling water on hand for all of us. It was 6pm. And I was surprised and quite frankly apart. This is what I thought, oh my god, no adult beverages. And we’re here for two hours at night, just talking with strangers. It was the longest two hours of my life. And at the end of that first gathering, the host asked for volunteers to sign up to host the next meetings at our house. And I put my name at the very top of the list.

Did I volunteer because I was such a nice person, a lovely host had all the free time to do it. Not really, I wanted to host because I wanted to serve wine and beer at our next gathering to set the tone for the group about what I thought should be served at the parents of infants support group meeting, so that I didn’t have to go through endless round Robins have to ever gatherings. Each week with no alcohol. I wanted to make the gathering to party Hell, I wanted to have fun and make friends. And I didn’t think that I could do that if we didn’t drink. Regardless of the fact there would be six infants there and none of us were sleeping and half of us were breastfeeding and all the rest. That was me. That was me completely and totally immersed in the wine mom culture, in the drinking, is required for a good time culture.

About a month before that group started. I went to a good Friend’s Wedding when my son was two months old. And I was so excited for the wedding. It was at a beautiful mountain resort with a big pool and views and golfing. Not for me. I do not golf. But that was but it was that kind of place. It was two nights away with all my girlfriends and their spouses. It was a party and I counted down to that night. I picked out the dress I was going to be wearing. I curled my hair. I did my makeup, and we hired a babysitter for my little Hank. And I drink around the pool with my girlfriends and before the wedding. And of course I drank at the wedding too. And I don’t remember most of the night. I blacked out. flashes of it came back and they weren’t pretty. My husband walked me home. God knows when I remember sitting on the asphalt of the driveway on the way to our hotel room. For some reason refusing to get up. I don’t remember why. I was too drunk to remember the babysitter, much less pay her. Thank God my husband and I passed out and I didn’t wake up to give my son a bottle. I don’t even remember him crying. My husband did it. I was brutally hung over the next day and went between not wanting to see anyone and kind of trying to subtly ask questions. To figure out what happened, how bad it was, if anyone else drank as much as me or had funny stories, to kind of mitigate my situation and make light of it.

My husband was mad at me. No fucking shit. Of course he was. Parenting my eight-week-old was hurt and exhausting. And we had to drive three hours home and I was so sick in the car, and pretty much spent the entire drive trying not to throw up. Yeah, that is how my wonderful weekend with friends wet because I drank too much. And I have a lot of those stories. They didn’t all go that way. Maybe 90% of them were me drinking after work, playing with my kid out on a date night with nothing out of the ordinary happening. Sure, I woke up at 3am and I was exhausted the next morning. But hey, I was also the mom of a toddler. Sometimes it goes that way. But there were those nights. The nights when it was a girl’s night with the kids. When I went over on a Friday afternoon to my friend’s house on Memorial Day weekend for a playdate and we open the wine bottles, and we kept them flowing. We ended up sleeping over with the kids see, we’re totally responsible mom’s no drinking and driving here. And the next day, driving my son home in his car seat, I had to pull over 10 blocks from my house to throw up in an empty parking lot while he was safely strapped into the car seat in back. And as I’m saying this, if I’m being honest, I’m thinking maybe I should not be sharing all of these stories with you. Someone listening is probably judging me. Of course you are. Someone listening to this in the future, might think I’m a bad mom, right? Maybe this is going to come back and bite me in the ass. But here’s the thing, I wasn’t really a bad mom, I really wasn’t. I’m not a bad person. I’m an awesome Mom, I love my son, and I love my daughter. And honestly, 90% of the time I was really safe. And when I drink too much. And when I wasn’t safe, or I wasn’t able to care for my kids, I had backup. I had other loving people who were responsible there and could take care of my kids.

Now, I’m not saying, throwing up in a parking lot, while my kids in a car seat is a good thing. And trust me, I felt like complete garbage about it. I carried that for a long time. But when I think about these things, I cringe over them, I regret it. And I’m sharing this now for a reason, even though I’m not sure that I should. Because if you’re listening to this, and you are where I was, I want you to know that you’re not alone. You are not the only one, you were just sucked into the bullshit marketing and messaging, we have all bought into. You believed it. And then you thought it was fun. And then drinking became a habit. And then you surrounded yourself with other drinkers, and they’re not bad people either. And guess what? Alcohol is addictive. And it’s designed to make you consume more of it. And more often and going down the road I went down and the road you might be going down now is just what fucking happens. It’s predictable. It’s inevitable. And it’s what 1000s of women who look like they have it all together and are having an awesome time are going through. And we’re not talking about it.

