The Food Medic - S6 E5: Sobriety with Millie Gooch from the Sober Girls Society

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Millie Gooch is the founder of the Sober Girl Society and is one of the voices leading the sobriety movement in the UK. As a journalist, she has written for a range of publications, and her campaigning work has been featured everywhere from ELLE and Stylist to the BBC and Evening Standard. The Sober Girl Society Handbook is her first book.This episode covers:- Inspiration behind the sober girl society- Why breaking up with alcohol is like breaking up with a toxic ex- Hangxiety, palpitations, the fear - What is being sober curious? - Benefits to going alcohol free that no one really talks about- How to deal with the stigma from friends/family/peers- Is sobriety part of diet culture?- Drink-free dating tips and sober sex - How to support people really struggling to stop drinking and where to find support. If you or someone you know needs support with cutting down or stopping drinking, please seek support from your GP. Self-help or mutual aid groups (groups such as AA or SMART Recovery groups) are accessible in most areas. Drinkline is the national alcohol helpline: Call 0300 123 1110 (weekdays 9am to 8pm, weekends 11am to 4pm).If you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. instagram/twitter/facebook: @thefoodmedicwww.thefoodmedic.co.ukThis podcast episode is sponsored by WHOOP. Right now, you can get your first month free when you checkout through join.whoop.com/thefoodmedic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over deliver. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Food Medic Podcast. I'm your host as always, Dr. Hazel. So today we are talking about sobriety. I guess if you guys follow me on social media you may have heard me or seen me talk about this because I've been dabbling with going alcohol free over the last 12 months really. I'm definitely not at a point where I am sober and I do still consume alcohol but I've tried periods of going completely sober and that was really because I felt like alcohol was contributing to my anxiety. I was having palpitations afterwards and it was disrupting my sleep and actually the periods that I stopped drinking were largely during lockdowns so in this episode I say it was easy but it was largely easy for that reason in that I didn't

have the I guess peer pressure of drinking alcohol not to say that my friends put me under a huge amount of pressure but society does let's be honest and so yeah I think my longest period was four months and I felt great afterwards but I do really enjoy a glass of wine or cocktail and I'm not gonna deny that I also don't want to make any absolutes when it comes to saying I'm this or that. And I'm the same when it comes to my diet. So basically, as I've been talking about it more, you guys have been asking questions and wanted to hear more because you're curious. And I love that.

So I've invited Millie Gooch on the podcast today. Now, Millie is the founder of the Sober Girl Society and is one of the voices leading the sobriety movement in the UK. So she's a journalist and has written for a range of publications and has done a lot of campaigning which has featured everywhere from Elle and Stylist to the BBC and the Evening Standard and she's published her first book which is The Sober Girl Society but even if you're a guy listening this conversation is for everyone. Also if you're not interested in cutting out alcohol completely again this conversation is for everyone it's for people who are just wanting to learn a bit more about going alcohol free or considering cutting down on alcohol and

wherever you are on your journey I really recommend you sticking around and having a listen because I really really enjoyed this episode. Today's podcast is brought to you by our sponsor Whoop. Whoop is one of the most popular fitness wearables right now. It's a 24-7 digital fitness and health coach that provides actionable insights to help you recover faster, train smarter and sleep better. Whoop is unlike most other wearables in the sense that it doesn't just tell you what you've done but it tells you what you really need to know. So I've been using my Whoop for a few months now and I am so impressed with

the amount and level of insight it can provide you. So each morning when you wake up you get a recovery score from Whoop based on your sleep and other recovery metrics such as heart rate variability and resting heart rate. That score helps to guide your day whether you should push yourself and go all out, pull it back a little, or actually just take a rest day. The greatest feature for me is the built-in sleep coach, which lets you know how much sleep you should be getting based on your expected activity for the following day. It also tracks all four stages of sleep, so you can get a breakdown of how much REM and slow-wave sleep you got. It's allowed me to figure out ways which work for me to optimize my

