April 10, 2025 • 43 mins
(00:00:00) Women & Alcohol: The Real Health Impact with Dr. Kimberly Mallett (Part 2)
(00:00:58) Anecdotal research - sleep
(00:08:07) What exactly is a drinking problem?
(00:15:02) Fertility
In Part 2 of our powerful conversation with clinical psychologist Dr. Kimberly Mallett, we dive deeper into the real impact of alcohol on women’s health — both mentally and physically. Dr. Mallett breaks down how alcohol uniquely affects women’s bodies, emotional well-being, and relationships. Whether you're sober-curious, navigating social drinking, or seeking to better understand the science, this episode offers research-backed insights you won’t want to miss.
Listen now to uncover the truth about alcohol and the often-overlooked challenges women face around consumption.
(00:00:58) Anecdotal research - sleep
(00:08:07) What exactly is a drinking problem?
(00:15:02) Fertility
In Part 2 of our powerful conversation with clinical psychologist Dr. Kimberly Mallett, we dive deeper into the real impact of alcohol on women’s health — both mentally and physically. Dr. Mallett breaks down how alcohol uniquely affects women’s bodies, emotional well-being, and relationships. Whether you're sober-curious, navigating social drinking, or seeking to better understand the science, this episode offers research-backed insights you won’t want to miss.
Listen now to uncover the truth about alcohol and the often-overlooked challenges women face around consumption.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, This is Haley and I'm Lara and welcome
to the Body Pod.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome back to part two with doctor Kimberly Mallet. So, Kim,
let's talk about alcohol and sleep.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
It is not helpful, but it's deceiving. So I think,
I think it's misleading and people get a false sense
that alcohol can be helpful to sleep, but it really isn't.
And that's that again. It just lures us in and
(00:42):
plays a mean trick on us, is what it's doing.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, you said in the last episode that you had
some research of your own. Did that have to do
with sleep?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
So anecdotal research for me? Yes, okay, so for me,
so I fit all I check all your boxes right.
So I'm late forties. I'm going to hold on to
that as long as I can. I'm late forties. But yeah,
sleep is I think challenging for so many reasons as
(01:15):
we age. But alcohol isn't helpful. And I think where
people are going to be surprised is in a couple areas.
One we know that if I think anyone who's ever
gotten intoxicated recognizes you're not going to get a good
night of sleep if you've been drunk. That No one
(01:37):
wakes up feeling refreshed after a night of heavy drinking,
so that's no surprise. But what sometimes people start to
fall in the trap of is thinking, oh, you know,
just a glass of wine or a drink helps kind
of make me tired and relax me and prepares me
(01:59):
for sleep. So alcohol does have that sedative effect and
it will do that for you. But the problem is
once you get to sleep, the quality of your sleep
turns to craft. So, you know, just to basically lay
it out there. So what it does, I'm going to
try to kind of to simplify this so it's not
(02:21):
too nerdy and science. Ye, but during the first half
of the night when we have alcohol in so it's
in our system. Now, what it does is it's going
to increase our slow wave sleep and it's going to
(02:47):
suppress our rem sleep. So when we're sleeping, we cycle
through all of these stages of sleep throughout the night.
So people will wake up and think, oh, you know,
I had a dream. You didn't just have one dream,
that's just the dream you had most recent to waking up.
You dream all throughout the night. You have different periods
(03:08):
of sleep, lighter and deeper waves, of sleep. So alcohol
is disrupting that full night of sleep. So in that
first half that's what happens.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
But then.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
You metabolize, remember your livers working while you're sleeping, and
once the alcohol leaves the system, the sedative affects diminish.
So how many of us have woken up.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Like every night in the morning. And it's not just.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Going to be alcohol that's responsible for this, but it
definitely can play a role here, and especially for people
who are sensitive to it. So if you're now you're
waking up in the night, and this is when it
becomes challenging, So you're having these these sleep disruptions and
these become more frequent. I did last time we talked,
(04:06):
I talked about alcohol's a toxin. Right now, it can
also destroy some of the neurons and impair them permanent.
This can after prolonged use of this is a pattern
where a lot of drinking is happening at night over
a sustained period of time, it can permanently damage some
of these neurons responsible for our sleep cycles, change our
(04:31):
entire architecture of sleep. And what can happen is when
people then try to abstain and think Okay, I'm going
to stop drinking. The sleep problems don't get better because
well sometimes they're just not going to and then they
go back. It's easy to fall back into the pattern
(04:53):
of I just need to get to sleep some and
have a drink to kind of knock me out and
sedate me.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
This is what I do. But with melotonin. Yeah, well.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
So yeah, I'm a melotonin junkie myself. So I have
my own drugs to choice these days, and those would
be like melotonin and estrogen.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And all the all the black market drugs. I mean,
that's it's so hard though, because women in this perimenopause phase,
like sleep party goes down out the window, like it
already just is really rough for a lot of women,
and so you tackle on alcohol and it's like double
(05:35):
whammy exactly, and it's so hard to function the next day.
And then we know that from a body composition phase
it doesn't help us either, and then we don't have
energy to go to the gym. Like it just is
this like roll on effect of all these other issues
that kind of contribute to it. What do you think
of like drinking in the day, It clearly it messes
(05:57):
up the night's sleep. But if you were like, well,
I'm gonna have three drinks this week, that's what that's
going to be my negotiation.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think if you can, if you want to drink,
and you can get it as far away from your
bedtime as possible, that's better. That's so think about it
from a harm reduction approach. If you don't want it
to impact your sleep, metabolize it out before you go
to sleep. You don't want to go right up against bedtime.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
So how long is that four hours?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Well, it depends how much you drink. The rule of
them is an hour per drink to process. So you know,
if you want to have a glass or two of wine,
just think about when you're going to bed and give yourself.
So when I say timing is everything right? How long
(06:52):
does it take you to drink a glass of wine?
And so it gets you get kind of in the
weeds about like when did I start? When that I finish?
And when is how well is my liver functioning depending
on my age? As we age, our liver is not
as efficient.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
So do we need to add thirty extra minutes?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Yeah, So if you want to cushion it, cushion it
if you want to be conservative. Great, but you think about, well,
maybe there's a reason happy hours a thing because it's
earlier in the night. Yeah, And I think, really what
it is is knowing your limits. So it's this idea
of can you just have a glass of wine or
(07:33):
one cocktail and be done, or you know, maybe you're out,
maybe it's a weekend, you're at a party, have a
couple of drinks, be done. There's always going to be
an occasion where maybe it's it's not the norm, and
that's okay, it's one episode isn't going to be a
deal breaker. But it's more that consistent pattern that I
(07:56):
think we need to be aware of of what we're doing,
what's our habit, what's our daily pattern looking like? Interesting?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So what exactly is a drinking problem? What's considered if
you want to talk about habits.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And what's aud what qualifies? So it's changed, and it's
funny a lot of times, I think our nomenclature or
vernacular is an alcoholic is kind of what we describe
and that's what we use. But really there's no such
thing in the diagnostic world. So it's really based more
(08:35):
on a continuum and there are When we look at
a diagnosis of an aud there are eleven different criteria
and these are a mixture of different things of the
impact alcohol is having on your life from a social perspective, interpersonal,
(08:57):
your daily functioning responsibilities, and our physical dependency on it.
