Hey, welcome to this week's episode of Midlife AF. This is a really cool one. So and probably the beginning of a series, I think. I am part of Cuppa Community, which is an online platform for people who are looking to change their relationship with alcohol. It's run by Victoria Van Stone, who is sober, awkward, and that amazing podcast and the drunk Mummy, Sober Mummy, and she's bringing out a book. And I was in that community and I did a poll asking people what they would like me to do a webinar on, and that is what led to this particular podcast episode. So I recorded it as a webinar, and now I'm going to make it into a podcast episode for you. And it's all about my journey and it's entitled something which I'm thinking might be the title to a book that I have yet to write called A Scream in a Bottle. And it's talking about being a woman in midlife perimenopause, finding out your neurodiverse neurodivergent and what that means, just a little bit about some definitions around those things and about how they can impact you as a person drinking. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker B 00:01:27
Let me know.
Speaker A 00:01:28
I'd love to hear. Give me some feedback. Over to me screaming a bottle perimenopause, neurodiversity and alcohol. If you're a woman in midlife whose intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move, then Midlife AF is the podcast for you. Join counsellor Psychotherapist, this naked mind and grey area drinking alcohol coach Emma G for a weekly natter about parenting, quirky, teens, menopause, relationships, and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling that life could be so much more, that you're sick and tired of doing all the things for everyone else, if your intuition is waving her arms manically at you, saying it could all be so much easier if we didn't have to keep drinking, come with me. Together we'll find our groove without boobs.
Speaker B 00:02:31
So glad you're able to join me. I call this a scream in a bottle because which sounds like a bit of an overdramatic name, but I've been doing a lot of writing about this recently, and not just about neurodivergence or Menopause Perimenopause, but about why. So many of us drink and why most of the time, us drinking has nothing to do with alcohol and why. It has everything to do with other things around us and our culture and our society. But I wanted to talk about neurodivergence and perimenopause because that has been my journey, particularly understanding it post giving up or stopping drinking. Don't like to use the words giving up because it implies that I've given up something good. And I come from a place where I absolutely, 100% believe that it was one of the best choices and one of the best things I've ever done. Excuse my dodgy voice. In true ADHD fashion, I have been in my pyjamas putting this presentation together for God knows how long. Today, nobody's really been fed properly. And as you can see, I've got no makeup on. So please forgive any errors in the content in the presentation. And I also just want to say that I am coming to this from my own personal experience and I do not and would never want to speak about other people's experiences. So this is literally my experience and I hope that I can share it with you in order to help other people who experience the same. So, first of all, I'd like to start this meeting by honouring the fact that I am holding this live Q and A on the lands of the Brunarang people of the East Coulon nations and I pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging, as well as to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I also just want to take a minute for us to ground and just find ourselves here tonight together or take a second. Just take a breath in and a nice long, slow breath out. One more breath in and a nice long, slow breath out. One more breath in and a nice long, slow breath out.
Welcome, everyone. So first of all, I just want to celebrate you for giving up your time. And I'm assuming that many of you have come to this presentation because you have been getting some kind of notice or knowing or there's something knocking on your door saying, hey, I'm wondering if maybe I might be neurodivergent. I might have ADHD. I might have autism. I might be highly sensitive or high sensory or any of the other things that fall into that category which I will come on to later. And there's so much lack of knowledge around perimenopause. It is getting a lot better since I started investigating it, for sure. But for many people, I couldn't be in perimenopause. A lot of people don't realise that perimenopause can strike from up to ten years before menopause. And so many people can be in their early 40s, late thirties and find that they are getting paramore's symptoms. And many of us don't know what those symptoms are. And as I said, this has changed a lot in the last few years. But I'm not sure it's 100% there for everybody. And I think it's something to be aware of. So celebrating you for coming here and being here tonight with me. Thank you. So this is what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about midlife and the perimenopause, which in turn will become the menopause. We're going to talk about neurodivergence. And for me particularly, my form of neurodivergence is ADHD. And then we're going to talk about why alcohol is the perfect storm for those two particular conditions. But first of all, I'd love you to share in the chat what brought you to today's presentation. So take a second just to share that with me. Yeah. You've been thinking you might have ADHD for a while. You're interested in the perimenopause and alcohol. Totally get that. You've been getting hot flushes. You're wondering why your tolerance for alcohol is much less than it used to be. Yeah, it's very common. So thank you. Thanks for sharing that with me. I really appreciate it.
