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Building Doors is a podcast about Inspiring Leaders who have created their own opportunities and are thought leaders, industry advocates and change makers in their field. This podcast gives you the resources, insights and steps to stop waiting for opportunities and start building your doors for success. Listen to this podcast to gain the resources, career tips and hands-on advice on how you can gain clarity and build doors in your own life and career.
The impact of alcohol on our wellbeing with Sarah Rusbatch
I have done yoga classes that have ended with a glass of champagne. Alcohol is being so normalized in our society and yet it's super addictive. If you notice that you have come, fallen into a grey area drinking category, don't think that there's something wrong with you.
Welcome to Building Doors. In this series, you'll develop the skills to build a roadmap for success, get inspired by those leaders who have come before you, and give you the confidence to stop waiting and start building.
Welcome to the Building Doors podcast, where we talk to some inspiring leaders, change makers, and individuals who've created the success meaning and purpose that they enjoy in their lives today. In this episode, we introduce Sarah.
Sarah is a woman's health and wellbeing coach, an accredited grey area drinking coach, and a keynote speaker known for sharing her journey to sobriety and the profound impact of alcohol on her mental health.
She is the driving force behind Perth's Alcohol Free Movement with a mission to inspire and empower women to live their best lives, both mentally and physically.
Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us on the Building Doors podcast.
Sarah Rusbatch:
Thank you so much for having me.
I had to share with the listeners. I was at a conference recently and listened to your talk and it really hit home and it really hit home for me, for so many individuals that I know, for the industry that I have worked in, recruitment, for many, many years.
And so I wanted to get you on to have a really deep and honest discussion around. your journey through grey area drinking and also how mental wellness and our physical well being all impacts what we're able to achieve at work. So can you share with us, Sarah, a little bit more around your own personal journey to sobriety and What led you to becoming a grey area drinking coach?
Sarah Rusbatch:
Sure. So, I grew up in the north of England, um, in the 90s, when it was kind of an era of, it was girl power, it was we can drink as much as the lads, it was like female empowerment, and we thought nothing of matching the lads. Pint for pint down the local pub and everything like that. I started drinking at 14, which was pretty normal where I grew up and where I lived.
We used to fill up SodaStream bottles with whatever we could find in our parents drinks cabinet, take it down the local park, drink this disgusting concoction of whatever we had managed to find, have a little kiss and a snog with the local boys and then head home, vomit your guts up and then do it all again the next weekend.
And that was kind of my initiation into Alcohol, as it was for pretty much everyone where I grew up, um, I'd grown up in a house where alcohol was very prevalent. It was never role modeled to me as a bad thing. It was only ever role modeled as something that was what adults did to have fun and have a good time.
I grew up in Scotland before we moved to the north of England. My parents would have these dinner parties where there'd be loads of drunk adults stumbling around my house laughing their heads up, seemingly having the best time ever. And as a kid, of course, those neural pathways got created at quite a young age, which was Ah, when you're a grown up, you drink alcohol and you have fun.
And I just wanted that. That's all that any of us really wants, isn't it? To have fun and be happy. And I saw lots of adults with their big smiles, the times that all these serious, scary men that my dad was friends with would come to my house and they'd all be fun and laughing and all of these things.
And so little did I know that my little innocent mind was kind of putting two and two together and coming up with alcohol is the answer. So it kind of made sense that when I grew up, I would drink alcohol. Right. So fast forward a few years. I was probably one of the bigger drinkers in my group and I wore my drinking as a badge of honor
I had a high capacity for alcohol, whereas some people the next day would be like, Oh, I feel so hungover. I can't drink. I was like, what is wrong with you? Let's get going. That's the way to fix your hangover is to have another drink. I went to uni. I moved to London. My first ever job in London was in recruitment.
And the fourth stage of the interview process was doing shots of Sambuca in a London city wine bar to see how well I could handle my booze. Wow. Um, this wasn't unusual. It was 1998 and this was just how it was. And needless to say, I passed with flying colors. I was hired. Um, back then in the 90s, it was very much a work hard, play hard culture and work hard, play hard. This meant, get home at 2am, get up at 6am, go back on the tube to London City, do it all again, and do it all again, and do it all again, and that was kind of, and when you're that age, you've got such capacity for alcohol, you don't get the same hangovers, your body metabolizes it completely different to how it does in your 40s, and so, there was never really a problem.
I mean, looking back, there probably was a problem, but I just didn't recognize it, because I drank the way everyone around me drank. I was in a recruitment industry where, so the last Friday of every month it was Champagne Friday and we would like just drink this disgusting like in house champagne that everyone like you just would feel so rough the next day but like we used to smoke at our desks like this is what it was like you'd you'd kind of have a fag in one hand you'd have your champagne in the other and you'd be chatting on a Friday night to all your colleagues it kind of seems like another world now right when you think about it yeah Fast forward a few years, and I'd met my husband, I'd traveled the world, everywhere I'd gone, alcohol had been very, very prevalent in my life.
It was my way of connecting, it was my way of socializing, it was my way of making friends. I didn't drink that much on my own, but, you know, I was socializing a lot, so that meant I was drinking a lot. There was some recreational drugs along the way, there was just a lot of hedonistic partying and lifestyle.
Then I got married, and then my husband and I... decided to start trying for babies and that was probably looking back a bit of a warning sign because we couldn't conceive and at no point did I think it was anything to do with the hardcore partying lifestyle that we had and then I started living this conflicting contradictory lifestyle that was like yoga and kale smoothies and acupuncture and float tanks and all the things, but then drinking so much every weekend that I was negating any of the benefits of what I was doing.
