Dry July is here again, with Kiwis going alcohol-free for the month to raise money for people affected by cancer. If you’re one of them - or simply looking for inspiration to help change your relationship with drinking - these seven stories are a good place to start.
Dry July: Advice on giving up drinking and what alcohol does to your body
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If Dry July has inspired you to take a look at your relationship with alcohol, these stories offer tips and advice to help cut down, or quit. Photo / Getty Images
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How to give up drinking: Sarah Frizzell on near-death and rehab
Two years ago, a drunken Sarah Frizzell, wife of artist Otis Frizzell, hid a ‘dirty little secret’ that nearly saw her lose everything, including her marriage. In an exclusive interview, she tells Carolyne Meng-Yee why she fell into the booze trap and how she got out of it.
Sarah Frizzell was blind drunk and bleeding when she was admitted to Auckland Hospital’s emergency department in late December 2021.
Desperate to find the tequila her husband had hidden, she crawled underneath their house and shredded her knees on broken glass.
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She found it, drank it all, and fell on top of the coffee table, cracking two ribs.
At her bedside, Otis gave her an ultimatum: “Quit drinking or I will leave you.”
How to stop drinking: Step-by-step guide to giving up alcohol
If you’ve decided it’s time to change your relationship with alcohol, here’s what you need to know about dependency and withdrawal
If your drinking is having a negative effect on your life, it’s hardly surprising if it’s taken some time for you to decide to do anything about it.
“Alcohol is a social lubricant and is embedded in our society,” says Sally Marlow, a professor of practice in the public understanding of mental health research at King’s College, London. “Many people have some of the best times of their lives when they are consuming alcohol. But in order to accept this we also need to be aware of the harms it can cause. Dependence is when your alcohol intake becomes so normalised that your body can’t function without it.”
For those who’ve decided it’s time to quit, there are rising numbers making that same decision. But how do you do it safely?
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Mum gives up drinking after daughter questions ‘strange behaviour’
After embracing a heavy drinking culture, Anna Donaghey, 53, used the qualities that drove her career to go teetotal
From her mid-teens onwards, alcohol played an increasingly important role in Anna Donaghey’s life, helping her to fit in and cope with feelings of inadequacy. Despite a successful career in advertising, a happy marriage and motherhood, she drank every day, which ended up affecting her performance, sleep, health and marriage - and even, at times, her safety.
That is, until eventually there were too many red flags to ignore and she had to find new and healthier ways of employing her addictive personality. She told Marina Gask how she went from being reliant on alcohol to putting it aside altogether.
Booze v bacteria: How does alcohol affect the gut microbiome?
A frothy beer or a glass of wine can enhance a meal and settle the mind. But what does alcohol do to the trillions of microbes living in your gut?
As with much of microbiome science, “there is a lot that we don’t know”, said Dr Lorenzo Leggio, a physician-scientist who studies alcohol use and addiction at the National Institutes of Health.
That said, it’s clear that happy microbes are essential for proper digestion, immune function and intestinal health. And as scientists begin to explore how drinking may influence your gut, they’re learning that overdoing it could have some unhappy consequences.
Women and alcohol: Why we’re drinking more than ever and ignoring health dangers
Simone Barclay shakes her head as she recalls a recent supermarket visit. “I was looking at the rosé section – it’s like half the wine section now. And I’m not surprised. Because it looks so pretty and fresh and the labels are gorgeous, and it’s like, whoa, why wouldn’t you drink this stuff?”
The psychologist has been sober for 25 years. But even she was tempted by the display, seemingly aimed very much at women.
“That particular genre is very feminine. And it’s fresh and summery and it’s pink, for god’s sake.” For Barclay, the takeaway impression was, “How harmful can it be?”
Barclay specialises in addiction and sees a large number of women in her practice. Alcohol is baked into our culture, she says. “Alcohol is still the most widely available, accessible and socially endorsed drug.”
She notes that every one of our transitions as humans is marked by the consumption of alcohol: birth, christenings, birthday celebrations, marriages, funerals.
“We are so surrounded by it in every way that for many people I think it’s impossible to think of a life without alcohol in it.”
When your hangover has a hangover: What leads to multiple days of misery?
The margaritas you downed on Saturday night leave you slumped in bed all Sunday. On Monday, you wake up, and you’re still parched and jittery. Your head hasn’t stopped throbbing.
Could you be in the throes of a two-day hangover?
In order to metabolise alcohol, the body breaks it down into acetaldehyde, a chemical compound. A hangover can be the byproduct of this process. For a vast majority of people in a vast majority of cases, hangovers follow a predictable pattern: They make you feel weak and weary for about 24 hours and then they abate. But in some cases, the symptoms can last longer.
The more alcohol someone drinks, the more likely the hangover is to linger. However, some people are predisposed to hangovers that stretch beyond one day even when they drink a relatively moderate amount, said Emmert Roberts, a psychiatry fellow at Stanford University who studies hangovers.
Scientists aren’t totally sure why this is, but they are working to untangle it. “There’s been such a dearth of hangover research in general,” Roberts said. Here’s what experts know.
