Quit Like a Woman

What’s in it for me? An empowered, feminist framework for sobriety.

Meet Holly Whitaker. When Holly was in her mid-30s, she looked like she had it all. A hip apartment in San Francisco. A group of ambitious, interesting friends. A high-powered, high-paying job at a startup that was going places. A penchant for green juices and yoga.

She was in total control of her life.

Except for the part where she was an alcoholic, who’d leave work early to drink at home by herself and was in the habit of carrying airline bottles of booze in her handbag. You know,  just in case.

Eventually, Holly got sober. And when she got sober, she also got angry. Angry about the fact that between 2002 and 2012 rates of alcohol addiction among women nearly doubled. Angry about the fact that between 2007 and 2017, when alcohol-related deaths rose by 29 percent among men, they rose by an astonishing 67 percent among women. Angry about the fact that patriarchal structures hold women to impossible standards. Angry about the fact that women are encouraged to drink as a way of coping with these structures.

When Holly got sober, she realized that drinking was holding her back from her own power – that drinking holds all women back from their power, individually and collectively.

So if you’re feeling ready to give up drinking and reclaim your own power, then why don’t you join Holly Whitaker and quit like a woman?

Alcoholic or moderate drinker? The distinction is irrelevant

If you’re reading this Blink, it might be because there’s a question you want answered. A question that lurks, mostly unspoken, at the back of your mind while you’re counting down the minutes to “drink o’clock” and that first glass of wine. A question that nags at you during panic-filled 3:00 a.m. wake-ups or in the head-throbbing Sunday morning aftermath of Saturday night.

Am I an alcoholic?

Here’s the thing: you’re asking the wrong question.

Contemporary culture frames drinkers as a binary. There are “normal, healthy” drinkers. These drinkers are in the majority. They can handle their booze. They enjoy champagne at weddings, beers at the beach, and wine with dinner. Then there are the problem drinkers – alcoholics, who are only ever one sip of alcohol away from a disastrous multi-day bender. Underpinning this binary is the assumption – and let’s be completely clear, this is an assumption that big alcohol conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch don’t want you to question – that moderate alcohol consumption doesn’t negatively impact your health or your life. In other words, if you’re not an alcoholic, you don’t have a problem with alcohol.

But that is simply wrong. Any amount of alcohol is bad for you.

To begin with: alcohol is poison. The principal ingredient of alcoholic beverages is ethanol. Do you know what other substances list ethanol as a key ingredient? Paint solvents. Deodorants. Engine fuel.

Moderation can’t protect you from alcohol’s poisonous effects. Even one glass of wine can set off a host of negative processes in your body. Here’s a taster. One glass of wine will: disrupt your sleep; stoke your anxiety; impair your liver’s ability to flush toxins from your body; contribute to weight gain or impair weight loss; cause facial redness; compromise the centers of your brain devoted to memory, motor function, inhibition, and emotional volatility; disrupt your endocrine system and deregulate your hormones; and kill healthy gut bacteria and create conditions for bad bacteria to flourish.

And there are a whole host of negative side-effects specific to women. Women drinkers who are under 18 are eight times more likely to experience a sexual assault than their peers; women who do experience sexual assault are 50 percent more likely to binge drink. Drinking lowers defenses, standards, and the ability to make good decisions – all vital capabilities that women sadly need to keep themselves safe. And, yes, no woman – whether she’s been drinking or not – deserves to be assaulted or harassed. But, in light of the harmful ways alcohol impacts women's lives, the persistent way wine and cocktails are marketed to women as glamorous, as fun, as a shortcut to relaxation, as a mode of self-care – well, it all starts to feel rather sinister.

To recap. There’s no such thing as a healthy drinker. Alcohol, even in moderation, is wreaking havoc on your body and brain. And women, in particular, are vulnerable to the damaging effects of alcohol. All of this is true, whether you’re a full-blown alcoholic or someone who enjoys an occasional drink with friends.

So, when you ask yourself, Am I an alcoholic? you’re asking yourself the wrong question. Ask yourself this instead: Is alcohol holding me back from living the best version of my life?

Be honest. The answer is yes, isn’t it?

Understanding why you drink is the first step toward stopping

Okay. Deep breath. You’ve taken stock and you’ve decided – yes. Yes, alcohol has caused me to do things I regret. Yes, alcohol has, in aggregate, brought me more pain than it has joy. Yes, alcohol is getting in the way of my life, my happiness, my sense of self-worth.

What now?

Well, the obvious answer is to stop drinking.

But it’s not quite so simple. If you’ve ever tried to stop before, then found yourself days, weeks, or even months later, caving and corking that bottle of wine, you already know this.