So even going to GPs and doctors, no one was really asking me that. I remember about alcohol or if they did, I would have lied and probably said I was drinking the standard 14 units a week. Whereas in reality, I was. probably drinking double that. And the same for my husband as well. And what we now know is that alcohol use in men can lead to impact in their sperm, can then lead to a higher risk of miscarriage.
So again, you know, there's so many factors that we have now that we probably didn't know about them. Anyway, I finally got pregnant through fertility treatment. And after we had our son, We decided to move to Australia, and this had been on the cards for quite some time. We wanted to kind of live the dream, live on the beach, have the kids growing up with that outdoor lifestyle very different to what the UK was able to offer.
And so we moved. And then funnily enough, nine months of not really drinking too much, raising my son, like I still drank, but certainly not to the level that I had been. And I got pregnant again very, very quickly because it turns out when you're not smashing your body with alcohol all of the time, your body can kind of knows what it's doing.
And so suddenly we were in Perth in Western Australia and I had two under two and I was really homesick. I was really lonely. I was struggling to make new friends. I wasn't working, and I'd had, by this point, I'd been director of a big recruitment business. I got a huge sense of purpose, fulfillment, meaning through my career, and now my days were spent pureeing pear and broccoli, and going to baby rhyme time, and changing nappies, and cleaning sick, and doing that without a support group around you.
I had no family. I was struggling, you know, I had made some friends, but they're new friends. You don't have that same depth of friendship, right? And so I drank because I knew that alcohol had always worked for me. Alcohol had always been something that made me feel better. And it turns out that When you're going through a period of time with very difficult emotions, alcohol makes those feelings go away.
And who doesn't want that, right? And so, that's probably when I started drinking on my own. Um, alone. And I never drank with the, like, just me and the kids. But as soon as my husband got home from work, it was literally like, take my children. I'm now going to have a drink. So my alcohol use started to increase.
I was then, the years are going by and I'm getting older. And as I now know, a woman's body anyway, which we'll talk about later, cannot physically metabolize alcohol in the way that a man's can. And then this only gets exemplified as a woman ages. And so as I'm getting older and I'm still drinking, I'm having more physical impacts from alcohol, my anxiety is through the roof, I'm not sleeping, I'm putting on weight, I've got no energy.
And so I go to my GP, and I was like, I'm a shell of myself, I'm exhausted, I'm overthinking everything, I'm scared about everything. And at no point did she say, how much are you drinking, didn't come up, but happily wrote me a script for anti anxiety meds. And I didn't want to take the tablets because smething in me.
knew that there was more going on and I'm not someone who had ever had anxiety in my life. It just, that's just not the way that I had been. And so this was all very new to me. And I decided that I would take a break from alcohol. A couple of things had happened. Um, that had just scared me a little bit.
I'd had a fall, I'd fallen on my face and cut my lip open at a party. I'd gone to a big birthday event, which had been a big 12 hour drinking session. And the following morning I was meant to take my son to cricket and. I couldn't drive because I was still over the limit and Lauren, that's not a nice feeling when you have to tell your son that you can't take him to the thing he loves most in the world because his mum is still pissed at eight o'clock in the morning.
And these were just a few wake up calls that was like, yeah, I mean, it never occurred to me, Oh God, I need to stop drinking. It was like, Just need to have a break. Just need to have a bit of a reset, right? I'm just going to detox. And they say it takes 21 days to change a habit. So I'm going to do a 21 day detox.
So I did. And I got to the 21 days. So this was back in 2017. And I just felt great. Like I was like, my anxiety pretty much disappeared. My sleep improved. My mental wellbeing improved. I was so much more positive by this point. I was running my own recruitment business. Um, and I was so productive. I was getting so much done and I went on to do a hundred days.
And I tell you, Lauren, in that a hundred days, I build more in that a hundred days than I had done the entire previous year. I was focused. I was on it. I was showing up. I was doing those marketing calls. doing that headhunting cause because I wasn't hiding behind email. I was doing the stuff that you've got to do.
Right. And so I did that for a hundred days, alcohol free. And then I was like, right, okay, well, I'm clearly fixed now. And I clearly don't have a problem because if I had a problem, I wouldn't have been able to just take a hundred days off. So now I'll go back to drinking and now I'll be a moderate normal drinker and now everything will be fine.
So I went back to drinking and that first night I had one glass of wine. I was like, ha, look at me, I've got this sussed, I'm great, I'm just a normal drinker now. And within three weeks I was back to drinking the same amount as before, because that's how it is for most grey area drinkers. So what followed was a couple of years of stop, start, stop, start, and then finally, April 2019, I had my last drink.
And... 2020, I retrained because I knew that if I was suffering in the way that I had been, there would be thousands, if not more, women who were as well. And I could see that there was so much support for the sober community in the UK, where I'm from, but I was living in Australia, and there was nothing. In Australia, there was just nothing.
And like, we, it's a very big drinking culture here. People say the Brits are big drinkers, but goodness me, the Aussies give them a fight for that pole position. In fact, a study has shown that Australia is the biggest binge drinking country in the world. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So I then retrained to be a health and wellness coach and then a gray area drinking coach.
And then I launched my business in January 21. And it's just been absolutely mental ever since. Tell us more, I really want to define what a grey area drinker is, because I feel like that will help people understand a little bit more, because I've seen you speak and you've defined it really well. I'd love you to share with us a little bit more, what is a grey area drinker?
Yeah, so a really simple way to think about it, is a scale of one to ten. So the way that we've always talked about alcohol before is you're an alcoholic or you're not. And if we think about someone as being an alcoholic, we generally think about someone who's homeless, who's waking in the morning with trembling hands and needs to drink.