And here’s the message of this podcast, you can get out of it. You can stop drinking, you won’t be miserable. Drinking is not required. As a mom, or as a modern empowered woman. It’s not required to have fun or let loose, or to rebel from your responsibilities or to cope with them, you will still be a badass, you’ll in fact, be more of a badass. without alcohol, you will still have fun. Your identity will still be more than being a mother or wife or an employee or a manager or whatever it is. And here’s the good news. You’ll be happier. Your life will be better. Parenting will be easier. Your anxiety will be less, you’ll feel less overwhelmed, you’ll be better able to cope with your schedule and with your responsibilities. You’ll actually be a better friend, and a better employee and a better manager and a better leader. All by walking away from the booth and you will be clad that you ditch the wine. I know you might not believe me now, but you will. You don’t need it. So, you know how else I know you’re not alone? When my son was first born, and I bought all the mommy wine culture groups, I bought books like sippy cups are not for Chardonnay. And naptime is the new happy hour. They were written by a woman named Stephanie Wilder Taylor, and they were right up my alley. In fact, the book naptime is the new happy hour. It was published exactly one month before my son was born on March 25, 2008, and I ate it up. Here’s what publisher weekly wrote about Stephanie’s motherhood books. When the Los Angeles comedian and television writer and producer Wilder Taylor got pregnant, she feared undergoing this process. Quote, a perfectly sane woman who swigs Jack Daniel’s and never goes to sleep before 8am and has had at least one STD gives birth and suddenly becomes a different person. A person who subscribes to three dozen parenting magazines, thinks a wild night is tossing back to old duels and never hits the hay after 8pm Those were the books that spoke to me.

And here’s the thing, 16 months after my son was born, 17 months after nap time is the new happier was published. I saw an article on the New York Times about Stephanie titled a heroine of cocktail. Mom’s sobers up. That article came up three years after sippy cups are not for Chardonnay was published a year and a half after naptime is the new happy hour and six weeks before her new book was about to be released, which covered many of the same mom wine culture themes. Here’s how the article starts, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. Another pro forma play date, toddlers plied with juice boxes, goldfish crackers playdough then the host mommy turns to the guests Mommy, something to drink. I’ll have coffee tea, the two mommies gaze of Bach white wine. Stephanie Wilder Taylor always chose the wine. It was a taboo moment said Miss Wilder Taylor 43, who is three young girls younger than five and lives in California. It was a way to express that we’re still fun people. Just because we have babies doesn’t mean we can’t have an adult side. Ms. Wilder Taylor, a former stand-up comic has made a career of championing the cocktail play date attitude. Her funny web column is called make mine a double tail of twins and tequila. And she has been the toast of the anti-perfection, mom lit world. But in late May, six weeks before the latest publication of her book, A Memoir in which alcohol is a Mary companion. Miss Wilder Taylor put a post-up on her blog, baby on board that has reverberated throughout mommy blog dumb. I drink too much she wrote. I quit on Friday. Later she wrote, it’s embarrassing to be all rah go booze, only to zip off with my tail between my legs saying, never mind. I’ve joined the other team, but it’s what I had to do. You know what the name of her book was that was published six weeks after that blog. It’s not me it’s your subjective recollections from eternally optimistic, chronically sarcastic, and occasionally in the abbreviated woman. I saw that article while I was waiting for coffee. Before heading up to my office. My son was a year old. I read the title. I knew who Stephanie Wilder Taylor was, of course I did. I had her books, I probably gifted them to other moms for their baby showers. I bought the paper and I actually hit it away. I then found the article online. And I copied the words and saved it in a Word document, which I conveniently titled it something innocuous, so that no one would find it on my desktop. I copied it to read it over and over again. If you do the math on that, I saw that article in the line at the coffee shop of my office building. When Hank was 16 months old.

I quit for the first time, when he was five years old. I quit drinking for the last time when he was eight years old. This shit is hard. If you are worried about your drinking and you should stop and are listening to this and have known for a while. But keep going back to the wine. I get it. It took me a lot of tries to stop drinking and to figure out that life is better without it. By the way, I do not blame Stephanie at all. I thank her. I thank her for being brave. I thank her for her honesty, I thank her for stopping drinking and telling the world about it. I was drinking plenty way before I bought her books about naptime being the new happy hour. Getting those books didn’t push me over the edge. I was driving that way, really fast all on my own. I saw that article, the blog she wrote, the fucking week, she stopped drinking, after all the publicity and all the books she had published, and all the followers she had, who celebrated her devil may care attitude about drinking wine and being a mom.

And you know what I know now, that was so brave. No way I would have been that brave. No way. It must have been truly so incredibly hard for her to post that blog. The week she stopped drinking, telling people she stopped on Friday. She’s a hero. And I saw that article after buying all her books. And it spoke to me. And it took a couple years, but it helped me.