So next I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Emma, and I find women in midlife. I help women in midlife find their groove without birth. I have a lot of great qualifications. I'm a counsellor, psychotherapist. I'm this naked mind alcohol coach. I am a certified practitioner. I'm a certified counsellor and therapist. I'm a grey area drinking coach. I'm a tuning into teens coach, and I'm currently studying under Gabo Marte in his compassionate Inquiry professional course. But that's not the reason I'm here. Just want to take you a little bit back a little bit in my journey, I found out that I had ADHD last year. And the reason I found out was because both my children who were female assigned at birth one is trans now, were both diagnosed with ADHD and autism last year. And until that point, I had thought that we were all very similar. We were just the same as everybody else as a family. I just wondered why we seemed to make it all look so hard.
And so I just wanted to take you back a bit. So this is me when I was little. That's me in the nurse's outfit at about four, me about seven, I think maybe a bit younger. My ballet outfit and then me performing in a play when I was about 1011. So these were the things that used to be told to me to be told. I always had my head in a book. I definitely had difficulty sleeping. I remember having horrendous nightmares and really hating being on my own at night. I was always caught disorganised. I was told I was unsociable because I often didn't want to socialise with people when they came around to our house. I was messy, I was told my head was in the clouds. I was told I left everything till the last minute, and I left all my books at school, but I was still quite good at English, and I managed to kind of get pretty good reports, pretty good results, and come forward a little bit. So it's my teenage years, me and my dad, and you can say drinking was very much part of our family. We're very much part of that generation of kids who are brought up in families where they encouraged us to drink at home, with the idea being that if we drunk at home and we learned how to drink safely, then we wouldn't get caught in difficult situations outside of the home, which we now know from all the research, is no longer believed to be the best way of doing that. And in fact actually increases the propensity of somebody to have problems with alcohol later on in life. But bless our parents, they weren't to know that, and they were doing the best they could, right? Trying to keep us safe in the way that they thought was good for us.
So for me, I started I had a best friend, and this often happens with women, I think, who are neurodivergent and women in general, but I had a best friend, and we were quite young when we started high school, young in our way. And anyway, she decided that she didn't want to be my friend anymore. And that really devastated me. I was really surprised how much it devastated me, but it devastated me. And then all through my life I'd taken on all these sorts of descriptions of myself as being not good enough, not up to scratch, but I still was okay. I was pumping along. And then I think this was the final sort of nail in the coffin for me, and I was really like, I don't fit in the way I am. And so I started to change and I started trying to fit in. I tried to create this persona for myself, of this rebellious kind of persona. And I got caught inhaling aerosols when I was quite young, pretty young, actually. Like twelve or something. Caught smoking numerous occasions. Caught drinking numerous occasions. I was always leading people astray. I got expelled from school, not sure that spelling is right. I excelled when I was motivated. It was very, quite impulsive. Often I didn't know why I was doing things. Failed my end of school exams. But I did really well in some other exams that I'd taken two years earlier that got me into where I wanted to go. I had eating disorders, bulimia, anorexia, and I self sabotaged. I remembered the other day that I was going off to an interview at an art school, a really good art school in London, and I bought a bottle of wine and drank it on the way there. So I was completely pissed. I don't remember the interview at all. Obviously I didn't get in, and I didn't get into the university of my choice. I didn't get into any university since I left school because my A level grades, which are the UK equivalent of the HSC, were so bad. Let me just check. And then things sort of my parents, in the kindest way went, okay, well, she's obviously not going to become this whatever we thought she might be. And they kind of let me be, and they kind of let me just do what I wanted to do. So I ended up going back to art college, going to an art college, doing a foundation course, and then going to Uni, and then getting a job working for Warner Brothers in the UK and I stayed there for a long time, as you can see, just over ten years. And things sort of seemed to be going okay. I had a good corporate job, I was working in Soho. It was a bit crazy. I was, you know, living with me and my husband going to parties and we really enjoyed going to festivals. We'd go travelling to Thailand, we'd go to Copenhagen, we'd go to lots of that sort of more alternative kind of dancing braves and stuff. There were always beers after work. We were very much in the media lifestyle, so there were all sorts of extracurriculars and then things just started kind of to grind. Well, it was all going really well.
