Instagram is just one app in my endless rotation: texting, checking email, refreshing stats on my column views, scanning news headlines, opening email again. Did anyone read my piece in the last five minutes? Back to the podcast app. Did I miss a text? Check the weather.
My eyes glaze over as I loop through this process. Nonstop.
This dopamine reward center and false feedback loop? It’s real.
I mentioned this to friends one morning after a swim. The phone is a legitimate problem for almost everyone. Everywhere you look, people staring at screens, not even conscious of why they just picked it up. Ten minutes of life vanishes and they think, what the fuck, I did it again.
“Instead of picking up our phones,” I started to say, “we should grab a vibrator.”
My friend screamed: “Turn it into a taser!”
Pain or pleasure. Same function. Gets you in the moment.
Then I asked them, and I’ll ask you:
Did you know there are only two industries that call their consumers “users”?
Can you guess what they are?
Digital technology and drugs/alcohol.
What You Didn’t See Coming: The Gender Gap We Don’t Want
Here’s what I was really building toward: for the first time in history, women are closing the gender gap in drinking themselves to death.
Alcohol-induced deaths in the U.S. have nearly doubled since 1999—an 89% increase. The sharpest spike? Women aged 25–34, whose alcohol-related deaths rose 255%, compared to 188% for men.1 While men still die at higher rates, women’s numbers are rising faster across every age group.
Normally I’d be thrilled about closing gender gaps. But not this one. Not in deaths. Not in cirrhosis. Not in the slow destruction of our livers and lives.
Over the past century, society has normalized women drinking “like men.” Equality in the worst possible way; not in pay or representation, but in it being socially acceptable to destroy ourselves with alcohol.
The biological reality? Women can’t metabolize alcohol as efficiently. We have less of the enzyme that breaks it down, less body water to dilute it, and more body fat to store it. The result? We absorb more alcohol, feel its effects longer, and develop damage faster.
As one researcher put it, “Women really can have it all—even cirrhosis and liver disease.”2
The Midlife Multiplier: When Hormones Meet Happy Hour
If biology wasn’t already stacked against us, midlife brings its own plot twist.
During perimenopause and menopause, the liver—the same organ responsible for metabolizing both alcohol and hormones—slows down. It clears alcohol more slowly, which means it’s also slower to process estrogen. The two systems jam each other up.
It’s a perfect storm: alcohol intensifies hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, and sleep disruption. By menopause, our tolerance drops even further. That “one glass” that used to relax you now keeps you up all night.
We reach for the thing that promises relief while it pours gasoline on the fire.
Nearly one in five women aged 45–64 exceed recommended drinking limits. Studies show perimenopause is a time of “instability” in drinking habits. Many who once drank moderately start drinking more. And alcohol doesn’t just mess with mood; it interferes with calcium absorption and bone health at a time we can least afford it.
That nightcap you swear helps you sleep? It actually shreds REM, spikes cortisol, and leaves your nervous system fried by morning.
The Science of Want: Dopamine, the Clever Bastard
To understand why we drink or scroll, or shop, we have to understand dopamine.
Desire begins in thought: I deserve a drink. I’ll feel better. Everyone else is having one. Each time we reward that thought with alcohol, we reinforce the craving loop.
Dopamine is the molecule of wanting, not having. It’s the thrill before the reward—the foreplay, not the orgasm. It fuels anticipation, the fantasy that the next sip or scroll will make things better.
Originally, dopamine kept humans alive. It motivated us to hunt, build shelter, find connection, but modern life hacked the system. We took basic survival drives and condensed them into quick hits: sugar, sex, shopping, and a drink.
But dopamine doesn’t care how the story ends. It only wants more. It has no interest in hangovers, shame, or regret. The more you chase, the less you enjoy. Unless the substance overrides the off switch.
That’s what alcohol does. It hijacks dopamine’s natural rhythm, keeping the wanting loop alive even as the pleasure fades.
You’re not drinking for the taste or the buzz anymore. You’re drinking for the promise of relief that never actually comes.
When Dopamine Doesn’t Know the Difference
When you don’t understand how dopamine works, you start believing your desires are urgent truths.
You need the thing. Now. It feels like you have no choice.
Dopamine lights up the idea of a better future just out of reach and your brain, wired for what feels easy and immediate, will chase that feeling over and over. That’s why sex, alcohol, sugar, shopping, and scrolling are such reliable hits. They promise an instant chemical reward.