Years later, when I was ready. I read on her website, a blog series called don’t get drunk Friday. Stories from other women like her and like me, who’d quit drinking. Stephanie’s blog actually led me to my absolute favorite secret not drinking Facebook group, the BFB or the booze Freeburg raid, which she was a part of founding. And that group really helped me quit drinking. I’ll put a guide to finding it, how to get into it in the show notes of this episode. So if you are listening to this, and you’re on and you’re starting on your path to stopping drinking, it is really helpful to wrap your head around why and how you’ve been fed these ideas that drinking alcohol is harmless and fun and necessary as part of your life. We’ve essentially been brainwashed when you’re drinking, and you have an inkling that the way you’re drinking isn’t healthy and isn’t helping you and it’s not sustainable. If you’re like me, and you’re justifying and rationalize your drinking, when you stop and look around, and you think that drinking isn’t working for you anymore, or when you try to cut back or stop, you’re told not to bother. You’re told that the way you feel stressed and anxious and tired and sleeping terribly and desperate for your nightly wine. That’s just part of being a modern woman. You’re told that despite how you feel, drinking is helping you drinking, it’s what’s holding you together.

And then here’s what you’ll think, well, maybe my drinking isn’t that bad. It’s probably not a problem. There’s nothing to see here. Let’s just move along. It was just a bad day, a big night, a bad hangover. I mean, sure, I feel like shit after drinking too much. But I need my wine to relax. It’ll make me feel better, it will help me actually be less tired and more relaxed. And besides, it’s what everyone else is doing. And that is true. It is not just you. Lots of other women, and probably many of the women around you are drinking too much. And behind closed doors. They may be wondering if they’re drinking scotch in that hand as well. I could quote you all the stats about how women in America are drinking more and more often than their mothers or their grandmothers, or about how alcohol consumption is killing women in record numbers. I could tell you that the rate of alcohol related deaths for white women ages 35 to 54 has more than doubled between 1999 and 2015. And the share of binge drinking is up 40% since 1997. I want to say that again, because it’s important. The rate of alcohol related deaths for white women, ages 35 to 54 has more than doubled between 99 and 2015. That is huge. I could share an article that came out just this week in parent’s magazine. It was titled what’s really driving moms to drink more than ever. It talked about how historically, rates of alcohol use disorder, a UD have been found to be disproportionately higher for men than for women. But in recent years, the gaps been closing the trend in Mother’s Day. To cope with stress isn’t a new one, right? We just talked about what has been happening since 1999. And how the share of women binge drinking is up 40% since 1997. But with the pandemic, it made a bad thing much worse. A study was published in the JAMA j. m. a network open, found that during 2020, there was a 41% increase in the number of days on which women drank heavily, and heavily is defined as having four or more drinks in a couple of hours. Yeah, that was me.

Another study conducted by the American Psychological Association found that the rate of adults who reported drinking more to manage pandemic stress was more than twice as high for parents of children between the ages of five and seven. You can see all those statistics and know them. But you know what, you don’t even need those, you just have to look around to see what’s happening. There is a constant feedback loop between advertising popular culture, and what our family and our friends are doing and telling us we need to do. They say we need to drink, we should drink, the way we drink is normal and okay. And actually, it’s pretty fucking awesome. So, let’s take a look at how advertisers are doing it. Because information and knowledge is power. We’re working on shifting your mindset, getting some perspective, when you hear these messages coming at you. A BBC article did a deep dive on the feminization of alcohol marketing last year. in it. The writer points to research by Carol Emsley, a professor of substance use and misuse and how she shows how alcohol companies harness the fact that women want to retain their identities as they go through various life stages. When Emily and her colleagues talk to women in their 30s and 40s. They found that many of you drinking as a way to show their identity beyond the responsibilities associated with being a woman in midlife, navigating career pressures, or childcare. And I hear that I felt it too. Getting together for a few drinks after work, to laugh and to relax, was especially important for them. She says women also felt that they were transformed back to care for youth away from their responsibilities when they got together for a few drinks after work. It’s these desires that marketers zeroed in on to get women to buy alcohol. They say we’ve seen a move against sexualizing women to sell alcohol to men to alcohol brands trying to align their products with sophistication, women’s empowerment, and with female friendship. It is straight out of the tobacco industry playbook.