sleep. Whoop can help anyone perform better. Whether you're preparing for a 5k, training for an event or just looking to build healthier habits, Whoop can help you make smarter lifestyle decisions with data that is personalized to you. Right now you can get your first month free when you check out through join.whoop.com slash thefoodmedic. It's so good to have you on. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to it. Basically, what I'd love to start with is to find out a bit more about you and your background, and I guess what inspired you to start the Sober Girl Society? Yeah of course so my background is actually journalism and basically I kind of came to Sober Girl Society because I started drinking when I

went to university so actually kind of before uni a lot of my friends were doing the you know being 14 drinking white lightning cider and I actually managed to skip all of that really so I actually kind of came to alcohol at university and I think when I look back on it now it wasn't even a question of oh will I drink at university it was kind of a non-negotiable it was yeah that that's what you do so I kind of went headfirst into university culture I you know got a job in a shop bar. I got a job in a vodka revolutions. I went kind of full throttle and went from kind of a zero drinker to a like three, four night a week binge drinker. I never played with that middle ground of, you know, a couple of drinks here and there. It was always very full on drinking. And I kind of, after I left uni, took those habits with

me. So I went to work in PR and then journalism and the media industry is quite a heavy drinking industry so I didn't really slow down and alcohol really started as something that I did just because everyone else did it it was kind of expected at uni and then gradually it became something that I felt more like I needed and in terms of like oh I need it for confidence and I need it if I needed. And in terms of like, oh, I need it for confidence. And I need it if I'm going on a date. And I need it if I'm going on a night out. And it had never really been something that I needed until I started drinking it, which is the irony of it. And gradually, my drinking just sort of got a bit worse. And, you know, I would go out on a

Tuesday night for drinks and fall asleep on the train and end up miles from my house I was kind of like saying things that I didn't remember and doing things that I didn't remember and it just slightly got a bit more dangerous I'd wake up and not really remember how I got home I was really suffering from blackouts and kind of towards my mid-20s it really started to take a toll on my mental health so I was always anxious especially on a hangover with hangover anxiety or anxiety as we like to call it and then I kind of noticed that just taking a bit more of a toll generally on my mental health so you know at the weekends I would spend them always pretty hungover never really actually resting

going straight to work on Monday doing a full week at, and then just going out and partying. I was a weekend warrior, I would say. And because of that, I never really like would get outside on a hangover. I was, you know, eating Domino's pizza for breakfast. And, you know, I was financially not very well because I was spending all my money on Jager bombs and tequila. And I just woke up in February 2018. I had this like almighty hangover. And I just said, I don't want to keep doing this. I don't think I can keep doing this anymore. It's exhausting. Like mentally, I'm on the floor. And I kind of looked around on Instagram because I thought, you know, it'd be really nice to find other people who feel like this, who don't necessarily identify with kind of an AA recovery path, but still feel like alcohol is quite damaging

to them. So I couldn't find anything I could find, you know, like a few groups that were talking about mummy wine culture, but I wasn't a mum, so I didn't identify. And there was kind of very recovery heavy groups that were kind of based in the US. And I thought, well, you know, maybe I could start something I know how to use Instagram. And I thought maybe 10 of us would gather and talk about non-alcoholic wine. And it just escalated and kind of snowballed. And yeah, so Sober Girl Society is now the largest community of women on Instagram who are sober or sober curious. So it's a bit of a convoluted long story. But that's how I got there in the end I love that and I guess this is probably a really obvious question but what do you mean when you say sober curious yeah so interestingly this has got a bit confused over the last few

years so sober curious some people think it means curious about becoming full-time sober but actually there's kind of this new definition which was brought in by Ruby Warrington who wrote the book Sober Curious and that is that sober curiosity is like a permanent state so you never kind of declare yourself teetotal but you are just uh it's quite interchangeable with the term mindful drinker so it means like you're really aware of your drinking habits you probably don't binge drink your default will be tending to not drink a lot, you might have a drink on special occasions, it's more that you're really kind of conscious. You know, I was when I was drinking was such a mindless drinker of just knocking back anything. It's like, Oh, does this have alcohol in it? Cool, I'll drink it. So it's just being really aware of,