And then this is very common, I think, in women with ADHD. I couldn't seem to progress. I'd got to a point and I couldn't seem to progress. So I wanted to become a director before I had kids and I just got stuck at the middle management level and I kept trying and I kept trying and I kept trying and I couldn't understand why, despite how hard I would work and how good my work was, I didn't seem to be able to progress. And I remember hearing things like not enough gravitas. And I did have a real issue with presenting, which was really strange because as a kid I'd always really enjoyed performing. And now, funnily enough, I love presenting. But in my corporate job I was so desperate, I think, trying to be recognized and understood that I put so much pressure on myself that it was almost too much. But work was very much part of my identity. I gave everything to work and I said many times, if I had progressed to director when I had wanted to, there's a strong possibility I wouldn't have had kids. I just get very hyper focused. I quite easily stay at work and work really, really late. I didn't mind it at all. It didn't feel like a bad thing to me. But I did have to work out vows to keep up. And things looked great on the surface. And you can see from these pictures I was having a good time. I was physically fit and well, probably in the best shape I ever was, was running every day.
I moved to Australia. I lost my dad when we moved over. Things looked great on the surface, but underneath things were pretty tough. I was running on empty. I was feeling like I was trying to do so much like so many mums. I'd woken up, I'd get up really early in the morning, I'd go running, I'd try and get my two children, which I didn't realise were Autistic and ADHD, out of the house and off to before school work, before school. And then I'd come home and pick them up at 07:00 and they'd be exhausted. I'd be trying to get them to bed and I'd be trying to be on calls with Global Conference people and I'd be hiding in a cupboard and trying to pretend I wasn't a mum. And I just felt like I was doing everything badly. My husband was so angry with me. Why can't you do your work in work time? All of this drinking started. My drinking was always really heavy. It was always really heavy, even from the age of eleven years old. And when I say heavy, probably what other people would think of as moderate, but we don't know how harmful alcohol can be. And I was waking up at 03:00 a.m. Beating myself up and just really frustrated in that merry go round, like so many of us are, of wishing I was drinking less and being really mean to myself because I was drinking more. Now today, I am happily alcohol free. I've been happily alcohol free for over three years. I'm learning to be at peace with myself. I do sleep really, really well now. I know I'm lucky in that way. And I'm able to be the calm space in my world, which has become an absolute reality. Because for my girls, my boy and girl who got diagnosed last year, things have really gotten a lot tougher in their teens. Or maybe I'm just a bit more aware of it.
So from a timeline perspective, I had what I call my spiritual awakening or breakdown back in 2018 when I had a bullying situation at work and I was unable to cope with it. I'd really been struggling with my life. I didn't realise it at the time, but I just think I was stretched so thin and I'd gone through a couple of traumatic things as well previously with work. And then the last time my ability to be able to suck it up had just gone. I was so brittle, I broken and I couldn't let I could no longer let anyone walk all over me. And so I walked away and I had a whole year worth of putting myself back together and just really reeling from the fact that that had happened. It really dented my ego, it dented my belief, because everything that I had ever done had been focused on that career. And once I'd had that breakdown, it would have been very difficult for me to go back into it. And looking back at it now, it wouldn't have been the right thing for me to do. So anyway, I decided that I wanted to study counselling and psychotherapy instead. So I'd started building myself back up. I started meditating, I started doing yoga and I started to study for this postgrad diploma. And I also was like, maybe I will work with teenagers because my kids are going to be teenagers soon and it's really interesting and there's such a need. So I spoke to a friend of mine and she said, don't train to help teenagers because teenagers really don't want to be helped by you because you're what they consider to be an old lady, and you'd be much better off helping their parents. And so I trained in tuning into Teens, which is an emotionally intelligent parenting program.
And then in 2020, I stopped drinking. And I stopped drinking using this naked mind. I did their January live alcohol experiment in 2020, which is the program that I teach now. And here's one of the things I am going to talk about at the end of this presentation is my great Aussie alcohol experiment, which I am launching in the next couple of days. And doors close on Tuesday, the 28 February. So I will talk about that at the end of this presentation. I hope that's okay with everybody. If you could type in the chat and let me know, that would be awesome. Yes, thank you. That's great. Then I started my business, Hope Rising Coaching. And in 2021, I started training under Jolene Park in her Gray area drinking recovery program. And that brings us fully back up to date. So in 2023, I have just started training with Dr. Gabriel Marte in his Compassionate Inquiry professional Training, and that's where I am now. So we're here to talk about midlife, the perimenopause. We're here to talk about neurodiversity and from my perspective, ADHD. And then we're going to talk about alcohol. So first of all, let's talk about midlife. So Brene Brown says, midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulder, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear, I'm not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing these coping mechanisms that you've developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt have to go. I love that so much. That's so much of my experience.