When slogans such as you’ve come a long way baby in the 60s were made famous by Virginia Slims. That campaign for cigarettes was an attempt to cash in on the women’s lib movement at the time trying to attract female consumers who identified with the movement. And the article points out that the trend towards female focused marketing is really unsurprising given the rise in women’s socio-economic power. So here’s what happened. There has been an emergence of multiple new alcohol products targeting female customers from fruit flavored beers to low calorie beverages. There’s a focus on slimness weight, pink packaging, glitter, messages of sisterhood, all female friendship, motherhood, and the all-time favorite overtime sexiness. messages of empowerment have increased, as well as the celebration of women. So for example, an association with International Women’s Day or Valentine’s Day and even Mother’s Day, the advertisers have shifted to targeting mothers more and more. And in the parent’s magazine, about the real reason’s mom are drinking more. They talk about it. They say as women spend more money on alcohol, the advertising companies have shifted their campaigns to target those of us in our reproductive years. Their messages communicate to women that they deserve a drink that they need wine in order to parent the so-called pinking of the alcohol market is something that’s been happening for two decades. And it’s, sort of, came to light the most.

If you saw the Saturday Night Live skit that was going around a few months ago. It was Focusing on the heavy-handed marketing that breeds the mommy wine culture. It was a sketch starring at Brian. As a mom receiving the not too subtle birthday gifts from her friends. It kitschy wouldn’t sign that red. I like you better when I’m left up. And hey barkeep, I want to die tonight. In the BBC story, my friend Kate Bailey, who is actually on episode 48 of this podcast, talking about self-care for moms going alcohol free. Kate’s the co-host of the love silver podcast, and the co-author of the book, Love yourself sober, a self-care guide to alcohol free living for busy moms. She was quoted in the article, Kate highlights the impact of alcohol marketing on mothers as a big area of concern. She sees feminized marketing, popularized by concepts of mummy juice, and wine o’clock, linked to how busy women navigate anxiety. Kate says that women are using alcohol as an acceptable way of self-medication and stress relief. Of course they are because we’re being sold it as a reward at the end of the day. Not only that, but the parent’s magazine article I mentioned, noted that statistically, females tend to tilt towards enjoying the reduction of discomfort effects of alcohol, instead of the pleasure effects. The article talked about many factors that are driving moms to drink more than ever, the normalization of drinking among mothers that we’ve talked about role overload between women trying to fulfill multiple roles at the same time, work and home, while simultaneously lacking the resources to perform them. And number three societal expectations about motherhood. There’s that feeling of all the pressure to be a quote unquote, good mom, and the idea that you’re not living up to it. And that creates the guilt and the shame among mom. And shame is a powerful motivator to drink. Women are known to lean on alcohol for its dampening effects of negative emotions. And so here’s what happens. Even when our drinking has escalated to the point where we know it’s not well, where we know it’s not serving us. When we know it’s making us feel like crap. We look around. And the message we receive is that it’s just normal. When we’re told that drinking equals empowerment and sophistication, and self-care, and a well-earned reward for hard work, it’s hard. The truth is, that we are being pacified and patronized and mollified, and we don’t even see it.

There’s a particular chart, which I guess is kind of a meme that I’ve seen floating around that I really, really hate. It’s called the hormone guide to talking to women. I’ll put a picture in it in the show notes to this article. So you can see how fucking awful it is. The idea presented is, this handy guide should be carried like a driver’s license in the wallet of every husband, boyfriend, coworker, or significant other who deals with women. Here’s what it outlines helpfully, of course, for men to say to women in categories of what is dangerous, safer, safest, and ultra-safe. So for example, for a man to say to a woman, what’s for dinner is very dangerous. Safer, is can I help you with dinner? Say fist is where would you like to go out for dinner? ultra-safe, aka punchline here has some wine. also dangerous for men to say to women. What do you so work up about? safer? Could we be overreacting? safest? Here’s my paycheck. Ultra-safe here. Have some wine. dangerous. What did you do all day? safer? I hope you didn’t overdo it today. safest, I’ve always loved you in this robe. Ultra-safe here have some wine. I mean, the chart is misogynistic and sexist and patronizing. And insulting. Yeah. And the messages.

The Ultra safe thing to say to women in any context is Here, have some wine. And I think it helps to get pissed off about it. It is bullshit. I think you need to start looking at this crap. I think you need to start looking at this crap. And it should piss you off. When you see the T-shirts and the socks and the kitchen towels, and then whines named mommy’s timeout. You should get fucking mad If you take a look at Etsy, you can see all this shit in one place. There are t-shirts that say, rosé all day, and socks that say, if you can read this, bring mommy wine. There are the signs that say wine helps me adult. There are the onesies that say mommy drinks because I cry in the kitchen towels that say corks are for quitters, and I’m not slurring. I’m speaking in cursive. There are the wine glasses etched with mommy sippy cups and surviving motherhood one glass at a time. And there are signs for your kitchen that say it’s not drinking alone. If your dog is home. They are even selling decals that say shut up liver, you’re fine and drunk Lives Matter.