you know, the motivations behind drinking, am I drinking because I'm stressed or am I drinking because you know it's a party and I'm in a really good mood so it's just an awareness really about your drinking oh I'm so glad I asked you that because I had no idea but I love that I just think yeah it's wonderful so basically the reason that like I wanted to speak to you about this is I think it's something that everyone's a little bit more interested about especially after the year that we've had in like going into various lockdowns and also just dealing with kind of collective trauma and stress and so I feel like people are like either one way or the other they were like drinking all the time or they actually

weren't drinking at all because they weren't going out and for me personally in the first lockdown I felt like it was almost like a novelty it was summer I was drinking a lot of rosé after work and I found myself getting into this habit where I was drinking it but it was more as a stress relief it wasn't that I was like particularly enjoying it or wanting it I just kind of was doing it out of habit and I was kind of her background working on a COVID ward so it was a really like stressful time but then I was coming home and like also stressing my body with alcohol and like I'm really glad that you mentioned the kind of fact that it's not you know there's a spectrum of how much you drink and your relationship with alcohol so I definitely wasn't dependent on it like I didn't need to have it in the mornings and so after that I was like do you know what I'm ready to

kind of stop drinking for a bit and so I've just dabbled with kind of periods of non-drinking and my longest was I think 120 days which is nice yeah I've done I know and I I found it really easy to be honest I didn't miss alcohol I think what made it easy for me is that I was like wow I didn't realize how good my body could feel not drinking alcohol and like how good my sleep was my energy levels just like overall feeling better in myself. I don't feel like I'm ready to give myself that label of being sober because since easing lockdown, I have had alcohol drinks. And so basically I found I'm kind of in this position where I'm like, I'm not really sure, you know, what I'm doing, whether to label it. And also, I think from speaking to other friends who are in the same

position, it's like, why is it so hard to break up with alcohol? And I guess that's the question I want to ask you, because I think we all know that, like, we're not going to feel good afterwards. And yet we still go back to it. And like, the analogy I used with someone was, it's like that ex-boyfriend that like, you know that they're not good for you, but you still go back to it and like the analogy I used with someone was it's like that ex-boyfriend that like you know that they're not good for you but you still go back to them because in the moment the comfort is nice oh my god I use the ex-boyfriend analogy for alcohol all the time because you've honestly you find so many parallels with it it's even like when we talk about you know like once you're like a year down the line, you kind of, you forget how bad they were for you. So you romanticize them. Like we compare it to an ex-boyfriend all the time. So you're quite right in that analogy. But I just think it's so hard because it's everywhere and it's, you know, celebration, it's commiseration. And that to me,

now that I look back on it, I think is a weird concept weird concept I'm like why do we use the same thing that we use to celebrate a friend's promotion that we use when someone has died like it is a really kind of weird contrast that we do that and also alcohol is just everywhere like if you look at photos we're all holding it like it is just an accessory now that is everywhere and unfortunately as well we've kind of become the our own marketers of it as well so we don't even like none of us need to be paid on instagram to be holding our wine glass like the alcohol industry have it great because they just have so many people giving like free advertising to them so it is hard because it is absolutely everywhere and it's such a social expectation and you know we use it for bonding

we use it when we're going on dates it's how we meet new people it is just impossible to kind of get away from it really yeah that's so true it really is it's like every experience involves alcohol in some shape or form yeah and I think like a lot of people I mean everyone is basically aware that it's not good for you in the long term there are health implications of drinking alcohol and that like spans things like heart disease to various forms of cancer but what we don't really talk about is like the other symptoms and these are the things that personally make me really not want to drink alcohol and that's like anxiety the palpitations I get after I drink,

the fear I experience and also the sleep disturbance. I'd love to chat a little bit about them. Yeah, of course. I mean, I was exactly the same. I knew all the, I knew that alcohol wasn't K.O. I knew that it caused cancer. I think probably I didn't realize to what extent it was kind of linked, but you do know that, you know, you're not drinking elderberry juice or something.