So if you endorse after you know, going through a
clinical interview an assessment, if you endorse two or more
of these issues, and those could be things like, you know,
(09:18):
this is causing a problem between me and you know,
family member, loved one, spouse not not you're missing out,
You're not able to maintain responsibilities, work, school, those types
of things, if you I think the big ones that
(09:42):
I really take note of is if you are struggling
with limiting your alcohol intake. So for example, you are
trying to have you're setting out to have a couple
of drinks and you're at a party and you just
right through it and you're to the point of intoxication,
(10:04):
and every time you start drinking, you just really can't
stop limiting or always kind of going beyond what limits
you're setting for yourself. If you're craving, if you're noticing
that you're having withdrawal symptoms, like you get the shakes
if you need it, you're feeling really irritable if you
(10:25):
don't have it. These are those types of physical dependency
symptoms that come into play. So once we start seeing those,
those are in that realm of severe and that's when
we need to talk about more serious treatment and intervention.
When it's when people are starting to say, hey, I'm
(10:47):
worried about you. You're just starting to notice that your
tolerance actually tolerance. I think that is a big one
that people miss really just don't understand. They think, oh,
tolerance means that you need more alcohol to get the
same effect. So a lot of people take that to
(11:09):
mean as, oh, I can handle my alcohol, well, I
don't get slothy, you know, I can drink, and they
see it as a positive thing. It's really a big
warning sign because your body's adapting to try to manage
the amount of alcohol and not you're not seeing the effects.
(11:31):
So you're not seeing the balance issues, the slurring, the judgment.
Your body's starting to compensate. But what that means is
you're not actually interpreting how intoxicated you are, so your
BAC is still the same. If you were to drink
four drinks and feel really intoxicated, but you maintain that
(11:55):
and then you were to drink four drinks and not
feel that as much anymore. People make a lot of
a they think that they can drive, but your BAC
is still what it would have been before. You're just
not feeling the effects of it.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Can you back up and say, since we did this,
this is the second episode, just clarify what AUD stands for.
And BAC.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Au D is alcohol use disorder, so that would be
like the diagnosis of having an alcohol problem.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So au D is the technical term, but we the
public says alcoholism or an alcoholic okay.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
And BAC is blood alcohol concentration. So that's something I
think most people associate with that point oh eight level
to legally, once we cross that threshold, we shouldn't be driving.
That's when we're impaired. But the BAC has a huge range.
So when we start to notice difficulty with just judgment,
(13:06):
when we start to notice we have physical symptoms, so
our reaction time isn't as good. And this is why
it's point oh eight because that's around the time where
reaction time all of these these things our brain is
just doing automatically can't do anymore because alcohol is a
toxin and it's it's a central nervous system depressant, and
(13:29):
it's doing all these things in our brain. So it's making.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Point oh eight, like, what does that end up being
like one drink? No, I know it's probably different weight
how much somebody weighs.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yes, that's why it's so important to really to actually
pay attention to these what Anti TRIPAA puts out or
you can find them online. There be ac charts where
you can enter your weight, your gender, the amount of alcohol,
and the time taken to drink, and it will give
you an of what your BAC would be because we
(14:04):
can't how we feel is not an accurate estimate because
of things like tolerance. And so even though you may
feel like alcohol isn't you know that you're not really
experiencing a lot of the impact of alcohol. Your BAC
is still the same as what it was before tolerance increased,
(14:30):
so it still impacts those subtle things like reaction times.
You were still not safe to drive a car, and
if you've got pulled over you and you blew in
a breathalyzer, you would potentially be over that legal limit.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Laura, I have a question for you. Yes, did you.
I mean, I'm sure Kim's read plenty about this, but
I just had the fertility just came to mind when
you like it, does this play into fertility when you
were in that world?
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, when I went through all the rounds of IVF
and infertility. They don't want you to drink when you're
going through IVF, and yeah, it affects it.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
You probably already knew that, Kim.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Well, I'm not sure of all the reasons, but I
know again it's it's never going to help anything, right,
It's not something that's going to make our fertility. It's
not going to improve our physiological state or any of
these health benefits. It's just that's not what alcohol does.
(15:42):
But doesn't it doesn't it do something for the male
like for sperm.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I actually don't for them that. I'm just assuming.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Our body functions better when we don't have drugs and
alcohol in our system. Right. So it's like, if we
want our bodies to draw the way it needs to do,
then and if you're really working towards a goal like that,
and you're spending all of this time and money and
supplements and medications, you don't want to do anything that
(16:17):
is going to.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Be contradictive to that.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Exactly. Yeah, So I think that's a key piece. So
with alcohol use disorder, I mean, there are a lot
of variety of things that can come into play, but
it's the key here is is once it hits that
severe point where physical dependency comes in, the way we
(16:44):
deal with it is very different. And that means you
are now in a world of where you pass the
point of where you can drink moderately or light again.
You can't just go back to being a social drinker.
There's just this flip that or the switch that's flipped
(17:04):
in our brain, and that's where that limiting comes in.
And it's just this internal struggle that happens. So even
people that may not have been physically dependent but felt
like they really kind of struggled with their relationship with
alcohol that I've worked with have kind of made a
(17:28):
decision at some point to say, I think I'm going
to choose just not to drink because it's easier for
me to do that. I don't like having to constantly
struggle with myself. And I think we can all relate
to that. Some people think about sugar, or think about
something that dietary that that we like if we some
(17:54):
people can just have a little bit of chocolate every day.
I know you do that, Hailey, and you're good.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Associated you stop.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Some people, if they have a little bit, it makes
them want more, and then there's this constant struggle and
they seem to not crave it as much if they
don't have it at all. So it's really about knowing
your body. And I think that's a good analogy. If
we've talked a lot about alcohol, how should we treat it? Well?
I kind of think about it maybe as like cake.
(18:24):
How often do you eat cake? Do you eat cake
every day? Probably?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Not?
Speaker 4 (18:29):
You know?
Speaker 3 (18:29):
And if you do, do you eat the whole cake
or just have a little piece of cake? And can
we equate that to our relationship with alcohol.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
You said in part one that you've a lot of
your work has also been around ways to prevent someone
from having aud What have you found has worked the best,
Especially with these kids that are going off to college
or that are in college, it has been the most effective.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
So I can talk about some of our intervention work
and just so I do a lot of ideological work
where I identify risk factors for coming into college and
being a heavier drinker experiencing more consequences. And we've also
done a lot of work with parent developed and tested
(19:24):
and randomized clinical trials, parent based interventions and how parents
can make a difference in their kids' life. So just
some general risk factors, So we want to be very
aware of risk factors and some that we can manage behaviorally.
There are certain ones we can and certain ones we can't.
So for example, family history would be a risk factor. Well,
(19:47):
we can't really change that, right, but we can be
aware of it. And once we know if we have
that risk factor, when we talk to it to young
adults or teens or parents are talking with them, it's
important to kind of point these risk factors out and
that it's important that how to make decisions about alcohol.