So let's talk about perimenopause. So here are all the symptoms of perimenopause, and believe me, I'm sure there's a million more. Hot flushes, night sweats, irregular periods, problems falling asleep, problems staying asleep, sleep quality, breast tenderness, itchy crawly, dry skin exhaustion, trouble concentrating, vaginal dryness, loss of libido, migraines, premenstrual tension, mood changes, feeling more tearing, irritable and anxiety might occur. Also weight gain, even if there are no changes to diet or exercise due to the metabolism slowing down. My experience of perimenopausal symptoms was, well, I had hot flushes, but once I stopped drinking, those actually went away. And hot flashes are very, very strong. The evidence shows they're very strongly linked to alcohol use. So you know, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll get rid of them completely if you stop drinking, but definitely will improve them. And night sweats, I had all the time when I was drinking, and they definitely haven't had any night sweats, really, apart from odd ones since I stopped drinking.
Regular periods, 100% problems, falling asleep and staying asleep and sleep quality. This was my life, and now I've found that since I stopped drinking that's so much better. Exhaustion, I mean, that has been huge for me, fatigue. And I do think though, for a lot of women when they stop drinking even, they still feel huge exhaustion because lots of time is spent using alcohol to push on through and to keep them doing all the things. So often when they stop they're absolutely exhausted because of years of just pushing on through and using alcohol as a kind of energy giver. Trouble concentrating. We've done that. Sorry, I'm going back. More pronounced wintering. Sorry. What else did I find? Trouble concentrating? Absolutely. I've never had that. Itchy crawly skin, not too much. Breast tenderness. Vaginal dryness? Not for me. Lost libido? Yes. But I think that links to other things. Migraines, occasionally, not too much. More Pmt. Yes. Mood changes, definitely. And I would say everything that I've read and researched about menopause, perimenopause is the two the three biggest symptoms of perimenopause are anxiety, sleeplessness and low mood. I also put on a huge amount of weight very quickly and was incredibly healthy and exercised really well and it was very frustrating for me for that to happen. I've had to do a lot of work around body image and so on and so forth in order to make my peace with that and kind of explore my internalised fat phobia. But that's the subject for another day.
So perimenopause is the problem. Things that happen, we get. My biggest thing, which wasn't on that list before, is I have really bad joints. I had really bad joint pain that wasn't a real problem in my fingers and that's a really common complaint. Another thing that's not there is that you get a lower tolerance in a bigger reaction from booze. A lot of women find this, it's like, oh, suddenly two drinks that were felt like hardly anything back in the day, suddenly I'm really, really drunk and I need to pass out or go to sleep. Hot flushes, short term memory loss, brain fog and so on. There are a lot of things we can do medically and not medically, the same sort of things as you would imagine doing for yourself. You can take HRT so you can go to your doctor and talk about that. Really important thing with all of this stuff is just understanding what's going on for you. And in midlife, what really happens a lot is, and this is particularly what happens to me and most of the women that I speak to is that our ability to keep giving out reduces and our ability to push on through reduces because our oestrogen is declining and that's our nurturing hormone. And as our nurturing hormone declines, our ability to put up with shit also declines. And that can be both a benefit and a negative. But what really needs to happen is we need to start looking after ourselves and we need to stop forcing ourselves to do all of the things that society has told us that we have to do, because we're women, and if we don't do them, then we're selfish, and if we rest, then we're lazy. We need to start understanding, first of all, understand what's going on, read, get as much knowledge as you can. Follow people on instagram. Understand and then treat yourself with self compassion. Have your own back. Start carving out time for yourself. Start resting when you need to, and start to develop a relationship with yourself. Less force, more gentle, loving kindness. And like I say, this is a really creative time of life.