What dopamine doesn’t register are the consequences: the hangover, the crash, the shame. There’s no connection between the wanting and the wreckage.
So we ask ourselves, What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep going back?
Gabor Maté reframes it:
“Don’t ask why the addiction. Ask why the pain.”
The cruel irony: alcohol, the thing we reach for to calm our nerves, amplifies them. It’s a depressant. If you’re down, it sinks you lower. If you’re anxious, it dials it up.
That first drink might bring twenty minutes of ease, but from there your body is just processing poison… cortisol up, adrenaline up, estrogen down.
The relief you’re chasing is the very thing the drink erases.
And while our bodies are burning out, the culture just keeps pouring another round.
The Marketing Machine: Selling Self-Destruction as Self-Care
It’s impossible to avoid alcohol. It’s everywhere: brunch, breakups, book clubs.
The rise in women’s drinking isn’t just about stress or hormones; it’s marketing.
It’s sold to women as luxury, lifestyle, fun, and stress relief. The media portrays the good life with a drink at the end of each day. Rosé all day, wine o’clock, you deserve it.
It’s more socially acceptable to drink than to not drink. Alcohol has been rebranded as self-care, empowerment, even feminism. It’s sold as the reward for surviving your day, the accessory to your success.
Behind every “you deserve this” ad is an industry that knows exactly how dopamine works. They’re not just selling alcohol, they’re selling the illusion of relief.
There’s a difference between having a drink for pleasure and using one to survive the day.
We live in a culture that’s made it normal to soothe ourselves with substances but taboo to self-regulate through the body.
No one teaches us how to come down from stress by breathing, moving, or feeling.
We’re told to pour a drink, not take a breath.
We can market vapes, alcohol, and pills to kids, but we can’t openly teach them how to connect with their own bodies through rest, breath, or even pleasure.
We can’t talk about sexual pleasure as a birthright or an orgasm as nature’s antidepressant—a mood lifter, a way to self-soothe, to flood the body with its own feel-good chemistry—but we can glamorize every addictive behavior that pulls us further from ourselves.
That’s the real irony: we’ve normalized numbing and outsourced relief, but we’ve forgotten how to live in our own skin.
The Underlying Pain: Human Giver Syndrome
One in four women struggles with depression. Heart disease remains our leading killer.
Instead of reaching inward, we’re taught to reach outside ourselves to buffer discomfort with anything that promises relief. Pills. Drinks. Dessert. Distraction. All of it pulls us out of our bodies and comes with its own side effects: hangovers, weight gain, no sex drive, more anxiety, more depression.
Of course, some people truly need medication for chemical imbalances. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the culture we’ve built that tells women to numb instead of feel, to fix instead of rest, to perform instead of pause.
When we say we’re down, no one asks about our lives; our thoughts, our relationships, what’s missing, what we actually need. We’ve been socialized not to feel our emotions, not to speak our needs, not to hold boundaries.
Don’t be emotional.
Don’t be difficult.
Take care of everyone else.
We’re raised to be human givers—caretakers of husbands, partners, kids, and communities. We carry the emotional weight of others, sacrificing our time, our bodies, our joy to make everyone around us comfortable. Asking for help feels like social suicide.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski call this Human Giver Syndrome
the contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity to support others, no matter the cost to you.
And it’s costing us. Our health is declining. We’re deprived, depressed, resentful, overwhelmed, exhausted. On the edge of burnout—or already there.
When life feels impossible and time feels scarce, the brain looks for the fastest exit ramp: a pill to make it better, a drink to bring relief, a piece of cake to soothe your soul, a bit of validation to fill the void.
Unfortunately, none of these things solve the real problem; the emotion stuck in your body, the old patterns and unprocessed pain driving the loop you’re desperate to escape.
When you finally stop reaching outward and start listening inward, that’s when things begin to shift.
And maybe that’s the real buzz kill.
If something in this piece resonated and you’re ready to explore what life feels like when you stop numbing and start living—I can help. I’m a certified life coach specializing in wholeness-based recovery and midlife transformation for women. I help women close the gap between who they’ve been and who they actually are. You can learn more here.
If you’re specifically exploring your relationship with alcohol, I’m writing more about that at my Substack, This Side of Sober.
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i got sober this year, no alcohol (that was my thing), no weed (never my thing). i watched my mom drink herself to death a few years ago, so that was some motivation, and now booze just seems gross. i feel so much better, but where did all the people go? i love that you write about sobriety, it feels like a spindle of sober community. thank you.
All so true. Thanks for writing about it