(20:08):
The second is age of onset. So we know that
the younger you are when you start drinking, the more
at risk you are for developing risky drinking patterns potentially
and then going into adulthood with those. So the longer
we can delay that the better. The average drinking age
(20:29):
or modal drinking age is about sixteen in the States
and in other countries. You have no idea. How much
I hear about what about Europe they let those kids drink.
And I'll talk about that in a second. Because we've
done trials and I've published work on this very topic.
(20:52):
The one thing that parents can do, the most important
thing parents can do to lower their kids' risk of
going into college and being a heavy drinker. So to
protect the most protective thing is to not be permissive.
Do not give your kids alcohol, even tastes. Like what
(21:13):
we're finding is that permissiveness to drink. And this was
actually surprising to us. This is this is a little
bit counterintuitive, but when you allow your kids to drink,
even in small doses, they may be really responsible when
they're with you, but that's not going to necessarily translate
(21:37):
to when they're in a college environment. And that environment
is so so different than being at home with your parents.
It doesn't matter if you're the best communicator, if you
monitor your kid's behavior, if you model good behavior, and
(21:59):
we want you to do all those things, right, those
are all good. If you do all those and you
are permissive and say, oh, you know, yeah, you can
have a glass of wine because it's a holiday or
a wedding or you can have a taste of this
or that that basically makes everything up. It counters all
(22:20):
the good stuff you're doing.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
I would not have thought of that. I thought I
would have thought it was the opposite, where it's like,
it's not so taboo. But that's funny that you say that,
because I just had a conversation with one of our
friends last weekend and she was like, well, you know,
like the all the sixteen year olds, all these parents
(22:42):
you know, will just rent a party bus for prom
and they're just like, well, at least they're safe and
they're going to be doing it anyways. No, don't do
it parents, Okay.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah, well the research would say do not do that.
There's never And people will say, well, what about Europe
and this and that, Well, and you're their kids start
initiating around fourteen and they have much higher rates of
alcohol use disorder in Europe. Yeah, so no, And this
(23:16):
research is consistent because we have colleagues all over the
world that you know, in the Netherlands, we have talked
about this with permissiveness. All the data are consistent here
across studies, in our own studies, other studies coming out
of other labs, other parts of the world. Permissiveness is
not protective, this idea of well, at least we know
(23:37):
where they are, they're drinking at home or they're not
going to drive. It's not protective.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It's interesting.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It's putting the kids at higher risk.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Lara, like, now you can I know you have all
this information for raising kids that we know.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I was actually talking to my sister about this the
other day, like, how do you have your kids have
a healthy relationship with alcohol where it's not taboo. It's
not you know, because kids want to do what they
don't want to do or what they're told not to do. Right,
So that's I'm happy to know this.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Wow, is it the same with a sex like parents
that have again same friend That was like, oh, and
there's just like a condom drawer at like you know,
one of the friend's house. This was new to me.
I never experienced any of these things.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
But I don't know that I don't know about this translation.
And I do want to give a caveat here where
if you're a kid, so I think there's a way
in which you handle the permissiveness issue. So if your teens,
to say, your high school teen is living at home
and goes out, you get a call from said teen
(24:50):
saying I can't drive. You know, I'm stuck at this place.
I need a ride. Of course, you go make sure
or your kid is safe. It's not saying, you know,
be militant and i'll I can talk about some other research.
Because there's this line right about being rigid authoritarian type
(25:12):
of parent, where that's I said, you know, don't do
this because I said so, rather than authoritative, which who says,
you know, don't do this, but here's why. And having
conversations with your kid about your rationale and your reasoning
because you care about them. There's a very big difference
between how that pans out with alcohol use, because I
(25:36):
said so puts kids more at risk the authoritative who
says I'm not going to allow you to drink because
you know your brain's still developing until you're in your twenties.
Alcohol hurts that it's not safe. It increases your risk
of having problems with alcohol. Alcohol is really not a
safe substance. And I care about you and I love you,
(25:57):
and so I'm doing this because it's in your best interest.
So that's a very different communication style. I was raised
in number one household. Yeah, but that authoritative or that
number two style is much more protective and it gets
the message across because you want your kids to understand
(26:19):
how to make good decisions about alcohol for themselves, So
helping them with the decision making process and understanding the
risk around alcohol is so important so they can make
the decisions for themselves. But that being said, you make
sure your kids safe. You go pick them up from
the party. You don't say no, I said, don't drink,
so you're on your own. You know, you don't want
(26:40):
to be militant. But then the next day the conversation
gets revisited of you know, I know we talked about
not drinking and and I'm glad you called me and
I appreciate that, but we need to have another conversation
about you drinking because you're underage, and that really goes up.
I think what we found is this idea of not
(27:03):
being permissive until they're twenty one. But I work in
a world of a huge college town. We see all
sorts of things happen. I mean, football is a huge deal, tailgating,
and you see a variety of things happening, like kids
(27:26):
drinking with their parents that are underage and just all
sorts of behaviors that parents I think are always well
intentioned and want to do what's best for their kids,
but they just don't have the data to make to
understand that long term impact. And so we actually did
(27:46):
a study where we did a zoom call. It was
an intervention with the parents where we talked about this
very idea of permissiveness, talk to them about their family
rules and what impact this had on their risk for
their kids as their kids were about to start their
(28:06):
freshman year up in state before they brought them in.
And what we found was this short intervention quickly it
reinforced parents who were not permissive, which is good. And
then it actually was in a short ten of like
fifteen minute conversation switched parents' perception of this and their
(28:32):
intentions about permissiveness very quickly. And now we've looked at
how it translates to what happens when the kids are
in college, and so we looked at it in the
short term their first and second year, and we saw
positive benefits of this intervention. So we have now submitted
(28:52):
a continuation of this study that's under review to start
looking at aud issues as these students are graduating and
going into adulthood, so we're looking at can parents actually
be protective and preventing AUD from developing or these high
risk behaviors from potentially leading into AUD.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
When is that research going to come out in a
few years.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
I'm so interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Well, the preliminary, the data on the parents we're already
analyzing and writing up. But the continuation to actually track
these students long term to see the long term effects
of this parent intervention that we'll know more about the
next year six months to a year. But we're tracking
(29:44):
them just because we want to keep them in the
sample so we hopefully get the funding and then can
follow them to look at these bigger, more chronic issues
and can we prevent those from developing by using parents.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
What is the most interesting or surprising.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Fact or data that you have found in your thirty
years of research dealing with alcohol doesn't have to be
with college kids like anything, so you can think of.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I mean, just to name one of them, is this
idea of permissiveness that if parents are permissive, it basically
takes over and it just wipes out the beneficial effects
of all the other good parenting behaviors that we encourage
and are so important. I'd say a couple things we're surprising,
(30:42):
and some are pretty simple. But in my college student work,
I look primarily at consequences that people report experiencing. And
one study I did, I ask them how negative was this?
Because as researchers and clinicians, we alway just call these
negative consequences, and what I'm referring to our things like vomiting,
(31:06):
blacking out, hangovers, having regretted sexual experiences, you know. And
so I asked this question because what I noticed in
previous work that was also surprising is when you ask
people who experience these things how much would you have
(31:27):
to drink to have it happen again? They would they
would say more than what they drank the last time
it happened. So they weren't curbing their behavior, They weren't
learning from their mistake, so to speak, right, They weren't saying, oh,
that happened, I don't want that to happen again. And
(31:48):
we make this assumption that these negative consequences are aversive, right,
and that people, when they experience them are going to think, oh, okay,
I'm going to be careful next time, or drink less.