The first step in stopping drinking is understanding why you drink in the first place. Let’s break this why down into two separate stages: the root cause, or the problems you’re trying to address through drinking; and the cycle of addiction, or why drinking – your chosen coping mechanism – has become a dependency.

Let’s start with the root cause. The popular narrative around drinking tells us that alcohol causes addiction in a small proportion of drinkers and that the key to addiction lies in genetic makeup. Now, that’s not wrong. Some people are genetically predisposed to have a more addictive relationship to substances like alcohol. But, as we’ve established, even if you’re not an alcoholic, you may be dependent on alcohol. And there’s often an emotional or psychological dimension to this dependency. Your relationship to alcohol may be shaped by traumas you’ve suffered, by the drinking habits modeled to you by parents and peers, by the oppressions you experience on a daily basis, or by feelings of isolation and lack of belonging.

But above all, you’re drinking to escape something – some part of your life that you can’t deal with. Ask yourself what you want to escape from – and there you have it. The root cause of your drinking.

Next up: the cycle of addiction. You drink because you want to address the root cause of your unhappiness. But when you apply alcohol to your problems, you simply create a new problem: dependency. Here’s how that works.

When you encounter something that’s good for you or gives you pleasure, your midbrain reacts by releasing a chemical called dopamine. Your midbrain, by the way, is the part of your brain devoted to sensory impressions and other instincts. When an experience causes high levels of dopamine to be released, your midbrain not only understands that experience to be good for you but also programs you to want to repeat this activity by sending out another chemical called glutamate, that literally hardwires you to seek this experience out again. Alcohol messes with your brain chemistry. Drinking alcohol floods your brain with an artificially high level of dopamine. Your brain sends out glutamate, to “lock in” this “positive” experience. The more you drink, the more your brain perceives alcohol’s false benefits, and it encourages you to drink still more.

Of course, you’re not totally governed by your midbrain chemicals. You can also apply logic and common sense – functions of your neocortex, also known as the thinking brain – to everyday situations. But the more alcohol messes with your midbrain, the less sway your neocortex has over your decisions around drinking. That’s why, even after a heavy night, even when you know it’s a bad idea, you can find yourself, against your own judgment, reaching for a drink.

To quit drinking, you need to break the cycle of addiction – you need to repair that chemical imbalance in your midbrain that tells you drinking is the best way you can unwind and enjoy yourself, and let your neocortex take the wheel again. But it doesn’t end there. You need to also look at your addiction holistically. And that means doing something a lot scarier than quitting drinking – it means addressing the root cause of why you drink, and healing it so that you never have to drink again.

Conventional sobriety programs weren’t designed with women in mind

If you’re sober or even sober-curious, you’ve almost certainly heard of Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA. It was founded in 1935, so by now it’s been around for nearly a century. And, like many things that are roughly a century old, it wasn’t exactly designed with women in mind. Take, for example, all the work that AA participants are instructed to do in discovering their humility – that’s something most women who exist in a patriarchal society that constantly tells them they aren’t good enough won’t need to work too hard to discover. Same goes for the way AA encourages its participants to catalog their faults and flaws – plenty of women will have that list, annotated and footnoted, ready to go. Thanks, patriarchy!

If you’ve failed at quitting through AA-style programs before, you haven’t necessarily failed at quitting. You’ve just failed at quitting like a man. Why not try quitting like a woman?

Feminine-centric recovery takes a fundamentally different approach from masculine-centric recovery programs like AA. Those masculine-skewed programs start with the base assumption that you, the addict, are broken and in need of fixing. A feminine-centric approach believes that you are, fundamentally, perfect and whole – the work of recovery is the work of bringing that whole, authentic self back to the surface. Crucially, this approach isn’t goal-oriented and linear. Instead, it consists of a framework, folding in fundamental principles for healing.

The first principle? Reshape your core beliefs. Your beliefs about a process color your experience of it, and this is certainly true for the process of getting sober. If your core beliefs are that quitting drinking is challenging and that getting sober is a punishment, then both things will be true. Try these on for size: quitting drinking opens the door to a life of meaning, fulfillment, and joy. Getting sober is the ultimate act of self-care – it’s something you do for yourself because you deserve it.

The second principle is weakening, then breaking, the cycle of addiction. We’re not talking about going cold turkey here. We’re talking about doing work, like meditation or therapy, to weaken the hold your root cause has over you, and about creating new rituals and coping mechanisms to replace drinking. In the next section, we’ll share some specific strategies. The goal here is to sit with your cravings, to understand them, and to consciously work to free yourself from them.

