Beyond Booze and Into a Better Life: Sarah Rusbatch on Reinventing Midlife for Women Over 40

0:0010 hours on my feet, traffic, noise, everybody needing something from me. My head is spinning. I just need the world to stop for one second. But then I get home, shoes off, phone out, and I open Modo Casino. Hundreds of slots, classic table games. It's my instant reset. The variety I want in the quiet I need. Modo Casino, the social casino. Board were prohibited. No purchase necessary. Visit moto.us for more details. Download the Modo Casino app today. Must be 21+. Modo Casino, America's social casino.

0:30Sarah Rusbatch:Hi everyone, my name is Haley. And this is Laura. And welcome to The Body Pod.

0:45Sarah Rusbatch:Today on The Body Pod, we have the pleasure of speaking with Sarah Rusbatch. Sarah is the author of the best-selling book, Beyond Booze, How to Create a Life You Love Alcohol-Free, an award-winning health and well-being coach, an accredited gray area drinking coach, a menopause coach, and a keynote speaker sharing her journey to sobriety and impact of alcohol on mental health to global audiences. After developing what she describes as a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, Sarah made the decision to remove alcohol from her life in early 2019 and has never looked back. She now works with women across the globe, guiding them from feeling lost, stuck, and out of control to a healthier and happier way of life.

1:29Sarah Rusbatch:She's the host of a thriving global online community called the Women's Wellbeing Collective, which offers a safe space where women feel seen and heard. She equips women with the tools they need to break the cycle of unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms. Her experience, knowledge, and passion has transformed lives. So we will jump right into the show with Sarah Rusbatch. Enjoy.

1:59Sarah Rusbatch:Well, hello, Sarah. Welcome to The Body Pod. Thank you so much for having me. We are so excited to have you and talk about your book and all things that sometimes can be a buzzkill when people want to talk about alcohol. It can go one or two ways. So I'm super excited to kind of have this conversation around drinking and women and how you even got into this. So let's start there with your story. What led you to reassess your relationship with alcohol and ultimately giving it up? Maybe that might take people too much. We're just diving right in. Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the north of England and I think it was not a question of if I would start drinking, it was a question of when.

2:53As a little girl, my parents were pretty sociable. So there was lots of dinner parties. There was lots of like, you know, drunken adults around my house that as a little girl, I would look on going, oh, my God, this is what you do to have fun as a grown up. This is, you know, what was modeled to me as a little girl was the way that adults socialize and have fun is to drink alcohol. They would have, you know, all come over to our house for dinner parties, etc. So while I didn't realise it at the time, I can see that my beliefs around alcohol were formed at a very young age as to this is how you have fun when you grow up.

3:29And we had a few changes growing up where I moved from Scotland to England at the age of 13, which was a really difficult time to make a move to go and, you know, be the new girl at a very posh school where everyone had all their friends and stuff. And I felt like I really didn't fit in. and then at 14 we started drinking and we would go down the local park and we would fill soda stream bottles with whatever we could find in our parents drinks cabinet and we would drink them it was disgusting hayley and laura it was we would like have this concoction of like martini southern comfort like sherry baileys whatever you could find and we would think it was hilarious that you'd just fill it up in this bottle and you'd go and drink it you'd put some coca-cola on the top and oh I think about it now and it's just disgusting but that's like this right as you're singing right right and I always remember I started getting this feedback of oh you're so fun when you're drunk you're hilarious when you're drunk and when you want to fit in as a 14 year old who feels a bit like she's on the outside and then you start getting this feedback you start to create this identity of, well, people like me when I drink alcohol.

4:41I'm funny. I'm hilarious. People want to be around me. And I think that that started to then create this persona of who I thought I had to be to have alcohol, was to have alcohol in my life. So fast forward many years, it was, you know, I didn't drink problematically, but I had a high capacity for alcohol. I didn't really get hangovers. I wasn't someone that had like, you know, I had to spend the whole day in bed vomiting the next day, I was just like, you know, brush yourself off and get on with it and thought it was like this badge of honor that I could drink the way that the boys did. I could match them, you know, university in the UK, I think it's very much like the US where it's very alcohol focused.