Well they're not. They'd actually and heavier drinkers just blew
through it like they just they kept drinking more. So
(32:10):
I asked a simple question, and when people would report
consequence that, I'd ask how positive or negative was this experience?
And you'd be shocked that a lot of people rate
these consequences as neutral and sometimes even positive. And we're
talking about blackouts. Blackouts are another like tolerance is kind
(32:32):
of misunderstood, so are blackouts. Blackouts is when we drink.
Usually they happen at around a bac ofo point three
or so, depending on your tolerance level. If you have
a higher tolerance, they're going to take longer to kick in.
But it's when you've had so much alcohol that your
brain has to now make a decision keep you alive
(32:55):
by breathing or make memories. Oh my gosh, and it
shuts down your ability to make memories. You're still completely functional,
like you're still walking, breathing, doing stuff. It's not passing out,
it's just you're not creating. You're not able to remember
what happened the night before. These are that's a big deal.
(33:19):
But they don't see it as so much a negative.
Some people do, but some people don't. And again, people
who don't see negative consequences are negative researchers. Negative consequences
as negative or a versive are less likely to want
to avoid them. Right, So then they drink more and
(33:41):
this cycle starts going.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Okay, that was totally news to me. It's incredible how
the body will take over despite what we try to
be like, we can trick it, and you can't do
it will just keep well doing its best to keep
you alive.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, and there that's alcohol poisoning is a very real thing.
So even at lower levels like point three, but between
point three and too point four you can kill you
you will, you can. That's alcohol poisoning where it shuts
down your ability to Your brain can't function, it can't
(34:26):
keep you alive, it can't breathe, your respiratory SYSM.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
So it can be a lower amount than what you
really think, is what I'm getting from that comment. Also,
it depends on the person so well. For someone who
is an over drinker and consistently over and over again.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Yeah, but their tolerance is going to go up so
their body gets better. So tolerance is really your body
trying to protect itself, right, it's trying trying to continue
to function and keep you safe and alive even though
you're drinking. So it's trying to adapt to the amount
(35:10):
of alcohol. So if you're a heavy drinker and you're
maintaining that, over time, your body's going to try to
get better at managing the side effects than those depressant effects.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
So general adaptation syndrome that happens with everything. Yeah, this
is no different.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
But you can reset tolerance. So if you stop drinking
even we get it at lower levels too. You know,
if you think about just having a glass or two
of wine, you may not notice it hits you as
much if you're drinking consistently. But say you do dry
January and then you have a glass of wine in February,
(35:52):
you may think, oh, who, that just hit me a
little bit more than it used to. That's because you
don't have tolerance anymore. Your tolerance went back down to baseline.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I'm kind of curious about what is going to happen
if this like pendulum swings the other way, and like
if we find a new way to like a pill
or you know something. I know those things are already
out there, but it seems like we're as humans it's
(36:23):
hard to really give up something that we really like, y,
so we just find another way that could be.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Yeah, so you know this idea of well how can
we what can we do to reduce our alcohol use?
And when I start working with someone who uses alcohol
to cope or has it in their life for it's
there for a reason, So you don't just take it away,
(36:51):
you know, just say okay, just stop drinking. That's why
people just don't stop drinking because they don't have anything
healthy to replace it. So what can take the place
of alcohol that's healthy and in our life in general,
we want to think about exercise, you know, social support, therapy,
(37:12):
finding other ways to manage stress if alcohols become the
go to. So if you're feeling stress, maybe going for
a walk or starting to practice different mindfulness skills, starting
to do things that take the place and manage your
stress in a healthy way so that you don't feel
like you need it as much.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And those would be tips for someone who is listening
and thinking, you know what, I think I am drinking
too much and I would like to take it away,
like not drink anymore in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Or just reduce it, you know, drink for more social
or celebratory reasons not drink because I've had a hard day.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I think that that's that wrapping it up. That is
something that I try and you're you're going to be
in in the course too. But the negotiating with yourself
that we talked about in the behavior change module about
you know, maybe pulling back and being like, okay, well
maybe I won't drink have one drink every night, but
(38:21):
instead of like it's also hard too because you want everyone,
like every woman to have a place and and not
feel kind of ostracized as she's like, well I'm not
going to you know, give up alcohol completely and and
that's okay. That's an individual decision that you have to
(38:41):
out like wigh the risk versus the reward. Maybe the
timing if you want to help, you know, with sleep.
I think it's it's kind of great at that it
that it there's a lot of talk about circadian rhythm,
and when we talk about circadian rhythm and eating around
that window naturally, if we put alcohol in there, then
(39:04):
two to three hours before we go to bed, we're
done eating, we're done drinking, and it just sets us up.
I mean, I don't know it's kind of interesting how
it naturally from the beginning of time the rhythm that
we normally had, and now we're like swinging right back
to the very basics.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yes, yeah, but again, it's not that if someone chooses
to drink or has a glass of wine every day,
it doesn't mean that there's something wrong or a problem.
But it's really about a whole big picture. If someone
(39:43):
feels like, Okay, you know, I'm thinking about this a
little bit too much, or I'm planning things around my drinking,
just you kind of get a sense of when it
stops being optional or when it becomes too much of
a habit and you want to check in on it.
(40:04):
But some people just really like the taste of it, and.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
I get that.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I like it too.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I like a glass of wine. So what I often
recommend is focus on quality rather than quantity. And this
is where mindful eating comes in. If you're going to
have a glass of wine, get a good one, enjoy it.
If you're going to have a cocktail, get a nice
cocktail and really enjoy the taste. Try to slow down
your drinking so a drink lasts longer. Sometimes people are
(40:35):
really fast drinkers. If you can find a beverage that,
like red wine, isn't cold, you're not trying to drink
it before the fizz runs out. If you can find
something that you can sip and savor, it makes it
last a little bit longer and maybe you're going to
have one drink instead of two. So just those types
(40:56):
of negotiating skills can be helpful as a method of production,
because we know the less we drink, the better it
is for us.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
All I can hear is my mom growing up saying,
you know, Haley, moderation in all things.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Which is true. Yeah, mindful eating my little drinking mom.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Actually appreciate that you're this expert in this space and.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
You enjoy a glass of wine because it makes it
not this shameful thing when you talk about it.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
You know, like you can have a great relationship with it.
It doesn't have to be this negative, horrible thing. It's
just being thoughtful about it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
It is intentional, so it's being intentional, exactly intentional, and
you decide when you have a glass of wine. The
glass of wine doesn't decide when you have it, so
that it's knowing that relationship. And don't get me wrong,
I mean, the forties was a t where I'm like, huh,
I'm going to join some wine clubs because the quality
(42:04):
over quantity was so important. I'm going to have a
glass of wine. I'd rather have a really good one
and have fewer. And that's just kind of a choice
that I am in.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Kim.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Don't you want Kim to be your Yes?