Did you know that there’s a Facebook group called Mommy needs vodka that has 5 million followers. Five fucking million followers for Mommy needs vodka. And there’s a wine that’s called mad housewife Chardonnay. And here’s what it says on the label. Somewhere near the cool shadows at the laundry room, past the litter box in between the plastic yard twice. This is your time. Time to enjoy a moment to yourself a moment without the madness. The dishes can wait. Dinner be damned, mad housewife Chardonnay. I mean, it’s bullshit. It’s insulting. It’s stupid. And it’s not fucking funny anymore. This is the crap that is being sold to us to keep us sick. So that will keep drinking. It’s the crap we are buying each other as a joke. It is normalizing drinking a bottle of wine a night which by the way I did, which is actually really fucking dangerous. This is the crap that encourages us to keep consuming an addictive substance that makes us sick. The people making these products want you to look at these messages and think this is fine. This is funny. This is totally normal. They want you to think that slurring at night is normal. That drinking to tolerate your kids is normal. That not remembering this shows you watch is normal. That waking up with a hangover is normal. That drinking a bottle by yourself is normal, because corks are quitters, right? Get it hot. We look at these messages. And we start to believe that everyone drinks like this. But this is what adult women do. That it’s funny. That’s it’s empowering that it’s sophisticated, that it keeps us cool. Despite the fact that our latest hangover has this line in bed with a queasy stomach and a splitting headache. When we’re late for work. And we have a big meeting, or while our two-year-old is crying or our 11-year-old needs us to drive him to baseball. This is how we have been convinced to drink more and more often. And hook we drink at brunch. And at soccer games on the sidelines. We drink at the office happy hour. And on date nights, we drink at the spa. We drink when we walk in the door after a long day at the office. And while cooking dinner. And when helping our kids with their homework and on the couch at night after they’ve gone to bed. And when you’re trying to quit drinking, to flip the script to take care of yourself and your life and your health. These messages make it really hard to stop drinking. Because everyone around you has bought into this shit too. I don’t know if there’s one of us who hasn’t sort of subtly tried to slide in ask someone. Do you think I drink too much? Or I’ve been kind of worried about my drinking or I really want to cut back or I think I should, and you’re told Oh god, you’re not that bad. You’re totally fine. We all drink that way. Don’t worry about it.

Right. I had a friend who told me that her friend who eventually checked into rehab had confided in her friends that she was worried about her drinking. And the helpful suggestion was to just not bring up that last glass of vodka to bed with her. That was the suggestion, right? Because the moms didn’t want the wine nights to end either. And they probably didn’t want to look at their own drinking too closely. Look, the people who make the wine and the beer and the hard alcohol. They’ve done an amazing job. I worked in marketing for more than 20 years. They’re fucking good at what they do. And they’ve spent a lot of money doing it. They want us to drink more because when we drink more, they make More money. And they don’t care about what it does to our bodies, or our minds, or our relationships or a confidence. So as you’re stepping away from the wine bottle, and you start to think that maybe this is too hard, maybe by quitting, you’re denying yourself something that you’ve always been taught that you’re somehow walking away from something that helps you bond with your girlfriends make it through the day, or reward for the crap you put up with it work.

Remember, you are being lied to. You are being taken advantage of these messages. They were created deliberately to reinforce the idea that drinking is helping you cope with life. And this marketing, this targeting of women, it has real world consequences. The Harvard health blog posted a study on women and alcohol and COVID-19, just three months ago, it said the pandemic has further increased rates of alcohol use and women. According to a RAND Corporation study. During the pandemic, women have increased their heavy drinking days by 41%, then before the pandemic. Look, we drink when we’re happy, and we drink when we’re sad. We drink when we’re bored, and we drink when we’re stressed. We drink because alcohol is the first thing offered to you when you go out to dinner. And because Trader Joe’s hangs up a giant sign from the ceiling above the wine display. Right when you enter the store that says Get your back to school supplies right here. We drink because alcohol is addictive. So if you drink often, and often enough and who the fuck doesn’t, when it’s pushed on you 24 seven, you will inevitably want and then need to drink more. And then when times get tough, you drink even more, because you’re told it’s the one thing that will make you better. And if you’re being honest, you drink because you want to numb out and essentially knock yourself unconscious at the end of the day. Last month, NPR reported that women now drink as much as men, but they don’t do it for pleasure. They do it to cope, it talks about how during the pandemic, any glance at social media would reinforce the message that there was one cure for pandemic related stress. And it was alcohol.