Maybe they're sitting on a park bench drinking out of a brown paper bag and everyone else is just a... a big social drinker, right? Whereas the conversation has changed now. And if we now think about this in terms of a scale, so we've got a scale of one to 10 and one is someone who doesn't drink or maybe has a glass of champagne once or twice a year at a wedding.
And other than that, alcohol doesn't feature in their life. 10 is. someone with physical dependency on alcohol who needs to have medical support to withdraw from alcohol because something people don't talk about is alcohol is one of only three substances that the human body can die from withdrawal from and so Right, and yeah, it's listed as a central service during lockdown But I mean, that's just a whole other tangent that I could go down at another point So we've got a scale of one to ten Generally speaking to me, gray area drinking is about a four to a seven, four to an eight on that scale.
So we've passed the point of take it or leave it drinking. We've passed the point. Maybe we've started using alcohol for something. So we're at that point that every time we're stressed, we go, Oh, I need to have a drink. Every time we have an argument with our partner, I need to have a drink. Every time we have a frustrating day at work, maybe we lose out on a deal, maybe something, you know, whatever happens, the recruitment world is so up and down, right?
So we use alcohol to celebrate, but we use alcohol to commiserate as well. And the problem with alcohol is once you've created a short term neural pathway in your brain that says, when I feel like crap and I have a drink, it makes that crap feeling go away, your brain short circuits. And every time you feel like crap, a little thought comes up in your head going, have a drink that will make this feeling go away.
And so we end up going down that cycle. So. The other thing we have to remember is that alcohol is super addictive. So it's up there with the top five most addictive substances on earth. So if that's the case, we've got something that we're turning to when we're stressed, but it's really addictive and we build tolerance to it.
So what starts as one glass, then one glass isn't enough. And then we want two, and then we want three, and then maybe it's the bottle. And so it starts building up in that way. So some of the signs. for any of your listeners who are going, Hmm, maybe I identify with this. The signs that you fall into that gray area drinking category.
And by the way, there's no shame in this. If you listen to me and you're going, Ah, that's me. Don't feel shame. Like we have normalized gray area drinking. We have normalized, we live in a society that normalizes using alcohol. For so many different scenarios. I have done half marathons where I've been given a glass of champagne at the end.
I've gone to first birthday parties where I've been greeted at 10 a. m. with a glass of champagne. I have done yoga classes that have ended with a glass of champagne. Like, alcohol is being so normalized in our society and yet it's super addictive. And so if you notice that you have come, fallen into a gray area drinking category, please don't think that there's something wrong with you or that there's any shame.
Some of the signs. So, you're making rules around your drinking, but you often break them. It might be, oh, I don't drink before five o'clock. I don't drink on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I don't drink on my own at home. I don't drink at the weekend before lunchtime unless I'm with other people. Like, we start having rules, but then we always find a reason to justify breaking the rule.
So, I know I don't drink on a Tuesday, but I have got this event tonight, and so I can justify it because I'm doing this. And we're having this constant chatter and justification in our minds. about whether we're allowed to drink. And even though this was against the rule, can we justify why we can do it?
Because people that don't have a problem with drinking, they just don't think about drinking. Right? Like I've got a friend who, if you said to her, maybe she was planning on drinking at an event, and then you said to her, you're going to have to drive because you've got to go and pick one of your kids up afterwards, she'd be like, oh yeah, that's fine.
Whereas for me, if someone had said to me, if I was planning on having a few drinks and then someone said to me, you've got to drive because you've got to pick up one of your kids, so I'd be like. Goodness, that's going to ruin the whole night. There's no point going then. Like I look forward to drinking. I wanted to drink.
I liked the escapism that it gave me. Some of the other signs, maybe you always drink more than you intend to. Or I'm only going to have one or two, but then it always ends up being more. Um, maybe you notice the physical impacts of alcohol are really starting to become more negative for you as you're aging, which is very common, but you're struggling to drink less.
Like the number of times I would wake up in the morning and be like, Right, I'm not drinking for the rest of the week. I'm definitely not drinking. I feel like crap. I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm gonna have a healthy week. And then by five o'clock, I'm pouring a wine with all thoughts out the window of the promise that I'd made myself only like 10 hours earlier.
And so... We're kind of stuck in this cycle where we're making these promises. We're breaking them. We're thinking, Oh, I need to cut down, but we're actually not able to do it. We're having this chatter in our head that's going around. Am I drinking too much? People that aren't drinking too much. Don't ask themselves the question, am I drinking too much?
Like what's a normal amount of alcohol? The other thing is that gray area drinkers tend to surround themselves with other gray area drinkers. And when you do that, you normalize your drinking because you're just like, well, I only drink the same as her, her and her, and they all drink the same as me. And so it's all fine.
But in actual fact, this is what I was saying before. We've normalized a society. That deems regular daily alcohol use as normal, but it's not, it's really not. I think it's really important what you spoke around there around, and I'm going to call it, recruitment is a tough industry in terms of people will say, go home, have a wine.
You've had a bad day, you lost a deal, have a wine, it'll make you feel better. And that is a common thing. And then, and I know we're not the only industry, but I use it as an example because I've worked in this industry my whole career, and know for a fact that it is normalized to, as a coping mechanism as well.
So how much of our society and of the surroundings that we have in terms of what our work stress looks like, what our day to day routine, because you talked about being at home and being isolated, how much of that impacts your ability to go to sobriety when you do have these other factors? Do you have to look at it holistically?