Speaker 4 (42:23):
I'm like, what should we talk about?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
She's been mine unofficially, She's talked me off the ledge
multiple times since I started my business, Hailey, Okay, let's
let's break it down. And I'm like quitting.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
I'm glad you didn't. I'm glad you stuck with it, Hailey,
and I think so many other women are too.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Boy.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Well, thank you so much for your time, Kim. I'm
so thrilled to know you personally and just for what
you give back, you know, to everyone really, But I
love the feet email data too that you're just researching,
but they're also helping on the therapy site as well. Like,
you're just a well rounded, amazing person, and I'm super
(43:10):
grateful that I know you. So thank you for joining us,
thank you for having me, thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a
five star review and sharing the body Pod with your friends.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Until next time,
Hey everyone, This is Haley and I'm Lara and welcome
to the Body Pod.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome back to part two with doctor Kimberly Mallet. So, Kim,
let's talk about alcohol and sleep.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
It is not helpful, but it's deceiving. So I think,
I think it's misleading and people get a false sense
that alcohol can be helpful to sleep, but it really isn't.
And that's that again. It just lures us in and
(00:42):
plays a mean trick on us, is what it's doing.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, you said in the last episode that you had
some research of your own. Did that have to do
with sleep?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
So anecdotal research for me? Yes, okay, so for me,
so I fit all I check all your boxes right.
So I'm late forties. I'm going to hold on to
that as long as I can. I'm late forties. But yeah,
sleep is I think challenging for so many reasons as
(01:15):
we age. But alcohol isn't helpful. And I think where
people are going to be surprised is in a couple areas.
One we know that if I think anyone who's ever
gotten intoxicated recognizes you're not going to get a good
night of sleep if you've been drunk. That No one
(01:37):
wakes up feeling refreshed after a night of heavy drinking,
so that's no surprise. But what sometimes people start to
fall in the trap of is thinking, oh, you know,
just a glass of wine or a drink helps kind
of make me tired and relax me and prepares me
(01:59):
for sleep. So alcohol does have that sedative effect and
it will do that for you. But the problem is
once you get to sleep, the quality of your sleep
turns to craft. So, you know, just to basically lay
it out there. So what it does, I'm going to
try to kind of to simplify this so it's not
(02:21):
too nerdy and science. Ye, but during the first half
of the night when we have alcohol in so it's
in our system. Now, what it does is it's going
to increase our slow wave sleep and it's going to
(02:47):
suppress our rem sleep. So when we're sleeping, we cycle
through all of these stages of sleep throughout the night.
So people will wake up and think, oh, you know,
I had a dream. You didn't just have one dream,
that's just the dream you had most recent to waking up.
You dream all throughout the night. You have different periods
(03:08):
of sleep, lighter and deeper waves, of sleep. So alcohol
is disrupting that full night of sleep. So in that
first half that's what happens.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
But then.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
You metabolize, remember your livers working while you're sleeping, and
once the alcohol leaves the system, the sedative affects diminish.
So how many of us have woken up.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Like every night in the morning. And it's not just.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Going to be alcohol that's responsible for this, but it
definitely can play a role here, and especially for people
who are sensitive to it. So if you're now you're
waking up in the night, and this is when it
becomes challenging, So you're having these these sleep disruptions and
these become more frequent. I did last time we talked,
(04:06):
I talked about alcohol's a toxin. Right now, it can
also destroy some of the neurons and impair them permanent.
This can after prolonged use of this is a pattern
where a lot of drinking is happening at night over
a sustained period of time, it can permanently damage some
of these neurons responsible for our sleep cycles, change our
(04:31):
entire architecture of sleep. And what can happen is when
people then try to abstain and think Okay, I'm going
to stop drinking. The sleep problems don't get better because
well sometimes they're just not going to and then they
go back. It's easy to fall back into the pattern
(04:53):
of I just need to get to sleep some and
have a drink to kind of knock me out and
sedate me.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
This is what I do. But with melotonin. Yeah, well.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
So yeah, I'm a melotonin junkie myself. So I have
my own drugs to choice these days, and those would
be like melotonin and estrogen.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And all the all the black market drugs. I mean,
that's it's so hard though, because women in this perimenopause phase,
like sleep party goes down out the window, like it
already just is really rough for a lot of women,
and so you tackle on alcohol and it's like double
(05:35):
whammy exactly, and it's so hard to function the next day.
And then we know that from a body composition phase
it doesn't help us either, and then we don't have
energy to go to the gym. Like it just is
this like roll on effect of all these other issues
that kind of contribute to it. What do you think
of like drinking in the day, It clearly it messes
(05:57):
up the night's sleep. But if you were like, well,
I'm gonna have three drinks this week, that's what that's
going to be my negotiation.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think if you can, if you want to drink,
and you can get it as far away from your
bedtime as possible, that's better. That's so think about it
from a harm reduction approach. If you don't want it
to impact your sleep, metabolize it out before you go
to sleep. You don't want to go right up against bedtime.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
So how long is that four hours?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Well, it depends how much you drink. The rule of
them is an hour per drink to process. So you know,
if you want to have a glass or two of wine,
just think about when you're going to bed and give yourself.
So when I say timing is everything right? How long
(06:52):
does it take you to drink a glass of wine?
And so it gets you get kind of in the
weeds about like when did I start? When that I finish?
And when is how well is my liver functioning depending
on my age? As we age, our liver is not
as efficient.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
So do we need to add thirty extra minutes?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Yeah, So if you want to cushion it, cushion it
if you want to be conservative. Great, but you think about, well,
maybe there's a reason happy hours a thing because it's
earlier in the night. Yeah, And I think, really what
it is is knowing your limits. So it's this idea
of can you just have a glass of wine or
(07:33):
one cocktail and be done, or you know, maybe you're out,
maybe it's a weekend, you're at a party, have a
couple of drinks, be done. There's always going to be
an occasion where maybe it's it's not the norm, and
that's okay, it's one episode isn't going to be a
deal breaker. But it's more that consistent pattern that I
(07:56):
think we need to be aware of of what we're doing,
what's our habit, what's our daily pattern looking like? Interesting?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So what exactly is a drinking problem? What's considered if
you want to talk about habits.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And what's aud what qualifies? So it's changed, and it's
funny a lot of times, I think our nomenclature or
vernacular is an alcoholic is kind of what we describe
and that's what we use. But really there's no such
thing in the diagnostic world. So it's really based more
(08:35):
on a continuum and there are When we look at
a diagnosis of an aud there are eleven different criteria
and these are a mixture of different things of the
impact alcohol is having on your life from a social perspective, interpersonal,
(08:57):
your daily functioning responsibilities, and our physical dependency on it.
So if you endorse after you know, going through a
clinical interview an assessment, if you endorse two or more
of these issues, and those could be things like, you know,
(09:18):
this is causing a problem between me and you know,
family member, loved one, spouse not not you're missing out,
You're not able to maintain responsibilities, work, school, those types
of things, if you I think the big ones that
(09:42):
I really take note of is if you are struggling
with limiting your alcohol intake. So for example, you are
trying to have you're setting out to have a couple
of drinks and you're at a party and you just
right through it and you're to the point of intoxication,
(10:04):
and every time you start drinking, you just really can't
stop limiting or always kind of going beyond what limits
you're setting for yourself. If you're craving, if you're noticing
that you're having withdrawal symptoms, like you get the shakes
if you need it, you're feeling really irritable if you
(10:25):
don't have it. These are those types of physical dependency
symptoms that come into play. So once we start seeing those,
those are in that realm of severe and that's when
we need to talk about more serious treatment and intervention.