5:21And, you know, I just fell for that, you know, hook, line and sinker into this big, heavy drinking culture. Then we, I made the move to London at 21. You'll laugh at this. This was 1998. And my job interview for a recruitment company was three stages of formal serious interview. And then the fourth interview was in the pub doing shots of flaming sambuca to see how well you could handle your booze. And then they would decide whether or not you got the job. I'm looking at your faces now. What is happening? So this was the London in the financial district. It was, you know, we were working in investment banking, recruitment.

6:03This is just how it was in the 90s. And needless to say, I passed with flying colors. And this was, you know, I got the job. And this was this real era as well, where there was this shift in the cultural dynamic. It was sex in the city. We all wanted to channel our inner Samantha and go and drink Cosmopolitans on rooftop bars and pick up men and think that we could all be, you know, like we didn't need to have to rely on a man for anything. We had our girlfriends, we had our cosmopolitans, we had this life. And that was a really big movement, probably in the US, the same as it was in the UK. And I, again, continued my drinking in the way that I did, met my husband.

6:42And I think when my drinking changed was when we moved to Australia, when I had two kids under two, and all of a sudden I'd left London, I'd left this very exciting lifestyle. I had really close girlfriends. I had a fantastic career. And then I was on the other side of the world with two kids under two, with no friends, no family. I wasn't working. I was so lucky. And on paper, I had everything I wanted. We lived by the beach. I could take time off to raise my beautiful, healthy children. My husband was setting up a business. But I was really struggling. I was really homesick. I was really sad.

7:18I was really lonely. I was really confused. I wanted this family life. But all All of a sudden, my days had gone from this really exciting career to changing nappies, cleaning babysit, going to monkey music. And that was my life. And alcohol then started to become the solution to making those feelings go away because alcohol is really good at that. It makes us not have to feel in the moment. And this coincided with mummy wine culture. And I know this was as big in the US as it was in Australia and the UK. Our three countries are very similar in that drinking culture. And this was when the alcohol companies had really started playing on female pressures and mummy wine culture.

8:02And, you know, all those baby grows that you would see with like my wine. So my mum drinks wine and all of this stuff that really started to happen. Now, you didn't have to tell me that I needed I deserved that glass of wine at the end of the day because I knew I did. And so alcohol then became something that I wasn't doing socially, but I was doing to make those uncomfortable emotions go away. And it worked at the beginning. But then once I got into my 40s, and I'm sure we'll talk about this later on in this episode, alcohol really didn't work. And there's a reason for that, which I didn't know then, but I found that I had increasing anxiety.

8:41It was really disrupting my sleep, my skin, my weight, all the results I wanted at the gym. I wasn't getting them anymore. Like all of the impact that alcohol used to give me all the positives and only a little bit of negative. Whereas now it was like the balance had tipped and there were so many negatives coming from my drinking and not really that many positives. But I didn't have anything else in my toolkit to manage uncomfortable emotions because I've just been using alcohol for so long. John Daly here. You know what day it is? Neither do I. I live life daily. That's why I only spend on Moto Casino.

9:16Moto's got daily free bonuses, daily tournaments, new slots added daily. And the best part, guaranteed daily jackpots. You can't beat that. So today's the day you're gripping to spend it with me on Moto. America's Social Casino. Play for free on Moto.us. Moto Casino is a social casino. We're prohibited. No purchase necessary. Visit Moto.us for more details. Download the Moto Casino app today. Must be 21 plus. Moto Casino. America's Social Casino. And eventually, in age 43, after a few incidents of just quite big drinking that led to me, like I fell over at a party, I landed on my face, I cut my lip, I cut my nose.