You do know it's bad for you. So for me, the kicker was the mental side of it. And that's not really like disgust. When we kind of hear warnings about alcohol, it's really concentrating on like the physical effects. But not many people kind of talk about mental effects and I just didn't realize at the time how linked it was to my anxiety and how linked it was to depression and so many kind of other mental health conditions that it can exacerbate and the problem is it's such an intertwined phenomenon as well it's a bit like chicken and egg because you can't really decipher which comes first so if you've got kind of anxiety and you're drinking a lot you know know, a lot of us drink to calm anxiety, but it often exacerbates anxiety. So then you drink more to calm it and you quickly get into

this real cycle, which is kind of what I think I was in is, you know, I was constantly drinking because I wasn't feeling confident and I was feeling anxious. And then I would drink and I'd feel fine in that moment. And then the next day I'd feel even worse. And it just got into that kind of spiral. So those were the things for me and also particularly blackouts I experienced those quite a lot and I know speaking to a lot of other people now that they have and you know that not remembering things that caused me anxiety in itself as well as the chemical effects of alcohol um and there there is so much to it and I kind of didn't realize how much it was a problem in my life until I took it

out yeah that's so true I think if it's a really if it's something that you're doing really regularly it's very hard to separate it from other things in your life that may be causing those feelings and feelings of anxiety um and I mean I don't want to make this podcast all about shaming people who drink and also I fit into that bracket because I still drink alcohol but I just want to kind of highlight just like you said the fact that there are these kind of mental implications that the light really isn't shone on when it comes to talking about health effects of alcohol yeah and and I always say look I don't judge anyone who does drink you know my family drinks or my friend drinks, my partner drinks. So it's not about that. But there's so many things that you can do to kind of reduce your harms of alcohol, even if it's that not giving it up entirely, you know,

even things like dry months, like dry January, sober October, they just give you that breathing space to kind of analyze, actually, could this be having an effect on my anxiety, if you take 30 days off, and then kind of think of think actually my mood is a lot better then you kind of have that understanding and that knowledge whereas if we don't ever pause you never really stop to sit back and analyze actually what role is alcohol playing in my life and what role is it having on my physical mental health absolutely and I think looking at the positives what are some of the benefits of going alcohol free that you've experienced? It sounds so cliche and I always think people probably think I've like joined a cult but there isn't one thing honestly that hasn't been like positively impacted even if it's like a little

bit from giving up alcohol whether that is like physical health, mental health, more time, more energy, more money, better sleep, like everything my relationships are better I like who I am which sounds really silly but it's really helped me like get to know myself without this kind of like blanket of alcohol and it's just given me more confidence because you know I don't rely on alcohol as much that used to be oh I couldn't do this without alcohol and I couldn't do that and over the kind of three years that I haven't drunk I have proved to myself that I can do those things and it has given me more confidence so and I'm not saying there are no downsides to it but pretty much everything in my life is better for not drinking yeah no that's really good to hear and I've kind of experienced some of this but I'm sure you'll be able to talk

about it a bit more kind of dealing with the stigma that you come up against with friends family colleagues when you say that you're not drinking and how to navigate that because it can be very easy to like I don't know turn into a chameleon and change your mind and decide okay I'm just going to drink because it will make everyone else feel more comfortable and happier with the evening yeah there's two things I think you commonly come up against one is you're boring um and the other one I think is the kind of because the stigma associated with drinking or having a drinking problem is is normally you have this you know stereotypical alcohol dependency a lot of the time people will say oh you're not that bad you're fine like you can drink you're like you

know oh you're not dependent on it so those are the two things that I kind of really came up against at the start and I just I mean the second one I kind of really had very honest conversations with my friends you know first of all they they joked about it and I I said well actually it is really making me miserable and I said like I don't know if it's gonna be a forever thing but like at the moment it's a thing and I would really really appreciate you like getting on board and supporting me and I think as soon as I had those like really honest conversations with people they were so much more understanding than if I'd been like oh I'm just you know flippantly not drinking at the moment and or like I'm on antibiotics I think people find that they can push you if you don't give

them the whole story and I know that's kind of easier said than done because you know especially if you're at the start you don't necessarily want to go into the full detail of it but I just find being as honest as possible with your relationship with alcohol and how it is affecting you helps people understand it a bit more and then I think with the kind of like boring thing that is one of the the biggest things I hear from people. I say like, what would stop you going full time sober from Sober Curious? And they say like other people and the peer pressure and them thinking that I won't be fun. So that one is really hard.

