Does Drinking Make Me Mean?

On one of the coldest nights in the endless month of February, my husband and I decided to take our two young sons — both freshly shorn at the barbershop and looking unusually presentable — out to our favorite local burger joint. Upon arrival, our collective mood was jolly enough that ordering myself a midweek Manhattan seemed like a fun, celebratory gesture; a drink to draw out the glow of a nice afternoon, not to anaesthetize after a rough one. I savored the amber liquid, with its single golf ball of ice and extra toothpick of Luxardos — just the way I like it. But soon after its welcome warmth began to kick in, I started to feel something else, too — a rising tide of equal-opportunity, free-range irritability. Out of nowhere, I was bothered: by the bleak and frigid landscape outside the windows, the monotony of our small-town life, the limpness of the fries. And, sweet Jesus, the children: How hard is it, really, to get through an entire meal without toppling a water glass? I knew I was spiraling but felt powerless to stop it. What was I even doing here, anyway? How had my life come to this?

Afterward, stalking up the icy sidewalk to our car a good 20 feet ahead of the rest of my family — lest anyone miss the fact that I was not happy — I went back over the evening, piece by piece. There had been no marital infractions at dinner. The kids were mostly cute, the service just fine. The internal wrecking ball that had just careened through my evening felt hormonal in its nonsensical suddenness, but also alcohol-fueled in its heat. Was drinking at my age — for the record, 48 — making me a little bit… nuts?

No matter how old you are, you cannot have missed the nonstop headlines about the evils of drinking in recent years. According to the World Health Organization, alcohol is a “Group 1” carcinogen, which puts it on par with asbestos, radiation, and tobacco as a cause of cancer — including breast cancer. Just one drink a day (even if it’s red wine, billed for so long as a heart healthy — remember all that talk of polyphenols?) can raise our risk of liver cancer and cirrhosis and do cardiovascular damage, with a slightly higher risk for women. Given all this, that bottle of Tito’s may one day come with a black box warning label, like the one on Marlboros. But most of us don’t need The New York Times to tell us that, at some point in our 40s, that friendly little margarita started bringing on almost cataclysmic hangovers — a cruel twist in a life phase when few have the luxury of slowly recovering with breakfast sandwiches and The White Lotus.

“If they wanted to create a drug to make you depressed, alcohol would be an excellent choice.”

What I’ve been noticing lately, though, is that the glass of Bordeaux or can of IPA that I like to sip while cooking dinner, as a way of delineating the space between workday and home life (it’s all a blur when the office is one floor up from the kitchen), has a new way of shortening my fuse. On the evenings I have a drink, I often notice that after dinner and before bedtime — the window in which I’m likely to repeat the phrase “have you brushed your teeth?” 17 or 18 times, i.e., when I need patience most — my bandwidth has fizzled to nil. I have less to give. I’m quick to annoyance. If I’m not careful, I snap at the boys, veering into Mommy Dearest territory before I know it.

When I asked around, friends were quick to concur. Some lament their irritability in the moment; others the sadness or anxiety that washes over them the morning after. “I definitely get way more pissy now [when drinking],” says Laura. “The anxiety and the rage!” Likewise, Jean told me, “I can responsibly only drink one drink if I want to sleep and not be hung over and be kind to my children the next day.” The nights she has a cocktail, “I’m a happy, lovely joy to be around,” she says. (I can attest.) “It’s the next morning: Short tempered, impatient, cranky. Nothing is fun, and everyone is annoying.”

My buddy Emma*’s experience was most similar to my own. She and her husband used to loosen up with a beer with dinner, “the reward for making it through another day,” she says. But by her kids’ bedtime, “I realized I was basically yelling at them all.” She tried limiting the drinking to weekends, but “the next morning, I’d feel irredeemably awful, even with proper hydration… No amount of ibuprofen or even THC/CBD could beat back my irritability.” Now she struggles with “some pretty shameful memories” about the times this led to exploding at her son.

“I love champagne,” says journalist Tamsen Fadal, author of the comprehensive new guide How to Menopause, which covers everything from why you need a tongue scraper now to how to work around that lackluster libido. But this year, she didn’t even celebrate the launch of her book with a glass of bubbly. “It just makes me feel bad — almost like an indescribable bad, but women understand it,” she says. “It doesn’t even make me tipsy anymore. It just makes me sluggish and very snippy with people.”

“Forty percent of people have mood-related changes during the perimenopause transition.”

It was Gwyneth Paltrow, of course, who made the emotional roller coaster of midlife drinking Page Six fodder. On a recent Goop Podcast episode with OB-GYN and leading meno expert Dr. Mary Claire Haver, M.D., Paltrow noted that this past January, driven by anxiety about the wildfires raging in Los Angeles, she’d imbibed nightly — far exceeding her usual weekly tipple. The extra alcohol, she said, made her menopause symptoms spiral “completely out of control.”

“I would just wake up, [and] I would get crushed with anxiety,” she told Haver. “I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every person’s feelings I’ve ever hurt… And I would be up for six hours. It was crazy.”

Gwyneth, I feel you. Yet part of me wants to resist blaming this, too, on hormones. Maybe it’s knowing that an $18 billion menopause industrial complex (Paltrow’s “Madame Ovary” supplements notwithstanding) has sprung up to sell a “solution” to every facet of a life stage that is inherently nebulous , different for every woman, and associated with some 30-plus symptoms — ripe for research and attention, but also for exploitation. Maybe it’s the fact that I happen to be going through perimenopause in what seems to be the era of perimenopause; what’s that saying about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Whatever the reason, I’m taking perimenopause seriously, while also maintaining some skepticism about chalking up every lost hair and chipped nail to our obsession du jour. So, fine, I can almost never remember what the hell I walked into our mudroom to fetch. And my tongue regularly fails to serve up the right proper nouns on demand. But who’s to say that that’s brain fog due to my exhausted ovaries? Couldn’t it just be life in an age of multitasking?