Social media was rife with means of mom’s drinking to relieve their stress. And during the pandemic, alcohol was actually easier to obtain than anything. Through delivery sites and apps, there was a huge disproportionate effect of the pandemic on women’s alcohol use, right. And it was terrible before rates of alcohol use and heavy drinking, defined as four or more drinks on one occasion and related disorders and women. They were rising even before the pandemic, right. between 2001 and 2012, there was a 16% increase in the proportion of women who drink alcohol, a 58% increase in women’s heavy drinking, by the way, that’s compared to only 16% increase in men, and an 84% increase in women’s one year prevalence of an alcohol use disorder 84% increase versus 35% in men, I will link to all of these articles, all of these studies in the show notes. But our drinking was bad before. And the pandemic has made our drinking even worse. And research showed that the psychological stress related to COVID-19 was associated with greater drinking for women, but not for men. And we’re drinking more and more. But the discussion you see out there are women’s health seems to be trending around, oh, you need to lose weight. You should look at gluten, you should look at sugar, maybe your gut health, maybe that’s the issue. You’re ignoring the elephant in the room, the substance that we’re consuming more than anything else that can actually kill you. It’s the wine, it’s the beer, it’s the cocktail, the substance you’re consuming more than anything else that can kill you. It’s the alcohol in what should be clearly categorized as too fucking little too fucking late.

The American Cancer Society finally, just last year, updated its guidelines to say that no amount of alcohol is good for you. For years, we’ve been told through completely flawed medical studies that have been held up as truth that drinking in some small and controlled amount is actually healthier than not drinking at all. And that red wine in particular is actually good for your health. It was never true never. The medical research and guidelines finally came clean. In June 2020. The American Cancer Society, for the first time in eight years, made a major change to its guidelines on cancer reduction and prevention. Now saying newsflash, it’s best to cut alcohol out completely of one’s diet. It’s best not to drink alcohol, so the American Cancer Society. Previously, the society recommended that limiting alcohol consumption to one drink a day for women, and no more than two drinks a day for men. alcohol use is actually one of the most important preventable risk factors for cancer. In the CD C’s frequently asked questions about alcohol it states excessive drinking, in the form of heavy drinking or binge drinking is associated with numerous health problems, including chronic diseases such as liver cirrhosis, damage to liver cells, pancreatitis, inflammation of the pancreas, various cancers, including liver mouth throws larynx, esophagus, high blood pressure, and psychological disorders. We’re not even counting accidents, and breast cancer as well. But that’s not what’s being passed around as information. Because nobody wants to take a look too close at their drug of choice. I know I didn’t. So instead, what’s shared is the wine means and the SE science. And the chart I mentioned earlier, the one about the hormone guide to talking to women. And you know, what’s crazy about that stuff? Yeah, it’s insulting, and it’s patronizing. But it’s also sadly true. We have been taught and conditioned to be pacified with wine. We’re pissed and irritated and overwhelmed. And in order to push down those emotions, we pour ourselves a big glass of wine, we drank, and then we accept and tolerate things that really shouldn’t be acceptable. So we can take on too much, and over schedule ourselves and do things we don’t want to do, and then drink to tolerate it all. Instead of changing things. Instead of changing the deal that we’ve set up with our partners and our bosses and our kids, instead of getting the help we deserve. Instead of asking for more, we drink our wine and we give up our power. We are settling for so little.

Christy Coulter talks about this and so much more. In her book, nothing good can come from this and her viral essay martially Christy is a friend of mine. She lives in Seattle, and I reached out to her when I was in my first few months of sobriety. And Christy writes about being newly sober, and dog paddling through the booze all around her. And she describes what she sees about why women drink and what it is come to mean. Christie writes, that summer I realized that everyone around me is tanked. But it also dawned on me that a lot of the women are super double tanked. That to be a modern urban woman means to be a serious drinker. This isn’t a new idea. Just ask the Sex in the City girls.

A woman with a single malt Scotch is bold and discerning and might fire you from your life if you fuck with her. A woman with a PBR is a cool girl who will not be shamed for belching. A woman drinking mommy juice wine is saying she’s more than the unpaid labor she gave birth to. The thing women drink are signifiers for free time and self-care and conversation, you know, luxuries we can’t afford. She asked herself How did we not see this before? And Christy reminds herself Oh, yeah, you were too hammered. That summer she sees. She sees the booze is the oil in our motors. The thing that keeps us purring when we could be making other kinds of noise. What I hear when reading Christy’s writing, is that we’re stressed out, we’re overworked. We’re tired or frustrated or pissed off or overwhelmed. And instead of asking for help, or changing our schedules, or having a hard conversation with our partners, or establishing boundaries with our boss, or her coworkers or our children, we are drinking to numb out to make it all go away. And frankly, to put up with it. Listen to this line. Christie wrote booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us pouring when we could, and in my mind should be making other kinds of noise. I get it in the moment in the short-term tonight, it is easier to drink. It is easier to drink than to rock the boat, and to make other noise about what’s starting to become intolerable in our lives. Until drinking gets to a point when that too, is hard. And Christie writes about how other women have bought into the idea that drinking is a solution to any and every problem and annoyance as well.