I would just say it's kind of like a time thing. Like the longer you do it, the more your friends will notice that actually like you can still be fun and you can still do those things. I think my friends call me boring for about the first three or four months. And then when I said, look, but am I actually any less fun? Am I not coming out? Am I still not doing all the stuff? And they were like, oh, you know, actually you are still really fun. So I think a lot of it is just time and people getting used to it. And, you know, I always say, unfortunately, a lot of the time people's reactions are actually a reflection of their relationship with alcohol. And I know for myself, if three years ago someone said to me, oh, you know, I'm not going to drink tonight.

I think that was the worst thing in the world because then I thought, God, well, they're going to notice how drunk I'm getting and I want everyone else to be on my level. So I think you just have to try and be really confident in your decision. Remember why you're doing it remember that it's kind of for you and no one else and also really learn about setting those kind of hard boundaries of no I'm not drinking tonight yeah I've been discussing this like quite regularly on Instagram and there's like so many people who are really interested in it and a lot of women have like spoken to me who are single and they're like I've just started dating and I find that really difficult to do sober like I feel like I don't want to be on a first date and say I'm not drinking or I feel like I need the drink to help me relax well not just

women women and men and even like the whole concept of having sober sex seems to be this really scary thing for people. Yeah, it's a major factor. So many people kind of talk about that when they come up against, you know, what's going to be the hard things about not drinking. Again, like it's a really hard thing because I always want to give people like, oh, here's my ultimate tips. And I do have some like really easy things that you can do for dating but generally it is kind of like practice makes you know I never say perfect but progression and it's kind of like you have to just go on these dates the first one and the first thing you do sober of anything whether that's you know a wedding a day a bottomless brunch is never going to be like super easy it's always going to

be a little bit awkward because you're doing something new that you've never done before but once you've done that first one you're kind of like oh well that actually wasn't that scary and then you kind of do the next one and you do the next one and then by the time you get to about date four or five you're like well this is great it's just often getting past that like first hurdle but there's so many things that you can do to kind of make it easier I always told people up front I didn't drink because I didn't want to wait until the date and see their reaction just in case they reacted negatively I thought well at least if I tell them up front and they're not okay about it

then I don't have to go on the date with them um and then even things like you know when I was drinking I was never prepared for dates so I wouldn't get my outfit ready. I would get dressed like last minute, fluster, get really stressed and then have a glass of wine. I wouldn't look to see where I was going on Google Maps. So I would get lost and then I'd turn up late and then I'd be stressed and then I'd have another glass of wine.

You know, like getting things prepared, knowing where you're going, kind of getting your outfit ready, putting on a good sassy music playlist, like all those kinds of things that you can do to get yourself in the right headspace. because I always think if you're in the best possible headspace and that's when you're least likely to drink so if you can just try and keep that in mind when you're like getting ready for a date but I found sober dating at first terrifying

but genuinely one of the best things that I ever did because and I've done a lot of drunk dating in my time I always say gin can create a spark from nothing it's kind of like you don't really listen to each other because you're just kind of drinking and I've left many a drunk date and gone you know they're the one and then met up with them sober and being like oh actually we don't have a lot in common but whereas going on a first date sober it sounds really kind of cliche but you can feel whether you have that chemistry without alcohol and that's quite nice and actually asking someone and I was also meeting people who kind of had similar lifestyles that weren't necessarily non-drinkers but were more interested in doing things outside of drinking so it was really nice

to meet people like that whereas I think before I'd just always gone oh well they're a drinker I'll go on a date with them so I found it was a really good experience and I'm not saying you don't get the odd person who doesn't understand it but you know why would you want to be with that person anyway yeah no that's so true it's safer't it? Like when you think about it, because like you said just now, if you're avoiding drink, you tend to drink when you're not in a mentally stable place or safe space. And so if you're nervous and using alcohol as a crutch for that anxiety, then you end up drinking loads, you go on a date, you don't know whether you really like them. And then you may just decide to kind of go with the flow. Like, you know, you're not letting