This is the time when biologically, our children should be grown, and just before we're about to become grandparents or grown, so to speak, which is a time of creativity for us. It's time for us to seize our time. And so I think we can look at it in that way as well. But perimenopause can be very, very disabling for people. People get huge amounts of blood, sometimes terrible Pmt. And I've had friends who've really struggled psychologically with low mood, and often we get mistaken for being depressed or being anxious. But actually the causes are hormones. And when you look at the hormone charts for perimenopause in comparison to the hormone charts for when you're a teenager, you can see the amount of fluctuation in mood due to hormones, and it's pretty much exactly the same, if not slightly more in the perimenopause size. But it can be a real problem for people. And I think one of the most important things that we need to do is keep talking about it, keep showing people that they're not alone, that there's nothing wrong with them, that it's very normal that different people will experience perimenopause in different ways. But the more we can talk about and not shun things like the fact that we can't always remember the right words and our brain can be a bit foggy and so on and so forth and the more that we talk to that and say that doesn't mean that we're not clever. It doesn't mean that we can't have a seat at the table. It means that this is almost like there's a disabling effect, but it doesn't mean that we can't still be in power. And that's actually where we need to be more than anything else.
Neurodivergence and ADHD so again, I'm going to talk about both my kids who were diagnosed with autism and ADHD over a period of time. And so I've learned a lot about autism, but I don't identify at the moment as being autistic. So my diagnosis is ADHD. So that's what I'll talk about here. So neurodiversity, what does neurodiversity mean? It's a term that's used to describe neurological conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia dyspraxia and high sensitivity or high sensory, to name a few. It was coined by an Australian sociologist called Judy Singer and this was to challenge the idea that different wiring needed fixing. So it was very much treated in a sort of pathological, medical, behavioural way. Historically it would be like, okay, so you've got autism. These are the things that we need to do to make you like a neurotypical person's brain that's different to yours. So it's like instead of saying there's a disability here because of the way our world is structured and we need to change our world in order to accommodate the different types of brains and the way that we work. It was very much along the lines of we need to fix these neurodiverse people and make them the same, and we need to kind of reform their behaviour to behaviour that fits the mould of what we believe to be the correct type of behaviour. And so that's changed now. So a lot of us who identify as neurodivergent are very much along the neurodiversity affirming perspective, which means that we honour and celebrate the difference and think that that difference could bring so much to society as a whole. Because neurodivergent people are often the sensitive people, the creative people, the empathetic people and so much more.
So what are the commonly accepted ADHD symptoms? So many women and girls are diagnosed late with ADHD. And the reason for that is the way that the system is set up is it's set up to basically set up to identify ADHD in young boys. Same with autism. And for years ADHD was thought to be a young boy's condition. And so the things that were expected in somebody with ADHD were hyperactivity, impulsivity, self focused behaviour. So that means behaviour where it's difficult for people to kind of look outside of themselves. Which is very interesting because that also is something that comes up with people who stop drinking. I find a lot of clients, myself included, come out of drinking, especially if you've been drinking for a long time and you can find that you take everything very personally and everything sort of about you. And part of us talk about emotional sobriety and part of that being sort of beginning to look at things from a different perspective and not necessarily be so self focused. That makes sense. Emotional turmoil was a really interesting one. It used to be called meltdowns or Tantrums. That's right. And I remember my youngest was able to have some extraordinary tantrums. But what it actually means is emotional dysregulation. So it means an inability to be able to manage big emotions, having a big emotional response to things, which is a lot of the reason why people drink.
That's one of the reasons I want to talk about this stuff. Because there are so many clients that I work with, there is so much correlation between some of the neurodiverse symptoms and some of the reasons why we drink. And you'll see as well, there is a huge amount. Of research about neurodiversity and alcohol and other drug co occurrences. So struggles with paying attention, loses things and a lack of follow through on tasks or instructions. That was very much I know with my eldest, he would often have like he'd done all his homework but he'd forget to submit it and I was similar to that. So the next is ADHD symptoms in women and how they can be different. It's often more inattentive. We see hyper focusing like I've been doing all day today, which is if you're interested in something, you can really still focus on it. And why so many women have a date diagnosis is often because we've been able to mask. Our symptoms are different, they show up differently than they do in men. Excuse me, but we've been able to mask and I think my children were able to mask for a long time until they got into high school. That's often the case with girls as though they found all females assigned at birth, that they found that was becoming a problem for them, that they could no longer keep up the pretence of being these people that everyone expected them to be. It was debilitating. And so they became exhausted and actually one of my children ended up suffering from extreme burnout and ended up having to go to bed for a few years and we've been slowly building her back up since then. But constant motion so that can be like just fiddling, fiddling with things. Me wiggling your feet for me, I'm constantly chewing my fingers. Stimming, often called the difficulty of making friends, often is very different. We were going to get accused of being too much or being too little or being anxious. Being rejection dysphoria, which I'll talk about again, can mean we're not always on everyone's top list of people. And again, we internalise that and make it mean a load of stuff about ourselves. We're messy, often messy, often have low self esteem. And again, most of the people that I know that drink often have low self esteem and often even without realising they do. Often you can be like, I've actually got really high self esteem, but it doesn't kind of play out like that.