The message is reinforcing that we should drink to cope with everyday small problems and frustrations that surround a center. They’re constantly the messages that are delivered to us by the people closest to us. Christie writes, one day that summer I’m wearing unwise but cute, so cute shoes at a trip at a farmer and I trip at a farmer’s market, cracking my phone, blood staining the knees of my favorite jeans, and scraping both my palms. Naturally I post on Facebook about it as soon as I’ve dusted myself off. Three women who don’t know I’m sober comment quickly. Wine immediately. Do they sell wine, they’re definitely wine, and maybe some new shoes. Christie says, Have I mentioned that it’s morning when this happens on a weekday. This isn’t one of those nightclub farmers markets. And the women aren’t the kind of beleaguered downtrodden creatures you would imagine drinking to get through the day. They’re pretty cool chicks, the kind of people you ridicule for having first world problems. Why do they need to drink?

So yeah, Christy’s right. Why do we all think we need to drink? The truth is we don’t. But it’s really hard to get out of the ditch we’re in. So where do we go from here? If you’re drinking too much, if you feel like shit, if you suspect or know that alcohol is the issue, if you have tried to stop and said fuck it on day two, or day four, or day seven, as you’re trying, you’re trying to step away from the wine bottle. And then you start to think that maybe this is too hard. Maybe quitting means you’re going to deny yourself the small pleasure you have in life. Remember this, you are being lied to. These messages were created deliberately to reinforce the idea that drinking is an essential part of the oil that keeps our engine running, that keeps us able to cope with all of our first world problems. And it’s not true.

So I want to give you a few things to think about as you’re on this path. Number one, don’t believe the hype. Don’t buy into the fear or the scare tactics, that you won’t be fun, or you won’t fit in. If you don’t drink, you will.

Number two, watch for the agenda and look out for the subliminal messages. And frankly, a lot of them are not that subtle. So it’s super easy to do behind the drinking mom memes and the kitchen towels and the wine glasses that will hold an entire bottle of wine. take a critical look at the agenda you already are just by listening to this.

Number three, start to recognize and question the pressure being put on you by family and friends and colleagues to drink. What do they care? Why do they give a shit what beverage you consume? Why is it the drinking is the only drug you have to justify not taking? Why have we all bought into the fact that it’s perfectly okay to say you don’t smoke. But if you say you don’t want to drink, everyone will convince you to try to have just one.

Number four, follow your own path.

Number five, do your own research. in the show notes of this episode, I will link to every article and every study I cited.

Number six, listen to your own intuition. If you have been thinking that drinking is not serving you for a while, if you have been worried about your drinking, don’t let a fucking wine meme on Facebook convinced you to go back on what you know in your heart.

And number seven, know that you’re not alone. There are 1000s millions of other women who have fallen into this same trap and are struggling to you know those women you look at And you want to be like the ones that you think, quote unquote, drink normally, for whom drinking is fun, the ones you think can take it or leave it. If you look at the stats in the studies, and the article above, many, many, many of them aren’t having any fun, or at least not anymore. They’re scared to stop drinking too. And they’re scared to keep going, they want to stop, and they don’t they want to drink, and they don’t, they’re holding on really fucking tight to control their drinking, because this shit is hard. And then they post the means and take pictures of their drink and post them on social media and wake up feeling like garbage. And nobody is talking about it. We’re not talking about it, not to each other.

And number eight, the last thing you can do to get out of this cycle, and the best thing you can do is to get support, make this easier on yourself. You don’t have to try again and try again and make all the mistakes yourself. Take the shortcuts from those of us who have gone before you. It doesn’t have to be this hard. Here are my suggestions.

Number one, download my free guide 30 tips for your first 30 days, alcohol free, you can find it on my website. Hello, someday coaching.com. It’ll give you a jumpstart on getting away from this with really practical suggestions.

Number two, join one of my favorite private Facebook groups with really cool women just like you, I’ll post a link to the guide on the best sober Facebook groups for women in the show notes of this episode.