people know where you are, you might stay out later, things may happen that you don't want to happen. And I just think having an awareness, you know, especially thinking about where we're living in London, it's so important. and that goes for both men and women and you you can be more clear about what you want and whether this is a person that you want to go home with yeah a hundred percent and I mean even the kind of vulnerability aspect of you know I was commuting home and you know my mum was forever scared that I was just gonna like fall on a train track because there are so many kind of like drunken mishaps that you could have I was forever walking out in front of cars and so even that side of it I always do feel a little bit safer kind of that way

yeah absolutely so one of the things that I came up against when I was researching for the podcast was how this sobriety, how it's part of diet culture. And I actually never really framed it that way in my head. So I was quite interested to read these articles. And it's something that I wanted to bring up with you and whether it's something that you've had to tackle and speak about yeah it's really interesting because I had also never considered it until it was about a couple years ago someone wrote about how sobriety was like the new calorie counting and I totally understand where that's coming from because sobriety is kind of in this wellness space and you know for health so I can see why it would kind of come across that way but actually when you really look at it the kind of

diet culture aligns a lot more with alcohol culture which is this like real targeting of women in particular to sell them an idea and a narrative that is actually very harmful to them and they profit off it so you know we're sold this idea that drinking makes you sexy and glamorous in the same way we're told that dieting will do that and actually there's someone making money from that so when you're sober no one profits from that I mean there's probably a lot of cake companies that have profited from my sobriety but apart from that no one is kind of making money off you and you're being the most authentic you that you can be really so it's quite a really confusing conversation because I think there is that aspect where people think it's health and wellness and

trying to be skinny and not drinking the calories where it's so much more than that and it sounds a bit silly to be like oh it's super radical and rebellious but it kind of does have that element to it of sticking two fingers up against the alcohol industry and saying look we don't need your product that's actually really damaging to us we can live life without it and you know these are companies that spend billions of money like trying to get us to drink and recruit new drinkers and get us on board with all their kind of fancy marketing in the same way the diet industry do so actually alcohol culture has a lot more parallels with diet culture than sobriety does yeah I agree I completely agree

with you there yeah it's an interesting way to frame it but I guess there are people who may cut down on alcohol for health reasons and when I mentioned that I was not drinking alcohol for x amount of days I had a lot of people say oh is this because of the calories or is this because of health reasons like things like that and it was automatically assumed that because I guess I'm a doctor and a nutritionist that the reason that I'm doing it is purely from a calorie counting perspective and so that kind of you know was interesting to me but also when I was sharing some of the non-alcoholic drinks that I was making at home people were saying well there's the same

amount of calories in that and there's sugar in that as well so why would you bother and I'm like yeah you're missing the point like it's not like that I'm trying to avoid the kind of nutrition side of things it's purely the effects that alcohol have on me yeah and I think that's so important as well in that conversation is that we can't like categorize alcohol as like a drink or a food it's a drug so it's a totally different conversation it's you're not putting cocaine in that same bracket if you started saying oh I'm going to cut down on my cocaine use no one's going to say oh is this part of diet culture and and alcohol is a drug and I think we've kind of also done that to ourselves because we've tied like we say I'm not drinking and you constantly associate drinking

with alcohol even though you haven't specified what you're drinking so I think like a lot there is some conversation around changing kind of should we say I'm not drinking alcohol to kind of specify because otherwise we just see food and drink and we see alcohol as in a drink. Yeah, that's true. Someone said to me recently, you know, if alcohol was discovered right now, it wouldn't be legalized. It's so true. I know. It's terrifying when you think of it like that and you're like, oh, God. I know.