9:52It's just gross, you know, when you're just like, I don't want to be that drunken woman that is just making a fool of herself. But I seemed to have no off switch. Once I started drinking, it was like, yeah, come on, let's keep going, let's keep going. and I had a high capacity for alcohol, so I could drink quite a lot. And I took a break to see how it would make me feel. And I felt incredible and everything changed. And I went back to drinking to go, okay, let me see if I can now moderate. And I couldn't. Moderation was not something that worked for me with alcohol. And so finally, in 2019, I had my last drink.

10:29And so six and a half years, alcohol-free now. And honestly, my life just gets better and better and better with every year that passes. Did you know it was your last drink when you had the last drink? Did you say like this was the last one? I set the day in everything. Because I had done two stints of 100 days alcohol-free. And I knew in that time my anxiety disappeared, my sleep improved, I lost weight, my skin was great, I felt more positive, I was happier. And I remember a friend saying to me, everything in your life is better when you don't drink, drink so why are you fighting to keep alcohol in your life why are you trying to keep moderating when you know you really struggle and I was like yeah that's it and so I set the date and I thought I was going to go out with this massive big blowout a friend's 40th and in fact I had two drinks and went home and I was just really excited for the next stage of my life to start

11:25Sarah Rusbatch:wow so it's quite interesting when you do you feel like maybe you hung on to it a little bit But because you had this whole, you know, growing up childhood, you just thought this is what was expected. Laura and I grew up in very different homes where there wasn't alcohol in the home. And so that wasn't even a part of our life. So it's always interesting to me when, you know, I do have European friends and, you know, sometimes their kids will drink and they're 15, but they ask their parents and they let them know. And to me, it seems so foreign because we didn't even have alcohol in the house. But, you know, there is that culture where, you know, it's just part of what you do in Europe and in the United States, but not so much because we still have, I would say, a little bit stricter rules on the timing.

12:22Sarah Rusbatch:Do you think that played into it? I think it was a combination of things. I think it was that perfect storm of cultural upbringing, thinking that alcohol was kind of the solution to all problems. Secondly, I never classed myself as an alcoholic. I wasn't an alcoholic. I didn't drink every day. I could go periods of time without drinking. But I was what's called a gray area drinker. And gray area drinkers tend to surround themselves with other gray area drinkers. So then when you're in a friendship group where most of your friends are drinking in the way that you do, you feel like you're going to be missing out if you stop drinking now, because then you're like, well, that's the only way that I have fun.

13:00That's my hobby. That's what I do. So if I stop drinking now, what am I going to do? And then there was also this cultural shift that was happening in society, like the marketing of alcohol to women is very, very prevalent. And if you're not exposed to it and you don't even think about drinking, you may not notice it as much. But people that are very vulnerable to alcohol really do pick up that messaging, both conscious and subconscious, of alcohol product placement in TV shows, the police drama where the woman comes home from a stressful day at work. she pours a glass of wine and you watch her go, and it's like, you know, that's just given her that instant relaxation.

13:41So there's also like subconscious beliefs that many women have that alcohol relaxes us is the reward at the end of the day and, and that solution to however we might be feeling in the moment. Wow.

13:54Sarah Rusbatch:So, okay. If you, here you are, you decide not to, to be, become alcohol free. Did everyone in your circle support you? They did. I don't think everyone understood, but they did support me. Not everyone understood why I was doing it. And I felt a little bit of shame around why I couldn't be a normal drinker who just had a glass every now and then. So I wasn't completely honest with why I was choosing to take alcohol out of my life. I just would say things like, oh, I've got a half marathon and I want to get a PB or, oh, I want it to help me lose weight. Whereas what I should have said was alcohol is really impacting my mental health.

14:38It's wrecking my sleep. It's increasing my anxiety. I'm not the person I want to be. And so I'm taking it out of my life for a period of time. But I didn't say that. So when you say to someone, oh, I just, I'm on a diet and want to lose a bit of weight, they'll just go oh just have a vodka and soda there's no calories in that so you still kind of end up with a little bit of peer pressure so it can be tricky is that one of the things that you recommend to people that you help like one of the tools that they use is to be really vulnerable and honest when they are making that switch with the right people like there's always a level of appropriateness of who you will share but I've got a whole chapter in my book around navigating both your relationship, if you and your husband have both been big drinkers together and then you decide not to drink and navigating your friendships.

