If you drink to take the edge off anxiety, you are not alone. Millions of women do exactly the same thing. Wine at the end of a stressful day. A drink to calm the nerves before a social event. A glass to quiet the thoughts before bed.

It makes sense. In the short term, alcohol genuinely does reduce anxiety. The problem is what happens next.

Because alcohol doesn't solve anxiety. Over time, it creates it, amplifies it, and makes it significantly harder to address the underlying causes.

Here's why, starting with the science.

What Alcohol Actually Does to Your Brain

To understand the alcohol-anxiety connection, you need to understand two key neurotransmitters: GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and glutamate.

GABA is your brain's main calming chemical. Glutamate is its main excitatory chemical, it activates neurons and is essential for memory and cognition.

Alcohol works primarily by stimulating GABA and blocking glutamate. Professor David Nutt, one of the world's leading experts in...

If you’re wondering why it feels so hard to stop drinking, even when you genuinely want to, the answer isn’t weakness or lack of willpower. Alcohol affects the brain’s reward system, emotional regulation, stress response and habits in powerful ways. When drinking becomes tied to relaxation, relief, or identity, stopping can feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar. Real change happens when you understand these mechanisms and build the right kind of alcohol support around you.

You wake up determined.

This time you mean it.

You’re going to take a break. Cut down. Stop for good.

And yet, a few days, sometimes even hours later, you find yourself pouring a drink and wondering:

Why is it so hard to stop drinking when I really want to?

If that question feels familiar, you are not alone. And more importantly, there are reasons for it.

Not excuses. Reasons.

Understanding them changes everything.

Alcohol Changes the Brain’s Reward System

Alcohol stimulates dopamine the neurotransmitter inv...

On confidence

Stephanie has invited me to do a piece about confidence. Am I confident enough I wonder? Go on then!

Confidence, I have recently learned, comes from one’s self esteem and feeling of self-worth. This is developed in (about) the 4^th year of life when we experience how significant we are to our parents, or care givers. To be dear to someone, to have closeness and connection. Eventually, through adolescence and then when we become adults, we learn that we can create this very connection with ourselves, and become self-aware, to believe in ourselves, to support ourselves, stand on our own two feet.

Of course, we all know the notion of “having one’s confidence knocked”. That is when we momentarily doubt our self-worth. Mostly because of a situation or circumstance where we, erroneously, compare ourselves to others. We forget our own significance within.

The good news is that confidence (self-esteem, self-worth) can be learned and can be expanded upon, and the brain circuits...

A few words about anxiety and uncertainty.

Here is the thing, there are no guarantees in life.

Well I can guarantee that how you are feeling now will change, because everything changes. Like the weather, you can wake up feeling sad and then by the end of the day, feel good. The same way you can wake up and its sunny, then it will be raining by the afternoon.

There is so much that we dont know, or cant predict, we need to make peace with uncertainty.

If your thoughts are running away with you, please remember this, you are not your thoughts.
Your thoughts are just a small part of your human machine, like your heart beating, your blood pumping, lungs breathing, eyes seeing and so on.

Most of your thoughts are not real, or helpful.
Treat them like back seat drivers, tell them to shut up.

If you take a moment to imagine that your thoughts are another person, lets give them a name. What would you say if that person kept speaking to you, in the same way your thoughts do?

You would ha...

I have been a heavy drinker / binge drinker since I was 16.

At about the age of 17 my mental health started to deteriorate.  I experienced mood swings, paranoia and depression. I began to hate myself, my self-esteem and confidence became very fragile.  By the time I was in my final year at Uni stress and anxiety had firmly set in.  High drama often followed me around, all after a long night of drinking.  I was drinking at least 4 to 5 times a week and I wouldn’t take it easy. The morning after I would be overcome with crippling anxiety.

Just after graduation, I attempted suicide by overdosing on paracetamol.

After a year at home I had managed to get my act together again after counselling and anti-depressants – I still drank but to nowhere near the extent I had been doing, little did I understand the correlation. 

After leaving home again to work in London I spent quite a few years perfecting the skills of a “party girl” on the London club scene.  Other drugs came into play, so it ...