I'm really interested in that. I think you have to, you definitely have to get support if you're in a very boozy culture. I mean, I've seen adverts for recruitment companies that the selling points is how much booze they drink, right? We always have Friday night drinks. We always do monthly piss ups, like, as if that's a selling point that attracts people to go there.
Although it'll be interesting to see if this changes because... research is showing us that the younger generation are drinking less and less than what we were at their age. No, you don't have to change job and leave your company and all the rest of it, but you definitely need to start surrounding yourself with the other information.
So the things that really work are podcasts. joining online communities, reading the books, getting this information into your brain so that you are starting to discount the constant messaging that you've had, which is I need alcohol for this. I need alcohol for this. We need to change up our routine. And I always say to the people I work with, we can't take alcohol out and not add anything in because most of us are drinking for a reason.
So we've got to address what's the reason. Is it stress? Is it loneliness? Is it boredom? Those are the three biggest reasons that I see people drinking and so we've got to address that before we can successfully Change our relationship with alcohol because if the external factors don't change our need for alcohol won't change Whereas what can I do to alleviate my stress?
Can I start? exercising more? Can I be adding in a couple of yoga classes a week? Can I be walking to work rather than driving so that I'm getting some vitamin D and I'm building my neurotransmitters and I'm moving my body? Like there are little things that we can start adding in day by day that just alleviate that need to end the day with alcohol.
And then we also need to start learning because something I know myself and most of the people I've worked with have never been taught to which is to sit with hard emotions. Like, learning to sit with disappointment, learning to sit with sadness, learning to sit with frustration. Learning to sit with anger.
Most of us have never been taught that. And then we discover alcohol, and you're like, Right, well that's the one stop shop for all of this list of uncomfortable emotions. And that's what I'm going to use to escape them. And at some point, it all catches up with us. So at some point, we have to learn, Well, there's that big deal at work.
It sucks, but I have to remember. The way I feel right now, it's not going to matter a month, two months, six months from now. And so, I always used to say to myself, is it going to matter an hour from now, a day from now, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now? And when you just put it into context, you go, yeah, it's hard now.
It's really disappointing right now. I'm really frustrated, but it will pass. I'm not going to feel like this forever. I feel like I could relate because it's just so, and that's other industries too, but it's so recruitment related as well because the highs are high and the lows are lows. And you're so right when you talk about, everyone in my team knows I exercise five to six times a week and I need to do that.
And I know I need to do that because during COVID I was well aware and I had a conversation with my husband about it. I was. Just like you. Alone. I had the kids. I was working from home. Um, recruitment was tough. Like we didn't know if the business that I was working with was going to be okay. There was crying.
There was tears. There was a lot of emotion. And my husband was working and things like that. You're trying to homeschool all that stress. And so I think with COVID, and I know a lot of my friends were the same, I was ordering like Bottles and bottles of wine. Totally. And just to get through that monotony.
You couldn't get out. You couldn't go anywhere. You didn't have that social outlet. So you're home all day. You are working, you're, you're homeschooling your kids. And then you're also dealing with, as you understand for us, a stressful industry. And so I think that what you talk about there is so important in having other coping mechanisms and things like that as well.
I did recognize right there. Back then. And my husband and I were talking about it. I was like I'm drinking too much. And I knew it and I knew it. And I was like my life has to. I've lost. lost weight doing, you know, unintentionally, but like my life has to change and I need to exercise. I need to look after myself and I need to be more resilient for when things go wrong that I don't need to pick up a bottle.
Yeah. And that's the thing. We don't build any resilience. If the first thing we do is reach for alcohol, the moment we face any adversity. And that's one of the hardest lessons in life. But don't you think that wouldn't that be an amazing tool that they taught that in schools? How to sit with these hard feelings and how to manage them.
You know, we've been doing it with kids since they were really little. It was done to us like, Oh, you've hurt yourself. Come and have a lollipop. Come and have an ice cream. Let's make it better. And I was doing it to my kids, you know, instead of just simply going, Oh, you look really sad. Can I just sit with you for a moment?
And let's just wait till it passes. But we've never taught anyone that these feelings pass. We can sit with them for a moment. We don't have to distract the moment we face adversity. Whereas for most of us, that's what we've been doing because that's what we were taught. Like they say that sugar is the gateway drug.
And we would, most of us were using sugar or sugar was given to us by our caregivers as the first way of distraction. And then as we get older, it just. It becomes other things. It becomes alcohol, it becomes social media, it becomes drugs, porn, gambling, like any of those things just to simply escape ourselves.
So true. Because you think about it as well when a child's upset about something, so often you see it, somebody will go, you're right, you're right, move on, come on, it's fine, she'll be right. That's the, that's the common thing we say as well, rather than saying, Oh, you know, I see that you're feeling really upset about that really sucks.
So we don't want to sit with the. Emotion. And that's going to be a big change. And I think the new generation coming through is very much more aware, that I see, of mental health and that side of things as well. But they also have a lot more to deal with now, with social media and other outside external factors.
Yeah. You touched on something before I'd love you to talk more about, and that is... The Bottle Shops. Tell us a little bit more around some of the, you know, the things that you might like to see change in society around alcohol. Yeah. So, during lockdown, alcohol was listed as an essential service. And, you know, for some people who are physically addicted to alcohol, they needed to have access to alcohol during COVID because withdrawal can lead to, can be fatal.
Yeah. Right? But should it have been an essential service for everybody? Because evidence shows, the research shows, that the statistics of alcohol use increased massively during Covid, because it was people's coping strategy. So what would I like to see changed? I would like to see more alcohol free drinks available in bars and restaurants.
