Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about drinking. I’ve been sober for more than a decade, and I acknowledge all of the benefits – no more hangovers, no more empty calories, no more headaches, no more alcohol-infused messy situations, no more shame, no more regrets. But yeah, the past four months have been incredibly rough and I completely understand how some people have fallen off the wagon. I completely understand why even non-alcoholics are drinking more than ever too. Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about her drinking – she’s always enjoyed a glass of wine or a cocktail, but her drinking apparently got a lot worse during the Southern California fires. Apparently, menopause is compounding everything too.
Gwyneth Paltrow says her menopause symptoms were made worse by alcohol — and she drank “every night” during the outbreak of wildfires in Los Angeles. Paltrow, 52, had a frank conversation about menopause on the March 4 episode of the Goop podcast with guest Dr. Mary Clare Haver, a board-certified OB-GYN and author of the New York Times bestseller The New Menopause.
“I’m really in the thick of it right now, so I’m all over the place,” Paltrow said of her symptoms. “But I noticed my symptoms are, like, pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in L.A. I’ve, like, used alcohol for its purpose.”
The Academy Award winner previously said she was in “deep grief” over the wildfires, which broke out in Southern California in January. Paltrow lives in Los Angeles with her husband Brad Falchuk, whom she married in September 2018. While she shared that they were safe from the wildfires, “so many of our close friends… have lost everything.”
It was during this time, Paltrow says, “I think I drank every night. I was medicating. Normally, now at this point, I don’t drink a lot at all. Maybe I’ll have one drink a week,” she said, adding that drinking every night impacted her menopause symptoms. “My symptoms were completely out of control. It was the first time I really noticed, like, causation in that way.”
“Lots of my patients say the same thing. They’ve really just spontaneously realized that they’ve cut back on alcohol or just quit altogether because it just hasn’t been worth it. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer,” said Haver, who penned the foreword for Naomi Watts’ book about menopause, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known about Menopause.
Paltrow shared that she’s been struggling with insomnia, explaining, “I’ve always been a real sleeper” but after menopause, “I went through a particularly bad time with it. There were nights where my anxiety — like, I just thought it meant, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna be able to sleep because you don’t have enough progesterone or whatever,’ “ she explained about what she expected from menopause-induced insomnia. But instead, “It wasn’t that. I would just wake up [and] I would get crushed with anxiety, which I’ve never had in my life. And I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every person’s feelings I ever hurt, like, every bad, you know, And I would be up, like, for six hours. It was crazy.”
Or they would “just quit altogether because it just hasn’t been worth it. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer.” It’s true – once you get out of your early 20s, it just gets harder to recover or feel “normal” and that keeps getting worse and worse as you get older. I did a marathon of Sex and the City over the holidays and I was like… how are they all drinking so much in their 30s?? As for Gwyneth’s drinking exacerbating her menopause, I absolutely believe that and I’m sure the same would happen to me if I picked up a bottle right now.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