Likewise, yes, booze has a fun new way of making me, shall we say, not my best self. But I also know of men my age who have dialed down their drinking after realizing it was turning them into “bad dad.” So is my emotional response to booze a matter of aging in general? Or is it specifically a woman thing, one more symptom to toss atop the burning pyre of perimenopause?

The short answer is probably c) all of the above. Brooke Scheller, a doctor of clinical nutrition and author of the book How to Eat to Change How You Drink, reels off a long list of reasons why, no matter your age or sex, drinking can do a number on your mood. Alcohol affects neurotransmitters, including mood-setting dopamine and serotonin, which is why it’s known as a depressant. It elevates histamine levels, which can cause “aggravation” throughout the body, from hives to changes in emotional state. It dehydrates us and lowers electrolyte levels, which can cause the brain to function suboptimally. As one friend who gave up drinking several years ago put it to me, “if they wanted to create a drug to make you depressed, alcohol would be an excellent choice.”

Scheller theorizes that my recent Manhattan-fueled swan dive — which seemed to kick in as quickly as the drink hit my bloodstream — may be explained by yet another effect of alcohol: its ability to rapidly lower blood sugar, “which can show up as anxiety, moodiness, fatigue, and irritability,” Scheller says. The feeling, she says, is a lot like being “hangry.” Which: yes. That’s not perimenopausal, per se, but the spikes and dips in hormone levels during this transition can make us extra sensitive to all of it.

“No amount of ibuprofen or even THC/CBD could beat back my irritability.”

Menopause also changes the way we metabolize alcohol. As we age, women lose muscle mass and gain a higher percentage of fatty tissue, which can make even a small amount of alcohol more concentrated in the bloodstream. And “there seems to be a connection between our ovaries making less estrogen,” and our levels of antidiuretic hormone (ADH), an enzyme which helps regulate fluid balance and electrolyte levels — and that’s also impacted by alcohol consumption, says Dr. Monica Christmas, M.D., director of the Menopause Program and Center for Women’s Integrated Health at the University of Chicago. Again, this means it takes longer for us to process alcohol — a recipe for lethargy, depressed mood, or irritability.

Lots of women will sail through perimenopause and menopause without the pupu platter of symptoms we so avidly discuss these days — just like some women you know were lucky enough to have those cute, convenient three-to-four day periods; never felt crazed by PMS; never missed work or school because of cramps; and secretly wondered to themselves what the rest of us were making such a big deal about.

But Christmas says those who found themselves prone to big feelings in earlier “vulnerable windows” of hormonal change — in adolescence, postpartum, and even the days leading up to a monthly period — should be on the lookout for potential mood changes during this life change, too. “Forty percent of people have mood-related changes during the perimenopause transition,” she says, whether it’s anxiety, irritability, depressed mood, or anhedonia, the inability to get joy or motivation out of things that used to make you happy. Some of these symptoms can, indeed, be worsened by drinking.

Most patients don’t come to Christmas’ menopause clinic complaining about their changing relationship with Grey Goose. They come in talking about weight gain, sleep disturbances, mood swings. “They haven’t put it together,” Christmas says. But when she brings up potential lifestyle changes, including cutting out drinking, there’s often a lightbulb moment: “Oh, wow, there is a reason why I’m feeling this way.”

Yet for some reason, I’m just not ready to break up with my occasional Negroni. I like the ritual and the social nature of drinking; I need the respite that going out for drinks with friends can provide from the aforementioned monotony of small-town life. And, I know I sound a little doth-protest-too-much here, but drinking doesn’t always wreck my mood! There are still plenty of times when cocktail hour makes me feel just a little looser, lighter, a little more ready to laugh “like my old self,” or to, say, spontaneously offer to host a “music festival” this summer in the field behind our house. (True story. You’re all invited.) I like that version of myself — other people seem to, too! — and for better or worse, she sometimes needs a little chemical assistance to emerge. Friends who feel similarly are coming up with rules to keep their drink and manage the aftermath. Jean, for instance, allows herself a cocktail, but only early in the evening; then she attempts to fake herself out by switching to mocktails. Another friend set herself a rule: She can drink as much white wine as she likes. As long as it’s before 7 p.m.

But for other women, the downside of drinking these days is just too steep. Christmas herself, now in her 50s, won’t risk her preferred glass of red on a night before she knows she’s performing surgery — mostly because of two things alcohol is proven to enhance: hot flashes (often while drinking) and night sweats. Similarly, my friend Sara told me with real sadness that her days of a glass of wine to unwind after work are “long gone.”

A couple of weeks after my own terrible night out, Emma — the mom who found herself exploding at her son after a single beer — came over to watch the new Bridget Jones installment. She walked in bearing a packet of Valentine’s chocolates and a cardboard box that rattled intriguingly when she set it on a kitchen stool. I peered inside at a small liquor cabinet’s worth of Jamaican rum, single malt whiskey, and some kind of cranberry-infused vodka. “Whoa,” I said. “I appreciate your commitment to the theme, but even Bridget wouldn’t go this hard at our age.”

“They’re for you to keep,” Emma informed me. “I’m done. I can’t drink anymore. It’s over.”

I accepted them, with a little trepidation. Who’s up for a 5:30 pm round of piña coladas, followed by a 6-gallon water chaser, some Liquid IV, and a Tylenol kicker?

*Pseudonyms have been given where requested.