Mental health issues. So a lot of women struggle with anxiety, struggle with depression. Daydreaming chattiness. I always remember as well sort of inappropriate responses to things like my eldest used to always smile when she was being told off and she didn't care and she was but she's just really that was her body's reaction to that. Poor decision making skills. I mean, I find I make decisions very well, actually, but that's mainly because I am quite impulsive and I'm quite happy to sort of trust my gut. Time management issues. I have huge time management issues, hence this presentation which I thought would only take me a very short amount of time. I kept getting confused about yesterday and today and tomorrow and I've always managed to put it together in the end, but at what cost? And I found that when I was studying. 20, so 20 2019 to 2022, I think. It was so stressful for me every time I had to give them an assignment because I would just leave it. It took me so long and I just put myself under so much pressure and I wouldn't be able to be being a good mom to my kids, which is what happens to me even in this work, which I completely love. Rejection dysphoria that's taking rejection, taking any kind of criticism or anything like that very, very personally to the point where you feel it in your body and you kind of have to go into kind of shut down sleep problems. Massive issue. Both my kids and I had massive issues. Going to sleep, we ended up going to sleep school, staying in sleep school, and my kids would still be able to cry and not take, which we now know and I now wish I'd never done with them, control crying. But that was what we were all taught at the time. Intense emotions. We've just talked about that and that's such a propensity for white people. Drinking is not being able to not be able to sit with those really intense emotions. And intense emotions being massively strong for them.
Low tolerance for boredom. Again, another really common characteristic of people who drink. Impulsivity. Impulsive shopping, poor working memory. And that's something I struggle with big time. Has been made so much worse since I've got perimenopause as well. Object permanence issues are really interesting. Both me and my child have that where it's almost like we can't hold too much information in our head, so we have to just focus on where we are now. Which means that often for me, I moved around a lot as a kid and for me, I used to every time I moved to a new country, I'd be like, yep, great, I've moved, new place. And same with my kid, my youngest, she was always like, great new class, new friends, move on. And it was really interesting to me finding out about this because when my dad passed away, I didn't feel like I grieved his death in the way that other people do. I know there's not one way to grieve, but I felt very much like I kind of moved on, like he passed away. I loved him 100%. I missed him. I got to spend a lot of time with him before he passed away, luckily, because he passed away when we were on our way over here from the UK. And yeah, then I've just kind of moved on now.
I was having a very interesting conversation with Danni Carr from How I Quit Alcohol and she was saying to me, or maybe that is actually another coping mechanism that you've used because there's all this conversation as well about trauma and ADHD, trauma and autism, hypersensitivity. But whatever it is, whether it's a gene that passed down from our parents, whatever it is, there are so many different theories on it. What we end up with is a group of people who don't fit into the mould, don't fit the mould and do things in different ways. The burst of motivational interest is similar to hyper focus. But if I'm interested in something, I can get it done. My husband or the people around me were things that for me now I know as post diagnosis, as a coping mechanism to manage my ADHD symptoms. So I used to often bump my carb when I was reversing in and out. And part of my ADHD profile is that I have bad social awareness. I also like to put headphones on when I'm doing boring things because I enjoy listening to podcasts and learning. And if I can do that, I can get through the boring tasks like washing up, cleaning, anything else that I found boring. This is generally the housework. And again, my husband used to get really angry. He's like, why do you always have your headphones? You're listening to me. It's like no, no. Now I know. I'm like something I do to help me be able to do things that I find boring.