When it's when people are starting to say, hey, I'm
(10:47):
worried about you. You're just starting to notice that your
tolerance actually tolerance. I think that is a big one
that people miss really just don't understand. They think, oh,
tolerance means that you need more alcohol to get the
same effect. So a lot of people take that to
(11:09):
mean as, oh, I can handle my alcohol, well, I
don't get slothy, you know, I can drink, and they
see it as a positive thing. It's really a big
warning sign because your body's adapting to try to manage
the amount of alcohol and not you're not seeing the effects.
(11:31):
So you're not seeing the balance issues, the slurring, the judgment.
Your body's starting to compensate. But what that means is
you're not actually interpreting how intoxicated you are, so your
BAC is still the same. If you were to drink
four drinks and feel really intoxicated, but you maintain that
(11:55):
and then you were to drink four drinks and not
feel that as much anymore. People make a lot of
a they think that they can drive, but your BAC
is still what it would have been before. You're just
not feeling the effects of it.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Can you back up and say, since we did this,
this is the second episode, just clarify what AUD stands for.
And BAC.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Au D is alcohol use disorder, so that would be
like the diagnosis of having an alcohol problem.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So au D is the technical term, but we the
public says alcoholism or an alcoholic okay.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
And BAC is blood alcohol concentration. So that's something I
think most people associate with that point oh eight level
to legally, once we cross that threshold, we shouldn't be driving.
That's when we're impaired. But the BAC has a huge range.
So when we start to notice difficulty with just judgment,
(13:06):
when we start to notice we have physical symptoms, so
our reaction time isn't as good. And this is why
it's point oh eight because that's around the time where
reaction time all of these these things our brain is
just doing automatically can't do anymore because alcohol is a
toxin and it's it's a central nervous system depressant, and
(13:29):
it's doing all these things in our brain. So it's making.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Point oh eight, like, what does that end up being
like one drink? No, I know it's probably different weight
how much somebody weighs.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yes, that's why it's so important to really to actually
pay attention to these what Anti TRIPAA puts out or
you can find them online. There be ac charts where
you can enter your weight, your gender, the amount of alcohol,
and the time taken to drink, and it will give
you an of what your BAC would be because we
(14:04):
can't how we feel is not an accurate estimate because
of things like tolerance. And so even though you may
feel like alcohol isn't you know that you're not really
experiencing a lot of the impact of alcohol. Your BAC
is still the same as what it was before tolerance increased,
(14:30):
so it still impacts those subtle things like reaction times.
You were still not safe to drive a car, and
if you've got pulled over you and you blew in
a breathalyzer, you would potentially be over that legal limit.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Laura, I have a question for you. Yes, did you.
I mean, I'm sure Kim's read plenty about this, but
I just had the fertility just came to mind when
you like it, does this play into fertility when you
were in that world?
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, when I went through all the rounds of IVF
and infertility. They don't want you to drink when you're
going through IVF, and yeah, it affects it.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
You probably already knew that, Kim.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Well, I'm not sure of all the reasons, but I
know again it's it's never going to help anything, right,
It's not something that's going to make our fertility. It's
not going to improve our physiological state or any of
these health benefits. It's just that's not what alcohol does.
(15:42):
But doesn't it doesn't it do something for the male
like for sperm.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I actually don't for them that. I'm just assuming.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Our body functions better when we don't have drugs and
alcohol in our system. Right. So it's like, if we
want our bodies to draw the way it needs to do,
then and if you're really working towards a goal like that,
and you're spending all of this time and money and
supplements and medications, you don't want to do anything that
(16:17):
is going to.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Be contradictive to that.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Exactly. Yeah, So I think that's a key piece. So
with alcohol use disorder, I mean, there are a lot
of variety of things that can come into play, but
it's the key here is is once it hits that
severe point where physical dependency comes in, the way we
(16:44):
deal with it is very different. And that means you
are now in a world of where you pass the
point of where you can drink moderately or light again.
You can't just go back to being a social drinker.
There's just this flip that or the switch that's flipped
(17:04):
in our brain, and that's where that limiting comes in.
And it's just this internal struggle that happens. So even
people that may not have been physically dependent but felt
like they really kind of struggled with their relationship with
alcohol that I've worked with have kind of made a
(17:28):
decision at some point to say, I think I'm going
to choose just not to drink because it's easier for
me to do that. I don't like having to constantly
struggle with myself. And I think we can all relate
to that. Some people think about sugar, or think about
something that dietary that that we like if we some
(17:54):
people can just have a little bit of chocolate every day.
I know you do that, Hailey, and you're good.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Associated you stop.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Some people, if they have a little bit, it makes
them want more, and then there's this constant struggle and
they seem to not crave it as much if they
don't have it at all. So it's really about knowing
your body. And I think that's a good analogy. If
we've talked a lot about alcohol, how should we treat it? Well?
I kind of think about it maybe as like cake.
(18:24):
How often do you eat cake? Do you eat cake
every day? Probably?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Not?
Speaker 4 (18:29):
You know?
Speaker 3 (18:29):
And if you do, do you eat the whole cake
or just have a little piece of cake? And can
we equate that to our relationship with alcohol.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
You said in part one that you've a lot of
your work has also been around ways to prevent someone
from having aud What have you found has worked the best,
Especially with these kids that are going off to college
or that are in college, it has been the most effective.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
So I can talk about some of our intervention work
and just so I do a lot of ideological work
where I identify risk factors for coming into college and
being a heavier drinker experiencing more consequences. And we've also
done a lot of work with parent developed and tested
(19:24):
and randomized clinical trials, parent based interventions and how parents
can make a difference in their kids' life. So just
some general risk factors, So we want to be very
aware of risk factors and some that we can manage behaviorally.
There are certain ones we can and certain ones we can't.
So for example, family history would be a risk factor. Well,
(19:47):
we can't really change that, right, but we can be
aware of it. And once we know if we have
that risk factor, when we talk to it to young
adults or teens or parents are talking with them, it's
important to kind of point these risk factors out and
that it's important that how to make decisions about alcohol.
(20:08):
The second is age of onset. So we know that
the younger you are when you start drinking, the more
at risk you are for developing risky drinking patterns potentially
and then going into adulthood with those. So the longer
we can delay that the better. The average drinking age
(20:29):
or modal drinking age is about sixteen in the States
and in other countries. You have no idea. How much
I hear about what about Europe they let those kids drink.
And I'll talk about that in a second. Because we've
done trials and I've published work on this very topic.
(20:52):
The one thing that parents can do, the most important
thing parents can do to lower their kids' risk of
going into college and being a heavy drinker. So to
protect the most protective thing is to not be permissive.