I know I know so I guess there's going to be some people here who do consume alcohol or who are listening and maybe they're like right I'm interested in this what tips do you have for people who are sober curious and learning to navigate this new normal in a slightly kind of alcohol driven world yeah I think the first thing is just to get I mean, mindful is the right word of your drinking habit. So, you know, even noticing things, writing things down, maybe keeping a journal of kind of when do I drink? Are there times I am triggered more to drink? Are there people I drink more around? Are there particular times when I

drink? And just kind of like noticing any patterns or you know do I drink because I'm stressed or getting a bit curious about your relationship and identifying any of those patterns and then I would say that there is like an entire corner of the internet like in the last three years since I stopped drinking there has been like a boom in courses programs people alcohol-free drinks so So I would say, look, just start engaging with some of that content, follow a few people, listen to a few podcasts, maybe read some Quitlet, and just kind of absorb yourself a little bit to kind of move yourself away from really heavy alcohol messaging. I think even just having like an Instagram feed that's got a bit more of

that inspiration will kind of help you along the way and see other people who are doing it I think there's so much help out there now that it's amazing and I think I mean even if you're not on social media there's so many amazing books and podcasts and people that you can reach out to yeah I found joining your page the silver girl society just something really refreshing because of the conversations that you're having and how you're reframing a lot of it and I didn't find that anywhere else so I definitely do encourage people to go check out your page because it's just nice like you said to break up the endless bottomless branches that are ongoing right now and they are endless

at the moment um so I mean obviously we're talking about people here who are not dependent on alcohol but I'm sure there are there may be some people listening who do feel like they've gotten to the point where their relationship with alcohol is not healthy and maybe they are a bit more dependent on it what support can we offer for people who are really struggling and where can they go for that support yeah so there's so much support out there I mean I would say go to your doctor if you are worried that you might be dependent on alcohol because if you do need to go through like a medical withdrawal that kind of needs to be done under supervision so I would

always say go to your doctor and then the other thing is you know there's amazing support lines out there and charities that you can go to you You could go to an AA meeting. There's amazing charities out there like Alcohol Change and NACOA and so many that you can go to. We Are With You is another great one. So there really is help out there. I've actually got just in the highlights of my Instagram page, there's a link with all the kind of hotlines that you can ring if you are struggling so I would say that that is your first point of call but definitely go to your doctor if you are worried about having an alcohol dependency yeah I completely echo that and so to finish off for people who want to read and find out more about this is the Sober Girl Society the best page or

your own personal page you can come to both society is more the community so that's where we run kind of like our events and our meetups if you want to come and meet like-minded people and then I also talk about it a lot on my personal page that's kind of like more my experience and then yeah the book the sober girl society handbook is out so that's that's a mixture of both really it's a bit of my story and then also just some like really practical tips from kind of me and other people in the community yeah I have the book and I love it yeah I just also the branding's so cool it makes it feel like because I think when we think about sobriety it can often feel very like old-fashioned and a little bit boring like you mentioned earlier but it's so refreshing to have it like you know reframed by a young woman and also have like this group of women behind you who are like all doing

it and you're like actually do it at any age and it's not that it's uncool it's actually pretty cool oh I will I love that I'm glad that comes across because that that's my main aim I think when I first started looking for pages everything was really you know like you say even the branding it was dark and it was kind of this is what you give up and this is what you leave behind and actually my experience of sobriety was really positive and I'm not saying it was you know everything was sparkles and rainbows but I felt much better in myself and I just couldn't find anything that that really reflected that so I wanted to you know create something that was actually appealing and

and wouldn't put people off sobriety but actually encourage them to get mindful about their alcohol consumption yeah I love that message and I think that's definitely what I feel like I get from the page so oh good yeah no so good well thank you so much for coming on it's been it was a really lovely conversation and I well I'm sure that we've inspired a lot of people oh thank you so much for having me yeah hopefully okay team that was Millie I hope you enjoyed the conversation it was potentially slightly different to the conversations we normally have on here but all related to our physical and mental health and that's the most important thing I just want to I guess emphasize the last message and that is if you or someone you know needs support with

cutting down or stopping drinking please do seek support from your GP because if you are dependent on alcohol stopping drinking suddenly can be very dangerous and so it should be done under medical supervision drink line is the national alcohol helpline so you can call 0300 123 1110 and they're open weekdays 9am to 8pm and weekends 11am to 4pm i would be really interested to hear your feedback on this episode and if you did love it make sure to give it a review a rating hopefully five stars and share it with your friends or family and I'll see you again next time