I've gone to places, you know, I haven't had alcohol for four and a half years. I don't just want to drink water, and I don't want sugary soft drinks. And so I would love an alcohol free dry sparkling champagne when I go to a cocktail party or when I go to a bar, but do I find anywhere that sells that? Do I?
Heck, like, they might have an alcohol free beer, but... If I'm in my cocktail dress going to a beautiful party, I don't want to stand there with a can of beer. I would like, and what frustrates me is there are so many incredible options out there, but the bars and restaurants are just not stocking them. So the, the alcohol free drinks, I would love to see there being a bigger movement for them to be, I mean, it's great that they are so much more available, but even when I went back to the UK last year, I was amazed at every bar and restaurant had so many alcohol free drinks available, like a whole page.
And every menu would be alcohol free drinks. And we're lucky in Australia if you see one on a menu. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you have to ask, you know, you might see a mocktail or something like that, which are generally really expensive. And very sugary. And sugary. Yep. Yeah. And that's the thing as well, is that. I find most of us, when we remove alcohol, we go on a bit of a health kick because we start exercising more.
We become more aware of what we're eating and you don't just want to be consuming shit loads of sugar because it makes you feel crap as well. And so I'd love to see that change. I would love to see there being more education and more information available. about what alcohol actually does to us. Like I was just looking, funnily enough, this morning on Facebook, there was an advert for a place in Perth that is, it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month this month, and they are hosting a, a lunch to raise money for breast cancer that has free flowing champagne.
And alcohol is the biggest cause of breast cancer. Oh gosh. One in five now, breast cancer diagnoses are directly caused by alcohol. Wow. Yeah. And a study shows that drinking one to two drinks a night increases your chance of breast cancer by 30 to 50 percent. But no one is talking about this. And then you go to these fundraisers that are raising money for breast cancer that are offering free flow champagne.
It's like you wouldn't go to a lung cancer fundraiser and be given a pack of fags on arrival. So why are we not talking about alcohol and breast cancer? So I would love to see there being so much more awareness. Yeah, I want to talk more around in the business world, because I know a lot of our listeners are in the business world and either started their own businesses or pursuing careers.
And I want to talk more around what you see as some of the factors to be aware of in our work to. I guess stay on top of gray area drinking or potentially what I'm trying to unpack here is kind of understanding how can we look after our health better or what common things you're seeing with some of the people that are coming to you that are an issue for people right now.
Yeah. So I do a lot of corporate work. Um, I worked with a big mining company last year and they flew me up to all of their mine sites to do talks on gray area drinking, which was incredible. I've got quite a few talks this month within corporates. And my message is not alcohol is bad, you must never drink.
My message is on the nights you can take it or leave it, it's always better to leave it. And if someone in your life is removing alcohol, please support them because there is nothing worse than when you say, Oh, I'm not drinking tonight, someone's response being, Oh, don't be so boring, just have one, like support people.
And then the third thing is what a company is offering in terms of alcohol free alternatives and alcohol free events. for socializing within their organization. You know, there are so many companies where it's ritual, it's habit, it's their normal thing. Every Friday, they have a fridge full of wine and everyone is expected to stay and drink wine.
I have clients with whom I have to sit down on a weekly basis, look at their work schedule of events that they've got and talk about what excuse. They're going to give us to why they're not drinking at every single event that they've got coming up because the peer pressure and the expectation for them to drink is so strong.
Wow. Right. And I can see that too. I do know people that don't drink and things like that. And I do see them constantly queried. You don't just want one. No, I don't drink. Yeah. You know, and the common one I've seen that people have accepted. And one of my clients actually just says, I don't drink. And then they say, Oh, you want one of these?
Like, I don't drink. And just really strong. And then everyone just leaves it alone. Well, you say that, but I was at a dinner party recently and a woman said to me, Oh, she went to pour me a glass of wine. And I said, no, thanks. I don't drink. And she went, why? Are you an alcoholic? Oh, no. I've never met her before.
And I was like, wow, doesn't that say a lot? That the world we live in, where if someone says they don't drink, the other person's immediate response is they must be an alcoholic. Yeah, we just got to be so much more sensitive to people's own personal journey and can I just put it out there, so much less judgmental, really, you know, and you also don't need to be a grey area drinker to decide you don't want to drink alcohol.
That is your problem. personal choice at any given time of what you put into your own body and kind of leads in more to what I want to talk to you as well around your women's wellbeing work that you've been doing in the Women's Wellbeing Collective, because I want to talk more around that forward approach as well.
Tell me more about that side of it and what you're trying to do in the women's wellbeing space. So like, you know, going back to the point that you just made as well with regards to supporting people to not drink and you're to decide to remove alcohol. There is so much evidence now of the, that we have of the impact of alcohol on our health.
Canada has come out and said it is not safe to drink more than two units a week. Andrew Huberman has a podcast that goes, spends two hours talking about the impact that alcohol has on us and he's talking about people drinking. a couple of drinks three times a week. He's not talking about people drinking a lot.
Alcohol in 2019 was put into the same carcinogenic category as tobacco. Smoking 10 cigarettes a week has the same impact as drinking one bottle of wine a week in terms of cancer risks. If someone says I've stopped smoking. You go, well done, good for you. You say, I've stopped drinking, and people think, what's wrong with you?
You know, when you asked me earlier, what do you want to see changing? It's definitely that. And then coming on to the women's health, the reason I'm so passionate about this is because women are extremely vulnerable. to the physical impact of alcohol. We cannot metabolize alcohol in the way that men do because we don't have the same amount of this enzyme called ALDH, which is what breaks down alcohol.