Do not give your kids alcohol, even tastes. Like what
(21:13):
we're finding is that permissiveness to drink. And this was
actually surprising to us. This is this is a little
bit counterintuitive, but when you allow your kids to drink,
even in small doses, they may be really responsible when
they're with you, but that's not going to necessarily translate
(21:37):
to when they're in a college environment. And that environment
is so so different than being at home with your parents.
It doesn't matter if you're the best communicator, if you
monitor your kid's behavior, if you model good behavior, and
(21:59):
we want you to do all those things, right, those
are all good. If you do all those and you
are permissive and say, oh, you know, yeah, you can
have a glass of wine because it's a holiday or
a wedding or you can have a taste of this
or that that basically makes everything up. It counters all
(22:20):
the good stuff you're doing.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
I would not have thought of that. I thought I
would have thought it was the opposite, where it's like,
it's not so taboo. But that's funny that you say that,
because I just had a conversation with one of our
friends last weekend and she was like, well, you know,
like the all the sixteen year olds, all these parents
(22:42):
you know, will just rent a party bus for prom
and they're just like, well, at least they're safe and
they're going to be doing it anyways. No, don't do
it parents, Okay.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah, well the research would say do not do that.
There's never And people will say, well, what about Europe
and this and that, Well, and you're their kids start
initiating around fourteen and they have much higher rates of
alcohol use disorder in Europe. Yeah, so no, And this
(23:16):
research is consistent because we have colleagues all over the
world that you know, in the Netherlands, we have talked
about this with permissiveness. All the data are consistent here
across studies, in our own studies, other studies coming out
of other labs, other parts of the world. Permissiveness is
not protective, this idea of well, at least we know
(23:37):
where they are, they're drinking at home or they're not
going to drive. It's not protective.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It's interesting.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It's putting the kids at higher risk.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Lara, like, now you can I know you have all
this information for raising kids that we know.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I was actually talking to my sister about this the
other day, like, how do you have your kids have
a healthy relationship with alcohol where it's not taboo. It's
not you know, because kids want to do what they
don't want to do or what they're told not to do. Right,
So that's I'm happy to know this.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Wow, is it the same with a sex like parents
that have again same friend That was like, oh, and
there's just like a condom drawer at like you know,
one of the friend's house. This was new to me.
I never experienced any of these things.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
But I don't know that I don't know about this translation.
And I do want to give a caveat here where
if you're a kid, so I think there's a way
in which you handle the permissiveness issue. So if your teens,
to say, your high school teen is living at home
and goes out, you get a call from said teen
(24:50):
saying I can't drive. You know, I'm stuck at this place.
I need a ride. Of course, you go make sure
or your kid is safe. It's not saying, you know,
be militant and i'll I can talk about some other research.
Because there's this line right about being rigid authoritarian type
(25:12):
of parent, where that's I said, you know, don't do
this because I said so, rather than authoritative, which who says,
you know, don't do this, but here's why. And having
conversations with your kid about your rationale and your reasoning
because you care about them. There's a very big difference
between how that pans out with alcohol use, because I
(25:36):
said so puts kids more at risk the authoritative who
says I'm not going to allow you to drink because
you know your brain's still developing until you're in your twenties.
Alcohol hurts that it's not safe. It increases your risk
of having problems with alcohol. Alcohol is really not a
safe substance. And I care about you and I love you,
(25:57):
and so I'm doing this because it's in your best interest.
So that's a very different communication style. I was raised
in number one household. Yeah, but that authoritative or that
number two style is much more protective and it gets
the message across because you want your kids to understand
(26:19):
how to make good decisions about alcohol for themselves, So
helping them with the decision making process and understanding the
risk around alcohol is so important so they can make
the decisions for themselves. But that being said, you make
sure your kids safe. You go pick them up from
the party. You don't say no, I said, don't drink,
so you're on your own. You know, you don't want
(26:40):
to be militant. But then the next day the conversation
gets revisited of you know, I know we talked about
not drinking and and I'm glad you called me and
I appreciate that, but we need to have another conversation
about you drinking because you're underage, and that really goes up.
I think what we found is this idea of not
(27:03):
being permissive until they're twenty one. But I work in
a world of a huge college town. We see all
sorts of things happen. I mean, football is a huge deal, tailgating,
and you see a variety of things happening, like kids
(27:26):
drinking with their parents that are underage and just all
sorts of behaviors that parents I think are always well
intentioned and want to do what's best for their kids,
but they just don't have the data to make to
understand that long term impact. And so we actually did
(27:46):
a study where we did a zoom call. It was
an intervention with the parents where we talked about this
very idea of permissiveness, talk to them about their family
rules and what impact this had on their risk for
their kids as their kids were about to start their
(28:06):
freshman year up in state before they brought them in.
And what we found was this short intervention quickly it
reinforced parents who were not permissive, which is good. And
then it actually was in a short ten of like
fifteen minute conversation switched parents' perception of this and their
(28:32):
intentions about permissiveness very quickly. And now we've looked at
how it translates to what happens when the kids are
in college, and so we looked at it in the
short term their first and second year, and we saw
positive benefits of this intervention. So we have now submitted
(28:52):
a continuation of this study that's under review to start
looking at aud issues as these students are graduating and
going into adulthood, so we're looking at can parents actually
be protective and preventing AUD from developing or these high
risk behaviors from potentially leading into AUD.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
When is that research going to come out in a
few years.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
I'm so interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Well, the preliminary, the data on the parents we're already
analyzing and writing up. But the continuation to actually track
these students long term to see the long term effects
of this parent intervention that we'll know more about the
next year six months to a year. But we're tracking
(29:44):
them just because we want to keep them in the
sample so we hopefully get the funding and then can
follow them to look at these bigger, more chronic issues
and can we prevent those from developing by using parents.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
What is the most interesting or surprising.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Fact or data that you have found in your thirty
years of research dealing with alcohol doesn't have to be
with college kids like anything, so you can think of.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I mean, just to name one of them, is this
idea of permissiveness that if parents are permissive, it basically
takes over and it just wipes out the beneficial effects
of all the other good parenting behaviors that we encourage
and are so important. I'd say a couple things we're surprising,
(30:42):
and some are pretty simple. But in my college student work,
I look primarily at consequences that people report experiencing. And
one study I did, I ask them how negative was this?
Because as researchers and clinicians, we alway just call these
negative consequences, and what I'm referring to our things like vomiting,
(31:06):
blacking out, hangovers, having regretted sexual experiences, you know. And
so I asked this question because what I noticed in
previous work that was also surprising is when you ask
people who experience these things how much would you have
(31:27):
to drink to have it happen again? They would they
would say more than what they drank the last time
it happened. So they weren't curbing their behavior, They weren't
learning from their mistake, so to speak, right, They weren't saying, oh,
that happened, I don't want that to happen again. And
(31:48):
we make this assumption that these negative consequences are aversive, right,
and that people, when they experience them are going to think, oh, okay,
I'm going to be careful next time, or drink less.
Well they're not. They'd actually and heavier drinkers just blew
through it like they just they kept drinking more. So
(32:10):
I asked a simple question, and when people would report
consequence that, I'd ask how positive or negative was this experience?
And you'd be shocked that a lot of people rate
these consequences as neutral and sometimes even positive. And we're
talking about blackouts. Blackouts are another like tolerance is kind
(32:32):
of misunderstood, so are blackouts. Blackouts is when we drink.