The third principle is viewing sobriety as a practice, not as a zero-sum game. In AA, if you fall off the wagon, you’ve failed. Even with years of sobriety under your belt, a single sip of alcohol wipes all your hard work and takes you back to square one. In feminine-centric recovery, the focus is on forgiveness and resilience. Sobriety is a skill – the better you get at it, the longer you can pull it off.

The final principle of feminine-centric recovery is recognizing that your recovery will evolve just as you do. You’re not a static being – your sobriety won’t be static either. Rituals and coping mechanisms that work in one season of life may not work in another. You’re not failing if you have to replace some of the systems you’ve put in place for healing with new ones – you’re evolving.

Use thoughtful strategies to move away from dependence

So far, we’ve spoken about the negative effects that alcohol has on all drinkers, women in particular, identified two separate elements of your dependency – the root cause and the cycle of addiction, and outlined a feminine-centric approach to recovery. Now, we’d like to leave you with a handful of thoughtful, effective strategies that you can tailor to your own recovery journey.

First, mother yourself. Women are encouraged to be nurturers – it’s in our nature, or so we’re told. In practice, this means lots of women – mothers or not – spend a whole lot of time mothering and nurturing others, and little to no time mothering themselves. Starting your recovery journey means prioritizing you – it’s time to gently mother yourself. Nourish yourself with self-care, rest, and relaxation. Even if – especially if – you have a full plate of caregiving responsibilities. Now is the time to call in the troops: ask friends and family to help or hire paid care. Do whatever you need to do to give yourself essential breathing room.

Second, create rituals. Rituals are powerful and potent – and for many women, a glass or three of wine at the end of a challenging day is a treasured ritual. It’s imperative you find a new ritual to replace the one you’re giving up. Start small. Your new evening ritual might be taking a bath. It might be doing an online yoga class. Once you’ve stuck to this routine, you can start jazzing it up. Add essential oils and a playlist to bath time. Cap off yoga with fresh-brewed herbal tea. Carve out time for reading, or journaling, or whatever else makes you feel good. When your evenings are crowded with things that replenish and energize you, there’s no room in them for drinking.

Rituals aren’t just for the evening. When do you most feel like you need a big drink? When your day has gone completely off the rails, right? A morning ritual can help your day stay on track from the start. Try drinking hot water with lemon, taking ten minutes to meditate, and reading a positive affirmation or two.

Try and repeat any new ritual for 30 days without a break. Repetition will ensure it becomes a habit. Soon, you’ll reflexively be running a bath instead of reaching for a corkscrew.

Binge drinking is bad – but binging isn’t always negative. Try binging on good habits. Everyone has a personal toolbox of habits they can draw on when they’re feeling stressed, lonely, or overwhelmed. Some of those habits – think drinking, overeating, compulsively shopping – are likely bad. Others – watching reality television, doing jigsaw puzzles, cooking and eating nice meals – aren’t causing you any harm. Some – going for long walks, doing hot yoga – are great for you. Binge on the habits that aren’t hurting you. Watch two seasons of Real Housewives back to back if you need to stop yourself having a drink. There’s no judgment here!

Finally, and most importantly, have fun. Sober living isn’t a punishment, it’s an adventure! Quitting alcohol will slowly bring your brain chemistry back into balance and you’ll realize how much drinking dulled all of life’s most profound pleasures. Take time to reconnect with simple joys – getting absorbed in a good book, riding your bike really fast downhill, feeling the sand under your feet on a barefoot beach walk.

Socializing can be tricky when sitting in a wine bar for hours is no longer the default option – although mocktails and alcohol-free wines and beers can be your friend in these situations.  You’ll be forced to find new ways to connect with friends. And you might just love it! Do something kooky like hitting up a game parlor, or nourishing, like a luxurious spa day. Sounds way better than an evening in a noisy bar, doesn’t it?

And if you’ve been conditioned to believe that your senses of fun, risk, and rebelliousness could only be accessed through alcohol, prepare to be surprised. Everything, from skydiving to sex, feels more exciting without the dulling effects of drink. And you might find ways to rebel that are genuinely more meaningful than doing shots all night and dancing on tables – things like engaging in activism and protest. Things that leave the world a better place.

Sober living isn’t a glass-half-empty proposition. It’s brave, it’s radical, it’s adventurous. And it’s where the best version of yourself is waiting to meet you.

Final summary

Alcohol is holding you back, whether you consider yourself to have a problem or not. Addressing the pain that prompts you to drink and unlearning the addictive behaviors that you’ve acquired is a challenging process. But with self-compassion and self-forgiveness, you can forge a new, meaningful, alcohol-free life.