Clearing away the empties after a big night, I’ve sometimes considered scribbling out the ABV % and instead pencilling in the measure of my shame, on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Let’s just say, a ‘1’ was never in the running. 

A whole bottle of wine + five gins = one deeply private overshare, gallons of tears and at least 24 hours of deepest depression. 

Little mental calculations flying everywhere. Like ‘yes it was bad, but next time I’ll drink more water’, or ‘if I’d stopped at the wine everything would have been fine…’ 

Fundamentally though, those sums are all underpinned by the belief that giving up alcohol would be a socially or personally unsurvivable loss. 

Remarkable, isn’t it?

Alcohol is actually thought to affect around 50 different neural mechanisms, most significantly:

• by increasing the uptake of a neurotransmitter called GABA, it reduces stress … by acting basically like a sedative – Valium in a bottle. 
• By flooding our reward circuits with dopamine, making us feel grea...

Ok I didn’t actually kill anyone, but if deathly thoughts counted for anything he’d be pushing up daisies right about now….

And it was only partly his fault.

The other part was mine. My self-care routine was knocked out of whack so, instead of re-defining it, I let it slide. So, there I was, with all of life’s usual pressures and dramas, and without my outlet – my safe space and time to unwind and process.

It was not pretty. But I learned from it.

From now on, I will kill FOR my self-care time, not because of the lack of it. 

I’m joking!!!

Jokes aside, what I did learn is that, since creating that time for myself, I am so much more able to navigate the peaks and troughs of work and relationships, and without it I’m a little bit at sea. That time is, in the scheme of things, just a few moments, but it works wonders for my wellbeing.

Because I don’t want to be a reactive, dramatic person – most of us have no desire to metaphorically set fire to things in our lives, it just happens...

Want to work on your wellbeing? Start by ditching the self-flagellation, my friend.

We women are experts in telling ourselves to ‘do better’. We constantly beat ourselves up for never being ‘enough’, for never getting things quite ‘right’. We’re utterly unforgiving.

I get it – I was expert level in it too!

And that’s why I drank. Because I was drowning under the unrelenting pressure of modern womanhood and I’d learned, from a very young age, that alcohol was my band-aid of choice.

My beginnings

If you don’t already know, I was born in the UK but grew up in Africa. My parents didn’t drink any more than any of their friends, BUT my grandparents started each day with a Gin and Cinzano. And, at the ripe old age of 13, I was allowed to start drinking too.

I don’t blame any of them. The received wisdom back then was that, ‘if we let them drink with us then they'll be used to alcohol and better able to manage themselves’. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well….

In my 20s I moved ...

I call bullsh*t on alcohol

Hello and welcome to Emma’s alcohol-free paradise; a place of sunshine, rainbows and eternal joy.

Juuuuuust kidding.

Alcohol-free or not, life is life. Immense highs, the lowest of lows and everything in between. And that’s a daunting prospect, especially without our trademark ‘safety net’.

Except our relationship with alcohol has never been, and never will be, ‘safe’. It’s a sneaky little devil, dressing up as a solver of problems while it lights fires all around us.

And still, it manages to convince us that we ‘need’ it. That life will be worse without it. 

I call bullsh*t. 

Alcohol takes more than it gives

The first step to that rainbow-filled AF world is to recognise (as above) that our perception of alcohol is TOTALLY skewed. It is not our friend, it is not a band-aid and it will be no loss. 

Why is that important? Because perception and positive mental attitude are critical to our success. Doubting me? Then trust the science…

According to the ...