Usually they happen at around a bac ofo point three
or so, depending on your tolerance level. If you have
a higher tolerance, they're going to take longer to kick in.
But it's when you've had so much alcohol that your
brain has to now make a decision keep you alive
(32:55):
by breathing or make memories. Oh my gosh, and it
shuts down your ability to make memories. You're still completely functional,
like you're still walking, breathing, doing stuff. It's not passing out,
it's just you're not creating. You're not able to remember
what happened the night before. These are that's a big deal.
(33:19):
But they don't see it as so much a negative.
Some people do, but some people don't. And again, people
who don't see negative consequences are negative researchers. Negative consequences
as negative or a versive are less likely to want
to avoid them. Right, So then they drink more and
(33:41):
this cycle starts going.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Okay, that was totally news to me. It's incredible how
the body will take over despite what we try to
be like, we can trick it, and you can't do
it will just keep well doing its best to keep
you alive.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, and there that's alcohol poisoning is a very real thing.
So even at lower levels like point three, but between
point three and too point four you can kill you
you will, you can. That's alcohol poisoning where it shuts
down your ability to Your brain can't function, it can't
(34:26):
keep you alive, it can't breathe, your respiratory SYSM.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
So it can be a lower amount than what you
really think, is what I'm getting from that comment. Also,
it depends on the person so well. For someone who
is an over drinker and consistently over and over again.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Yeah, but their tolerance is going to go up so
their body gets better. So tolerance is really your body
trying to protect itself, right, it's trying trying to continue
to function and keep you safe and alive even though
you're drinking. So it's trying to adapt to the amount
(35:10):
of alcohol. So if you're a heavy drinker and you're
maintaining that, over time, your body's going to try to
get better at managing the side effects than those depressant effects.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
So general adaptation syndrome that happens with everything. Yeah, this
is no different.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
But you can reset tolerance. So if you stop drinking
even we get it at lower levels too. You know,
if you think about just having a glass or two
of wine, you may not notice it hits you as
much if you're drinking consistently. But say you do dry
January and then you have a glass of wine in February,
(35:52):
you may think, oh, who, that just hit me a
little bit more than it used to. That's because you
don't have tolerance anymore. Your tolerance went back down to baseline.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I'm kind of curious about what is going to happen
if this like pendulum swings the other way, and like
if we find a new way to like a pill
or you know something. I know those things are already
out there, but it seems like we're as humans it's
(36:23):
hard to really give up something that we really like, y,
so we just find another way that could be.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Yeah, so you know this idea of well how can
we what can we do to reduce our alcohol use?
And when I start working with someone who uses alcohol
to cope or has it in their life for it's
there for a reason, So you don't just take it away,
(36:51):
you know, just say okay, just stop drinking. That's why
people just don't stop drinking because they don't have anything
healthy to replace it. So what can take the place
of alcohol that's healthy and in our life in general,
we want to think about exercise, you know, social support, therapy,
(37:12):
finding other ways to manage stress if alcohols become the
go to. So if you're feeling stress, maybe going for
a walk or starting to practice different mindfulness skills, starting
to do things that take the place and manage your
stress in a healthy way so that you don't feel
like you need it as much.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And those would be tips for someone who is listening
and thinking, you know what, I think I am drinking
too much and I would like to take it away,
like not drink anymore in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Or just reduce it, you know, drink for more social
or celebratory reasons not drink because I've had a hard day.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I think that that's that wrapping it up. That is
something that I try and you're you're going to be
in in the course too. But the negotiating with yourself
that we talked about in the behavior change module about
you know, maybe pulling back and being like, okay, well
maybe I won't drink have one drink every night, but
(38:21):
instead of like it's also hard too because you want everyone,
like every woman to have a place and and not
feel kind of ostracized as she's like, well I'm not
going to you know, give up alcohol completely and and
that's okay. That's an individual decision that you have to
(38:41):
out like wigh the risk versus the reward. Maybe the
timing if you want to help, you know, with sleep.
I think it's it's kind of great at that it
that it there's a lot of talk about circadian rhythm,
and when we talk about circadian rhythm and eating around
that window naturally, if we put alcohol in there, then
(39:04):
two to three hours before we go to bed, we're
done eating, we're done drinking, and it just sets us up.
I mean, I don't know it's kind of interesting how
it naturally from the beginning of time the rhythm that
we normally had, and now we're like swinging right back
to the very basics.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yes, yeah, but again, it's not that if someone chooses
to drink or has a glass of wine every day,
it doesn't mean that there's something wrong or a problem.
But it's really about a whole big picture. If someone
(39:43):
feels like, Okay, you know, I'm thinking about this a
little bit too much, or I'm planning things around my drinking,
just you kind of get a sense of when it
stops being optional or when it becomes too much of
a habit and you want to check in on it.
(40:04):
But some people just really like the taste of it, and.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
I get that.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I like it too.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I like a glass of wine. So what I often
recommend is focus on quality rather than quantity. And this
is where mindful eating comes in. If you're going to
have a glass of wine, get a good one, enjoy it.
If you're going to have a cocktail, get a nice
cocktail and really enjoy the taste. Try to slow down
your drinking so a drink lasts longer. Sometimes people are
(40:35):
really fast drinkers. If you can find a beverage that,
like red wine, isn't cold, you're not trying to drink
it before the fizz runs out. If you can find
something that you can sip and savor, it makes it
last a little bit longer and maybe you're going to
have one drink instead of two. So just those types
(40:56):
of negotiating skills can be helpful as a method of production,
because we know the less we drink, the better it
is for us.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
All I can hear is my mom growing up saying,
you know, Haley, moderation in all things.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Which is true. Yeah, mindful eating my little drinking mom.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Actually appreciate that you're this expert in this space and.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
You enjoy a glass of wine because it makes it
not this shameful thing when you talk about it.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
You know, like you can have a great relationship with it.
It doesn't have to be this negative, horrible thing. It's
just being thoughtful about it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
It is intentional, so it's being intentional, exactly intentional, and
you decide when you have a glass of wine. The
glass of wine doesn't decide when you have it, so
that it's knowing that relationship. And don't get me wrong,
I mean, the forties was a t where I'm like, huh,
I'm going to join some wine clubs because the quality
(42:04):
over quantity was so important. I'm going to have a
glass of wine. I'd rather have a really good one
and have fewer. And that's just kind of a choice
that I am in.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Kim.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Don't you want Kim to be your Yes?
Speaker 4 (42:23):
I'm like, what should we talk about?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
She's been mine unofficially, She's talked me off the ledge
multiple times since I started my business, Hailey, Okay, let's
let's break it down. And I'm like quitting.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
I'm glad you didn't. I'm glad you stuck with it, Hailey,
and I think so many other women are too.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Boy.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Well, thank you so much for your time, Kim. I'm
so thrilled to know you personally and just for what
you give back, you know, to everyone really, But I
love the feet email data too that you're just researching,
but they're also helping on the therapy site as well. Like,
you're just a well rounded, amazing person, and I'm super
(43:10):
grateful that I know you. So thank you for joining us,
thank you for having me, thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a
five star review and sharing the body Pod with your friends.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Until next time,
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