Women just don't have as much of it. So what that means is for women, more alcohol enters our bloodstream. So women have, are more vulnerable to the health impacts of alcohol in terms of liver disease, heart disease, cancer, and all of the other impacts. Women become addicted to alcohol quicker than men do.
And women are four, I think it's four times more likely to experience strokes, liver disease, heart disease. So we've got to start being more mindful. of the fact that it's not without its health risks and we glamorize it and we put it on a pedestal alcohol oh go and relax have a glass of wine but it's physically detrimental to our health and that's what i'm passionate about doing not in a preaching you must never drink type way but simply in a way that women have the information and can make informed choices because i don't know about you but I never had any of this information available to me.
For a woman as well, you might be interested to know this. From our late 30s onwards, our liver volume starts shrinking. We have shrinking livers. So it shrinks by between 1 and 3 percent per year, um, up until like 70s. And it can shrink in volume by up to 40%. So our ability to metabolize alcohol decreases more, more, more, more the older we get.
And that's why as we get older, the hangovers get worse, the anxiety gets worse, it impacts our sleep more, it makes our menopause symptoms so much worse. And again, no one talks about this. Wow. I had no idea, especially with the liver side of things as well. And I think most people wouldn't, unless you researched it, had an idea because it is glamorized.
It is something that is part of our culture. Everything. Yeah, every sporting event, every birthday, as you mentioned before. So when you do your work, what kind of tools and strategies do you equip women with to break free and any of your clients to break free from the unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms?
So the first thing I do is get 'em to address why they're drinking. Because we can't, as I said before, we've got to add in, we can't just take alcohol out because if all we do is take alcohol out, it's only a matter of time before we go back to it or carry on drinking at that significant level. So we need to address what might need to change.
Do I need to, am I lonely? Like, Boredom, loneliness, and stress are the three top reasons that the women I work with are drinking. And so this needs to be addressed. Why are women so stressed? Why are we so lonely? And why are we so unfulfilled? And it's all interlinked where we've got so much pressure. We are doing the lion's share, normally, of household work, even if we I'm not physically doing it.
It's the mental load of my husband's amazing, but he just needs to be told what to do. He don't think on his way home. Oh, William's got a birthday party this weekend. I must just stop him at Kmart and buy a birthday present. I phone him and say, please, can you go to Kmart and get the present? He'll go and get it, but it's not in his head.
Like it's for women. It's all the stuff that is just circulating all the time. Right. And so I help women to identify what the stressors are. And then we start looking at what we are adding in. And that might be, and I look at neurotransmitters as well, because for most women we're deficient in key neurotransmitters and on a physical level, that is why we are drinking so much.
So I do one on one work to discover where their deficiencies are, and then we can start rebuilding those neurotransmitters through lifestyle, nutrition, and supplements, which then takes away their physical. Need to have alcohol. So it's, we're taking the alcohol out, but what are we adding in? Um, it's community and connection.
It's information to start changing those neural pathways. It's accountability. And then it's, what am I doing to look after myself, love myself, nourish myself, reward myself that doesn't involve alcohol. You've hit something there that I think is really important as well. And I want to talk more on it.
Around what, why are we seeing this with women? Is the neurotransmitters that you spoke about, is that a biological thing? Or is that a lifestyle thing with where we're at right now in society and what the mother load and the load is for women? Which one is it? It's both. So alcohol use disorder, which is defined as more than 14 units of alcohol a week, which is about eight drinks, is, has increased in women by 80, 80 percent over the last 30 years.
No, that's huge. Huge. So, we've got to look at why. And it's a combination of things. We're more stressed than we ever have been. And that is for a couple of reasons. We're, if you think back to our, even my mother, and you know, certainly my mum's mum, didn't have the pressure, stress, and life. that we have now.
Secondly, as women age, our progesterone starts declining. Progesterone is the hormone that makes us feel calm and relaxed, and it's also responsible for GABA production. GABA is the neurotransmitter that helps us feel calm and relaxed. It's the one that most of my women are deficient in. When we drink significantly, this impacts our GABA production as well.
So, so there are physical reasons, there's society reasons, and then the third piece is we've got, there was a specific time where the alcohol industry decided to specifically start targeting women. And with that specific targeting of alcohol to women has come an increase in, of course, women drinking, but also in...
the health risks and health impact of women drinking so significantly. So we have the stress that women have, the physical changes in their body and big alcohol directly coming in and going, I'll take all your problems away. Just have my beautiful glass of pink champagne and you'll feel amazing afterwards.
And what woman doesn't want to feel amazing, even if it's rude. Cause the thing about alcohol is it works short term. It doesn't work long term, but in that moment, it gives us what we want. You know, I said to the women in my group, I've got a community of 20, 000, and I said, what do you get from alcohol?
And most of them said oblivion. Like what they want is just an escape. Just, just to switch off and alcohol in the short term. gives that. The problem is in the long term, it completely screws us. What would you say to someone that's looking for that oblivion or escape? Because it is a common thing that people are looking, when someone's drinking in excess or they're looking for that escape.
What is that really telling us? It tells us that they are living their life in such nervous system dysregulation that they are flooded with cortisol most of the time. And they, so they want a quick switch off. So we have to go back to the root cause. We have to, and that's what I had to do. I was, you know, having come from a recruitment industry, where you are sales targets, bang, bang, bang, you're only as good as the last month.
And then, oh my God, celebrate on a Friday, Monday, back to zero, starting again. What's my target? What am I doing? You've got cortisol coursing through your body all the time. And I was, my nervous system was absolutely destroyed. And so I did so much work on nervous system regulation. So that I don't have cortisol flooding my body all the time.
