Latest / The b.reathe Blueprint Podcast / Why Successful Women Drink to Switch Off
Transcript
- Katie Harvey: It's 9pm. The inbox is closed, the kitchen is finally quiet, the last person who needed something has been given it, and you pour the glass. Not for the taste, if we are honest. For what happens 4 minutes later. The shoulders drop an inch, the spinning slows. For the first time since 6am, you're off duty. The day finally, actually, ends. Today I want to talk about the drinks successful women do not really talk about. And I want to set the tone before we start. This is not a lecture and it's not another piece of content wagging its finger at women about wine. I'm not here to judge the glass. I'm here to explain what it's doing because once you see the mechanics, you get something better than guilt. You get a choice. First, why the glass works so well on you specifically. By 9 PM you have run two shifts, the business all day and the home all evening. Your nervous system has been in output mode for 15 hours. And it is exhausted and activated at the same time, tired but wired. And a wired system does not switch off on request. And you know this because you've tried. So you sit down and the mind keeps spinning plates without you. Alcohol solves this with brutal efficiency. It is a sedative. It enhances the calming signals in your brain and suppresses the alert ones. Within minutes, it does chemically what you cannot do behaviorally. It forces the system. down. Of course you reach for it. It's the only off switch in the house that works on demand. Reaching for the one tool that reliably stops the noise is not weakness. It is a rational response to a life with no other exits. And here is the part that makes this a woman's episode, and not just a wine episode. An entire industry worked this out before you did. Wine o'clock. Mummy's wine time. Rose all day. The cards. The tea towels. The gifting culture. Alcohol has been deliberately marketed to exhausted women as self-care. As deserved. You have earned this. And notice the trick in that sentence. It is the same rule we took apart in the recovery episode. Rest must be earned. They took your one permitted reward and put it in a glass. So when the glass feels like the only thing that is yours in a day that belongs to everyone else, that is not an accident. That is positioning. You're not weak for falling for it. were targeted. But the glass is not rest. It is a loan against rest. And the repayments are precise. Repayment 1 arrives at 3am. Your body clears alcohol within a few hours and as the sedative leaves there is a rebound. The suppressed alert signals come back stronger, like a spring you have been holding down. Heart rate up, sleep suddenly shallow and you surface. Wide awake, mind already running tomorrow's list. If you heard the 4am episode, here is one of the main culprits. The drink that switched you off at 9 is the thing switching you back on at 3. And it's worth knowing that drink for drink, alcohol tends to hit women harder than men, simply because of how our bodies process it. Same glass, but bigger invoice. Repayment 2 is sleep quality. Alcohol is particularly hard on REM sleep, the stage that processes emotion and consolidates thinking. So even when you get your hours, you wake unrefreshed, flatter, with a shorter fuse for the people you love. If you are a whoop or any tracker, you've already seen this in your own data. Drinking nights, heart rate up, recovery score down. This is not wellness fluff. It's measurable in your numbers tonight. And repayment three is the echo. As the calming effect fully exits the next day, your baseline anxiety sits one notch higher than it started. A little more tension at 9pm. And what solves a notch more tension at 9pm? The glass. Each drink quietly builds the case for the next one. Nobody inside this loop feels like they have a problem, because every individual evening looks completely normal. The loop is only visible across weeks. More tired, more wired, pouring slightly earlier, needing it slightly more. So here is the real question. And it is not how many units. It is... What job is the glass doing for you? the answer is almost always one of three. The glass ends the day because nothing else does. No finish line, no transition, no moment where the shift formally ends, so the wine is the whistle. Or the glass is the boundary, the one thing that makes the family pause before asking for one more thing. closest thing to a do not disturb sign that you allow yourself. Or the glass is the feeling, the soft edge on things there has been no time to look at. None of those jobs is wrong, they are all real, genuine needs. The problem is only that the employee you have hired for them charges interest at 3am. So here is the work. Replace the function before you remove the tool. Give your day an actual ending. A hard stop. A get changed ritual. Ten minutes outside, anything that marks the border between shifts, so the whistle does not have to come from a bottle. Give your system a real downshift. Long, slow exhales for a few minutes. The body's built in sedative, the one with no rebound. An evening walk that discharges the day instead of dissolving it. And give yourself the thing the glass was really standing in for. A slice of the evening that is formally yours. Claimed out loud. not stolen at the bottom of a glass. Then run the experiment. Two weeks. Alcohol only at genuinely social moments, none as medicine at 9pm. Track three things. Night waking, morning state and the strength of the pull at 9. The first evenings, the pull will be loud. And that loudness is information about how much weight the glass was carrying. By week two, Most women I work with sleep through to morning for the first time in years. Your data will make the argument better than I can. And one more thing, and it matters. Everything here describes the everyday pattern of capable women managing an unmanaged load. But if the relationship with alcohol feels like it is no longer fully yours to choose, that deserves proper support from a professional. And asking is one of the strongest moves a capable woman can make. The 9pm glass has been telling you something every night, and it was never about wine. It has been telling you that your day has no ending, your evening has no boundary, and nothing in your week is formally yours. Those are fixable by design, not by willpower. Build an off switch you own.