15:27If you have a friendship group, that's, that's quite, you know, big drinkers. And, you know, one of the things I get asked about the most is like sober sex, because a lot of my women actually feel really uncomfortable. They can't relax because they've always had a couple of drinks to even have sex with their husband who they've been with for 25 years. And so they have to navigate all of that, which is, it can be challenging.

15:49Sarah Rusbatch:What do you do with that? Because I wouldn't have even thought of that. But yeah, I mean, that's a huge psychological issue that you've been having something to mask. Yes, exactly. And I've got a whole chapter in my book about that, where I talk about, you know, that side of it. But how do you connect more deeply with your partner? And it all comes down to communication. and you know my husband and I had both been big drinkers we met when we were 24 and um and alcohol had played a big part in our lives and it was how we connected it was our ritual of connection he would come home from work I'd hear his truck pulling into the driveway I'd be like oh it's time for a wine he would have a beer I'd have a wine we'd go sit outside we would debrief how was your day and then when when I stopped drinking we stopped doing that and then gradually we just got further and further apart.

16:39And before I knew it, we're in a couples therapy room on the brink of separation going, I don't even know who this man is anymore. But what I realized was we'd lost that ritual of connection. We hadn't replaced that point of connection that we used to have with anything else. And so we had to discover all of that.

16:56Sarah Rusbatch:Do the women that come into your group, the Women's Wellbeing Collective, uh well first of all let's talk about how long you've had that and when they're coming in are they coming in as partial drinkers have they completely quit what's the average female that's coming into that i would say they're sober curious so it's generally women aged 40 to 65 who are at that point where they're going alcohol's not really working anymore i think i need to change. It's not as easy as I thought, because alcohol's up in the top five most addictive substances in the world. So while we might be told, drink in moderation, you know, all the rest of it, for many people, it's not that easy.

17:41And when I set up the group, it was super interesting, because I did an interview with an online portal over here called Mamma Mia. And it was just when I'd set up the group, and I shared my story of being a grey area drinker. And the next day, 8 ,000 women contacted me from all over the world and said, you've just told my story. And that was when I knew that so many women in midlife are using alcohol. They're not alcoholics. They're what you call gray area drinkers, but they'd never heard that term before until that article went live. And then they were like, now I understand what my drinking is.

18:21Thank you for sharing this. And so that was in 2021. And since then I've supported over 10 ,000 women to change their relationship with alcohol.

18:30Sarah Rusbatch:How long is the course? Do you run like, does it have a hard start and a hard stop or is it kind of fluid? So I have a self-paced program, which is on my website that women can do anytime, but I also run women's challenges. So we all come in together and it's 30 days and every day they get daily support. They get a video, They have guest expert speakers all around supporting women in midlife to change their drinking habits. And I educate them on why alcohol is processed differently in a female body to a male body, why it's processed even more differently over the age of 40 when we're in perimenopause.

19:05Because I always think education is the key to change. And so many women are not aware of some of this information. So the next challenge I run will be January, which is always like my biggest challenge at the start of the year when everyone's like had a boozy Christmas and then got gross. Right. I need to change my drinking this year. And it's just incredible. It just leads to such positive change in women's relationship with alcohol. So does everyone end up being alcohol free or do some people just gain a better relationship with alcohol as well? yeah like my goal is not to make everyone alcohol free and to promote prohibition or anything like that my goal is to educate and empower women to understand the impact that alcohol will be having on us as we age and to give them the tools if I use alcohol for stress so I've got 25 ,000 in my group now and I ask them why do you drink and the three biggest reasons bearing in mind these women are mostly aged 40 to 65, a boredom, stress and loneliness.