So therefore I don't have that need for that quick switch off come five o'clock every day. I so resonate with what you're saying. Five to six times a week exercise. Two of those times of Pilates, meditate every day, at least once, sometimes twice a day. And it is because recruitment is extremely stressful and you get it running a business and things like that.
And I know I'm not the only one or we're not the only industry that experiences this when the highs are highs and the lows are really low. And if you know that your life is like that, whether you be, you are running a business or whether, whether you're in an industry, cause real estate and there's lots of other industries that are the same.
Then you don't have those other coping mechanisms in place. And if you don't know how to cope with that stress and you're in that cortisol consistently, yeah, I think it's so important that you're looking at it holistically, the whole package of the person and what their life is like. And we have to look at as well, how do we define success?
Because most of us define success, particularly if we're in a target driven environment by your sales, by your numbers and an actual fact. If you start measuring success by a feeling, how do most of us want to feel? We want to feel calm, we want to feel fulfilled, we want to feel happy at the end of each week.
And yes, all of the actions we're doing don't push us in that direction. So we have to start re looking at where are we prioritizing how we spend our time, and where are we prioritizing moving us towards. how we want to feel as opposed to what the outcome number is or anything like that. So it's, it's a readjustment as well.
Yes. So important to talk about success as a feeling. I so agree. We all say, Oh, when I get this, hit this target, I'll be happy then when I get this new house or this new or whatever goal you've got, but what about being your peace and your contentment? Yeah. In the here and now. Yeah. And, and that is so important.
Yeah. What about with our kids as well? I'm interested in what we can be doing to create, because if we recognize that this is an issue now, what can we be doing to create healthy relationships with alcohol with our children that are going to be exposed to it, our teens, things like that? What are some of the strategies that we can be doing for our future generations?
So the first thing is, how often do your kids see you socialize without alcohol? Like, do your kids see you going out and having a great time or being happy to socialize without a drink? Second thing, do your kids see you, every time you're stressed, reach for a glass of wine? Like, evidence shows that daughters that grow up with mothers with alcohol use disorder are so much more likely to develop it themselves because they've never been modeled self care.
All they've been modeled is when mom's stressed, she has a drink and monkey see monkey do the biggest way that we impact our kids is what they see us do. And that was one of the biggest reasons that I quit drinking because I, and it's not that I'm going to say to my kids, you can't drink, but I want them to grow up with a healthy relationship with alcohol and not.
to have what I had, which was seeing alcohol as on this pedestal that was going to make my life amazing. That was the, you know, this extra thing. I mean, goodness knows my kids hear me talking on podcasts and stuff all the time. So God help them when I think my son will be like, Oh my God. But you know, he's 14 very soon.
And that's how old I was when I started drinking. And all the evidence now shows. Delay, delay, delay. Like the younger person is when they start drinking, the higher the likelihood of them developing alcohol use disorder. There is no place for someone under the age of 16 to be drinking alcohol because their brain is still so underdeveloped.
There's an incredible guy, I'll share it with you, you can share it in the show notes, who's done a podcast on how to deal, speak to your kids about alcohol, and it's a really good one. Yeah, okay. I think it's good to talk about these health impacts because I don't think it's spoken about enough as quite how addictive it is, but also what it's with the breast cancer and all of the other comments that you've spoken about in this episode.
It's been an eye opener for me, a hundred percent, just not knowing this information. And I don't think that I'm alone. I think there's a lot of people that are just not aware because we celebrate alcohol, but we also. use it in so many aspects of our lives and we're exposed to it without really thinking about what it's doing to our bodies.
Exactly. We've glamorized it and there was a study done this year by the University of Oxford that now links alcohol to 60, 6 0 chronic diseases and illnesses, 30 of which had never before been linked to alcohol. And so there is more and more research coming out, but it's not filtrating into the general public as much because there are many political financial reasons as to why certain people don't want people to drink less.
The other thing you touched on before, which I wanted to just quickly... if you'd seen a pattern, is you mentioned you didn't have anxiety until you were drinking? So it was almost like you'd been drinking and that had linked to the anxiety. Are you seeing an increase in the group that you talk about of people that are drinking and then that's leading to some mental health issues as well?
Yeah, it's a direct research is out there that shows that. People who drink alcohol have a higher baseline of cortisol in their body than people who don't drink at all. So even if you're having a couple of drinks, three nights a week, you're going to have more of the stress hormone cortisol in your body than someone who doesn't drink because alcohol causes our brain to release cortisol.
So what this means is we make ourselves more anxious by drinking. And the irony is most of us drink because of anxiety and to switch off and to unwind. But in doing that, we're just making ourselves more and more stressed. And so it becomes a vicious cycle. cycle. And so what are some of the strategies you do in your own life?
Because if we know we're doing things, let's be honest, people listening are going to be, they're going to be other people in a stressful job. Maybe you're running a business. Maybe you're running a team. Life is stressful. What are things we can be doing? Let's take alcohol out of it right now in terms of.
If we can minimise that or get rid of that, obviously, to me, it just sounds like a bit of a no brainer, but everyone's going to make their own choice. What are things we can be doing to lower that cortisol and create more positive, I guess, emotions and physiological changes in our body? What are some of the things you implement in your own life too?
Yeah. So exercise is number one for me and, and that takes many different forms in terms of Pilates and yoga are very, very strong in my life. Yoga has been. Absolutely massive in my sobriety, but I also love my Peloton. I lift weights, but I move every day. Like it's non negotiable for me because that really helps me.