So next, the problem is many women end up being diagnosed late in life as perimenopause. Actually exacerbates the symptoms that we've learned to mask. Suddenly we can't push through anymore. Keep going. It's just not possible for us to. So the solution is, again, it's just learning and knowledge, self compassion and self advocacy. The more you learn, the more follow. Brilliant. There's some brilliant stuff out there. There's so many good ADHD people to follow. I can't name them off the top of my head now because my memory is terrible. But surround yourself. Read my most favourite book, which is different, not less, by Chloe Hayden. Absolutely amazing, brilliant, brilliant book. And there's some other really great stuff on perimenopause. The women that I really love listening to are My Brain Has Gone Back, Sarah Barley Bailey, and sorry, I'll have to look this up because I can't leave you hanging like that. Wendy McCallum. Wendy McCallum does a brilliant podcast. Got quite a few episodes on Perimenopause and I found her and Sarah Bailey talking about that really, really helpful, especially about seizing the beauty and wonder of actually the creative part of perimenopause.
Yes, there are lots of things that are negative about it, but there's also some amazing things like not being able to put up with shit anymore is amazing. Having to stop using all these coping mechanisms that we're using to numb and to keep ourselves safe. Having to really examine where those have come from and where those beliefs have come from and question whether they're not whether or not they're true. The things around our self worth things about our organisation and so on and so forth. So again, with ADHD, with any kind of neurodiversity and also with paramilitary, self advocacy is so important. Nobody's going to come and say, here's the solution to your problem, you have to keep going. Things aren't still right. I'm not going to put up with this anymore. And you also have to decide what you're happy to live with and what you're happy not to. I, for example, take Meds, my ADHD. I find them helpful. Sometimes I think I might not take them, but I find them really helpful for focus and getting things done. Like this presentation. I also take Meds for hormone therapy, for Perimenopause, but I still really struggle with short term memory loss and I'm having to have some tests, cognitive tests. I'm pretty sure that my stuff isn't dementia because my understanding is that if you have dementia, you're unaware of the issues that you have with short term memory loss. Whereas I knew I had something today, but I looked up on a walk when I'm supposed to be at an appointment and my doctor will call me up, I'd be like, an appointment, or put something somewhere silly anyway. And it can go on and I won't because I go on for too long. But alcohol, y, alcohol is a perfect storm. So that's me with a grumpy face.
Alcohol makes Perimenopause and ADHD symptoms worse, no doubt about it. So what can you do? Stop drinking, get curious, get ready for this wonderful adventure of self discovery. I mean, stopping drinking and taking a break from drinking, reducing your drinking, gives you some opportunity to understand why you were drinking in the first place and to stop becoming really intentional. Learning how to manage your emotions, learning how to manage your symptoms, doing things for your nervous system, the whole thing. For me, the three people together, finding out my neurodiversity becoming paramount also and stopping drinking have been the beginning of this amazing journey.
Yes, it's been hard and yes, it's not been perfect. And in fact, we're probably going to go back to being potatoes because I can't think of anything else to do. I'm so tired. Also launching my program, which I'll come on to talk about in a minute. But alcohol makes Perimenopause and ADHD symptoms worse because alcohol increases our anxiety and increases our low mood. It also disrupts our sleep. Those are the three biggest issues that people complain about ADHD, Perimenopause, and so if you take alcohol out of the equation, you will find that at least those symptoms aren't being made any worse. So if you share in the chat what you've taken, what information you've taken from this presentation, I would love to hear. You really enjoyed understanding the impermanence. Yeah, I found that really interesting as well. It was actually a bit revolutionary for me. You didn't realise that Perimenopause started so early. I know, right? It's such a surprise, isn't it? That really is. And you're interested in if you can just reduce your alcohol content, it will make things better. Definitely. Everything you can do in order to reduce the amount of alcohol that you drink is going to be beneficial for you, particularly with hot flushes, sleeplessness, nerves, anxiety and low mood, for sure. So whatever you can do will be very good. Great. Well, thanks very much for that feedback.