20:08So we've got this entire generation of midlife women drinking because they're bored, because most of them are so busy, they don't even have the time to think about what they would like to do if they have some spare time. And then when they do have spare time, they just drink because they don't know what else to do. Lonely, because we know women are starved of authentic, real in-person connection, and stressed because we're juggling more than we ever have before. And in the short term, alcohol suppresses our nervous system so for about that 20-30 minutes after you have a drink you feel super calm but the problem with that is that we then create more stress and anxiety in the body because alcohol ultimately causes our cortisol to raise and so the next day we will have more anxiety than we did before we even had a drink which is bonkers really because we drink because we're feeling stressed and anxious we get that momentary relief from that stress and anxiety And then we make ourselves more stressed and anxious the next day.

21:06So we just get caught in this vicious cycle.

21:09Sarah Rusbatch:So if we look at mindset, because I don't know, maybe you decided that you were done and it never was a temptation, but I'm sure it can be a temptation for a lot of women that want to be done. What are the mental shifts that you have to kind of guide them through when they're making something like a life change like this? Yeah, absolutely. And just like, although I knew that that last drink I would have would be my last one, it took me two years from my first break to actually fully stopping with a two-year process of exploring the role that alcohol had in my life. And so the first thing I do with my ladies is identify what are my beliefs around alcohol?

21:50What do I believe it's giving me? And then we go through an exercise of writing down what are the perceived benefits we get? What are the consequences of it? what are the benefits that we experience when we've had a period of not drinking and we start to just unpack because society tells us that alcohol is fun and it's relaxing and you're sexy and you have great connection when you drink but we start to pull that apart a little bit so we do that's part of it we also do the neurotransmitters so I really support women to understand what's happening in their brains so many of my women are deficient in GABA which is the neurotransmitter that helps us feel calm and relaxed.

22:28So I give them support to boost their GABA naturally, so they don't need to rely on that alcohol fix at the end of the day. And then we look at what are we adding in when we take alcohol out? Because we can't just remove alcohol, because it's been usually, it's a big part of our lives. So if we take it away, what are we adding in? And, you know, we talk about all the ways that we boost dopamine naturally. Like, I don't know anyone that removed alcohol successfully or changed their relationship with alcohol successfully for whom exercise was not part of that process because we need those ways of boosting dopamine, boosting endorphins, feeling better in ourselves and so lots of women I find start to, they take new hobbies, they've got ladies who've got more time and more money that they've saved from not drinking so they're horse riding, they're going to the choir, they've taken up piano lessons, they've gone to amateur dramatics, They've gone back to uni.

23:21They've changed careers. And it's just incredible the knock-on effect that comes from this one change that changes so many aspects of their life.

23:50Download the Moto Casino app today. Moto Casino is a social casino. What were prohibited? No purchase necessary. Visit Moto.us for more details. Moto Casino. America's social casino.

24:01Sarah Rusbatch:I think it's pretty interesting to see that the role is kind of shifting. I mean, the mass majority, it's still alcohol is big. But there are these small shifts, at least in these menopause groups and conferences, where I've been to multiple this year where there is no alcohol. It's all mocktails. And I'd never seen that. I'd never gone to a dinner party and had them serve mocktails only. It's a nice shift because I think it gives women permission to not have to, well, and to kind of remove it off the table. It just removes it. If it's something that's a struggle for you or, you know, obviously, as you said, the health aspect of just removing that.

24:55Sarah Rusbatch:I mean, from my groups, it's always the first thing that I'm just like, if you're trying to lose weight, it is the easiest thing to remove, but it's the one that is usually a lot harder than even say like dessert or some kind of, you know, salty snack or something like that, that they really like it. It's usually that the glass of wine that's the hardest to give up. Yeah, absolutely. And it's great to hear that you are attending these events that are alcohol free. And I think that people are becoming more aware of both the health risks of alcohol, but how contradictory it is to have an event that's focused on health and then be serving alcohol.