Second thing is diet. I've pretty much eliminated processed food because again, that has a link with stress hormones and cortisol and anxiety. Third thing is meditation. Fourth thing is sleep, right? I am so strict with my sleep routine because I've done so much reading and research now, and I know how important this is.
If I'm tired, everything feels worse the next day. Our cortisol is so much more increased if we haven't had a good night's sleep, yet so many of us are not sleeping enough. And so for me, I turn my phone off two hours before bed. I have a very strong sleep routine that before I get into bed, so I know that I'm getting that eight hours.
I have very strong boundaries around social media use and phone use because I know that that impacts like cortisol levels. And I make sure that I do things for fun. I make sure I do things that fill my cup and make me feel good. Like so many of us, when I ask the people I work with, what do you do for fun?
And they look at me, Lauren, and tears will form in their eyes and they will just say, I don't know. Because we've got to a point, many of us, particularly if we're midlife, maybe we've been raising kids, we're working in businesses, we've got financial pressures, we've got demands from family members and aging parents and all of these other things, and somewhere along the way, we've stopped doing anything for ourselves.
And... If we can't do that, then of course we're more likely to hit the bottle because that's just giving us that moment of temporary reprieve. And so it's adding in stuff that we love doing, and that's different for everyone. Like I spent yesterday afternoon at a sauna ice bath event, going from like sauna to ice bath, sauna to ice bath, and then having a swim in the ocean with some of my close friends.
And like, That was a blissful way to spend an afternoon. Other people would be like, Oh my God, I would never want to do that. But they might want to go and do a cooking class. They might want to go and do a hike. They might want to go and learn to speak Spanish. Like it just doesn't matter, but do something that you love, have something in your life outside of work and outside of family that you do just for you.
I love that. I love that. And I think it's so important and I do know a lot of people that wouldn't be able to answer that question of what they do for, for themselves, you know? And I think that we do need to make time for it because life is busy, yes, but how much gratitude do you feel once you've done something for yourself?
It's not selfish as well. I'm so, you know, I'm so sick of this narrative of, well, of motherhood sometimes that I get frustrated that this is that somehow if we do something that's for us or to fill our cup, that it's selfish. It's not selfish. We can't help others. If we're depleted ourselves, we can't be there for our family.
If we're not filling our cup. Absolutely. But also what kind of life do we have if we Do anything that we enjoy. Like, what kind of life is that? And if you'd asked me back then, what do you do for fun or what's your hobby, I would have just said drinking. Because I didn't do anything else. Whereas now, you know, people say, wasn't a sober life really boring?
And I'm like... Oh my god, isn't drinking, forgetting your, what you said, repeating yourself continuously and waking up feeling like shite every weekend really boring. Like, my life now is so full of interesting things and lots of things that I love doing. I'm curious, I'm always learning, I'm meeting new people and, and I put myself out there in a way that I never did when I was drinking.
I love that. I love that. And I just want to thank you for sharing so much, just so much valuable, insightful information that can apply to people, that people, you know, really can absorb and have a look at their own life. And, and I ask you when, if you're listening to be honest with yourself, I know it's not always easy.
It's easier to deny things, but I ask you always to be honest with yourself because I think that's where true change and growth happens is when we look within and when we're honest with ourselves. Thank you. Avoid, which is such a common thing that people do. For sure. Now, I'm going to move on to the Rocket Round, and I have a question now in my Rocket Round, which I'm probably going to take out, but I'm going to, I'm going to ask it to you, and then I'm going to tell you why I'm going to take it out, because I've realised something which you'll get to when we get to it.
Your favourite book? The Nightingale. Awesome. Favourite holiday destination? Exmouth. Cats or dogs? Dogs. And this is one I've always asked, but I'm going to change it. Coffee or wine? Coffee. But see? See? I never even thought of it being a, a bad question because, and everyone has commented on that question.
Coffee gets you going, wine's how you unwind. So how does that tell you how prevalent that is in our culture? You know, I'm, I'm the first to tell you that, yeah, I'd never thought of it. And what podcast are you listening to right now? Um, feel better, live more. Feel Better Live More. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast as a guest, Sarah.
I just loved having you on just as much as I did listening to you speak, and I'm really keen to understand how people can reach out to you, learn more about your programs, and Yeah, make that connection, get the help they need if they need as well. Sure. So my website is sarahrusbatch. com. It's R U S B A T C H.
Or if you google Sarah Gray Area Drinking, it will come up. Um, on Instagram, I'm at sarahrusbatch. And I have a women's free community called the Women's Wellbeing Collective on Facebook, which is a fantastic community of women all over the world who will welcome you with open arms. I also do corporate talks.
So for anyone listening who is interested in perhaps talking to me about the talks that I offer, it's interesting because I've had some people's business owners say, Oh, but I'd love to have you speak, but I'm worried that people will think that you're telling them what to do and that they will feel like they're being lectured about their drinking.
And I'm like, my talk is never a lecture. It's funny. It's interesting. It's honest. It's got my story. It's got statistics. But every single corporate talk I've done, I have had women and men. come up to me afterwards and go, that was incredible. I, I can't tell you how much I got from that. So that's another way to, to reach out to me, email me.
My email address is Sarah at sarahrussbatch. com. Thank you so much for being a guest, Sarah. And I know that this will impact some people listening today, so I appreciate your time. And yes, please do reach out to Sarah. And as always, I always say, if you do know someone that needs to hear this episode, please, please share it with them.
And like, subscribe, rate, review. That's the stuff I'm always supposed to say, but I love seeing a nice review, so please keep listening and please connect with Sarah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Building Doors. If you've got comments or questions, send them to hello at buildingdoors.com. au. And remember to subscribe, rate and review. See you next time.