So, last thing, I just want to take you through a case study. So this is a case study of one of my previous participants in my program, which is The Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment. This is Lou. Lou's a 48 year old mum, two teens and a four year old. She grew up in our family in Templestowe, and she was a weekend warrior and eventually went to one milk, two bottles of wine a week sorry, a night. And she joined my first alcohol experiment and has been alcohol free ever since, which is absolutely amazing. So that was in oh, my goodness. July 2022, I think. Yeah. Must be 21. 21, that's right. She'd done a few alcohol free stints, a bit like I had using Willpower, but they weren't getting any easier. She found the greatest podcast and she listened to stories in closing nine. And she listened to people who had found freedom using Booze, which I have a lot of on my podcast as well. They can be really helpful. Having woken up with one too many hazy flashbacks from a drunken night before, she decided to invest herself for her family and her loved ones. And she stopped drinking in July. There we go. I've got the date. 2021 and she hasn't looked back. She's amazing, isn't that right? So she needs to use alcohol free. So before, she had high anxiety, low self esteem, self doubt, self hatred, physically and mentally drained and exhausted. She had poor relationships with her partner, kids and family. And she repeated crap decisions, followed by crap decision life experiences. Crap life experiences. S
he was feeling trapped within a less ordinary life. She was reliant on others to determine her happiness. And afterwards, she felt like she was never anxious unless she was 100% warranted, found real happiness and love within herself. She lost weight, increased her fitness, both mentally and physically. And she has much better relationships with her partner. She sees a bright future with excitement, enthusiasm, confidence, guiding her life back to where she wants to be.
And then I've got a few other lovely quotes here. This one's from me, too. I'm so grateful for everyone, this experience and everything it taught me. I feel regenerated in hope and knowing that I've turned my life for the better, no longer desire alcohol. And I definitely recommend Emma a live experiment for anyone wanting to take a break from Booze? Thanks again, Emma. And we've got this lovely woman, Tony. Emma's like a rare sunshine, the alchemy experiment meets people wherever they are on their journey, there are words and actions. Emma's taught me that it's okay to be unapologetically imperfect. She gave me hope and reminded me of the importance of self love. Very important on this journey. Two things alcohol takes away doing the experiment gave me the knowledge and skills to trust myself. Again, thanks for always making me smile, mainly because you're laughing at yourself. Keep shining, Emma, because it's in place. I keep telling you that's. Lovely. The last one. I absolutely love the experiment. A great way to journey through the emotions associated with drinking and the beliefs we created. Emma was and is so nurturing throughout the whole process. And I would highly recommend the experiment. Emma. I loved it and still love all the awareness I gained and continued to grade from Ange. And you'll see, Ange and Lou are both in my podcast, Midlife AF.
So here's just a little bit of information about my program. What do you get? You get daily coaching videos and emails to keep you accountable. Journaling prompts. Yes. You have homework and access to my free Facebook community. We have daily live coaching sessions with Me, which is actually in Zoom. Small group coaching sessions and live demonstrations of the most common limiting beliefs that people hold around alcohol and how to transform them for yourself. Bonuses. We have my favourite nonalcoholic drink guide and discount code for online purchases, three bonus meditations, which are grounding, centering, and orienting, and one month free access to my beautiful friend Emma Wilkinshaw's. 21 minutes of Morning Magic, which is a great way to support yourself in this journey. She does seven minutes of movement yoga, seven minutes of meditation, and seven minutes of my brain's Gone Blank journaling. There we go. There you go. That's peripheral. But she's offering anyone who joins my program a three month worth of her program. So that's another lovely thing. It's $450, and if you sign up today, you get 3 x 30 minutes one to one coaching with me where we can work on your individual needs. And the reason I want to talk about this today is because the women that I work with are generally women in midlife. They are generally women who are perimenopausal. And an awful lot of them either have children who are neurodiverse or think there's a possibility that they could be neurodiverse, too. And one of the things I just want to come on to is whether you get diagnosed or whether you don't, it doesn't matter up to you. You choose that. I found it very affirming. So do my kids. Other people don't. Entirely up to you. But I think with all of these things, like with drinking, the more we can understand what's going on for us, the more we can give a name to, the more we can be compassionate to ourselves through all this, the better. Thanks so much for your time. If you've got any questions, reach out to me at my email address [email protected]. Thanks.
Speaker A 00:55:53
For tuning in to this week's episode of Midlife AF with Emma G. If you enjoyed it, please share on Instagram for your friends and tag me at Hope Rising Coaching. If you want to help me grow the podcast, please review the episodes for me on Apple podcast. That really helps.
Speaker B 00:56:09
If you would like to work further.
Speaker A 00:56:11
With me, please go to my website, www.hoperisingcoaching.com, for my free and paid programs, or email me at [email protected]. Sending a massive cuddle to you and yours from me and mine. And remember to keep choosing you.