And number three, I want to invite you to join my Sobriety Starter Kit Course. It literally covers every step, you need to walk away from the wine mom culture, to get out of the drinking cycle, to stop feeling like shit, and to start feeling better. If this podcast or any other my podcasts resonate with you, you’re going to love this course. It has 50 video lessons, helping you holding your hand every step of the way. I created it based off my years of coaching with busy successful women just like you to help them drink less and live more. If you want to join the course go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. And don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what Tonya who went through the course said about it. She said I’m on day 29 with the sobriety starter kit. And already I’m getting so much from it. I totally fit the profile of the highly successful busy mom who’s keeping all the balls in the air. And it’s also drinking a bottle of wine at night. Now for the first time, I’m seeing that a life completely alcohol free is not only possible, but perhaps my preferred path forward. And I don’t feel like I’m giving something up or depriving myself. She said thank you so much Casey. And Morgan wrote me, and she’s told me that the course was awesome, and was worth every penny. She said she wished she found it earlier because it’s 100 times easier to stop drinking with the resources and the guidance and the prompts and the information in the course. She wrote me and said I knew I wanted to stop drinking so I could be the best wife and mom I could be. But your course helped me dig deeper into my triggers and my behaviors. So, my choice not to drink wasn’t coming from a place where I feel like I’m missing out or depriving myself. She said the course was well organized and easy to follow. And that my take unstopping drinking with laugh out loud funny. So, it made the whole process of walking away from alcohol, something she really enjoyed. And Marta, a mom of three girls told me she loved the course, that she thought it was essential for every woman who wanted to stop drinking. Because it was a step by step approach full of the most important and basic and fundamental elements, you need to step away from alcohol. She thought it was upbeat and inspiring and practical and that it helped her take her power back. So, if you want to take a look at the course it’s www.sobrietystarterkit.com. I promise you as you get further away from your last day one, you will be amazed at how much better and stronger and more capable and more optimistic you will feel. You will no longer feel like you need to drink to cope with your life. 

And how do I know that? Well, I actually wrote down how I felt on my day one right before I stopped drinking Day 100. So here’s what I wrote to myself before I quit drinking. I said, Can I have a life of peace and optimism and happiness? I don’t know. I am stuck in a place of fear and anxiety. I wake up at 3am, almost tingling all over my body with anxiety and sadness. I am so tired every morning, and every day. I feel deeply unhappy. I am insecure about work projects and big life and future security issues. I have no emotional reserves, I have no goodwill to handle changes. It feels like every new request or break me. I wake up with adult eight behind my eyes. I spend all day recovering. I sleep terribly. I feel defensive and guilty and paranoid, an anxious and annoyed I want to hide. I’m resentful and angry. Why am I angry. And I always want more, more wine. It’s never enough. I wrote, I’m putting my life and my plans and all my forward progress on hold. What is wrong with me? That’s how I felt before I stopped drinking. And here’s what I wrote on day 100, just over three months later.

So if you’re listening to this, and you’re drinking and you feel like shit, you’re worried. Imagine how you could feel 100 days from now. Think of the date. Look out three months. Here’s how I felt. I wrote, when I compare the way I feel now to how awful I felt when I had my last drink. I am amazed at how much better I feel. I’m proud of myself. I feel moments of contentment and peace and gratitude on a fairly regular basis. I’m happy with my life. I walk into work on a random Tuesday and think I want the life I have like how crazy is that? I make plans and I follow through on them. I’ve lost weight, I’ve run a 10k I go walks in the middle of the day at work to reset and center myself. I am calmer and more present with my kids. They don’t send me on edge the way they used to. I feel less anxious and more competent at work. It takes so much less effort to keep track of everything now that I’ve stopped drinking.

My life actually feels somewhat manageable. It’s busy, but it’s not overwhelming. I don’t feel so anxious about the future. I actually feel optimistic. I haven’t woken up hating myself in a long time. It hasn’t been easy, but it hasn’t been quite as hard as I thought it would be. Nothing is wrong with you. Drinking messes with your mind, your emotions, your nerves. If you feel like shit, it’s the alcohol that’s making you feel the way you do. Once you get some space away from your last drink, you will start to see that your kids aren’t so hard that parenting isn’t so hard. That life isn’t so hard. It’s the alcohol. And if there’s stuff you need to change, awesome, at least now you have the clarity and the emotional stability and the energy to actually do things about it. Not to knock yourself unconscious and just make it worse. Drinking, especially drinking on a regular basis. It is not good for your health. And it is not good for your life. And stopping drinking is the ultimate act of self-care. It will improve the quality of your life. It will improve your physical health, your mental health, your looks, your confidence, your ability to move forward and achieve your dreams and your goals. You can do this, and it is worth it.

So, if you’re listening to this, and any of it resonated with you, please share this episode. This shit is important and it needs to be talked about. We need to start looking at this stuff and asking if we’ve been had. You’re not falling for this crap anymore. You’re calling bullshit. And that is good. All the hugs my friend.