The False Promise of Alcohol with Ellen Newstead

Episode 146

Most of our Tribe Sober members are quite mature – like me ;-) They drank socially in their 20’s and 30’s and it was only later in life that they found themselves becoming dependent.

But now and again we come across a younger person and my guest this week is Ellen Newstead who is in her early 30’s. She was smart enough to realise at an early age that alcohol was messing up her life and that she would be happier and healthier without it.

Ditching the booze at 30 changes your future - and that’s exactly what she did.

Ellen’s drinking career was short but it was intense and she very sensibly decided to get sober for her wedding – which she did, and she’s never looked back.

In this Episode

Like many teenagers Ellen was quite shy with self esteem issues and found that alcohol helped her relax and have fun
She enjoyed the buzz and was soon chasing that feeling
Her first experience of drinking was Alcopops which are between 4 and 8% alcohol
If you listened to last week’s podcast you will have heard marketing expert Nigel Jones explain how we are groomed by the alcohol industry to drink alcohol from a very early age – groomed to be their lifelong customers
Of course alcohol tastes unpleasant to a first time drinker – so they get round this problem by flavoring the alcopops to taste like cola or lemonade
Teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of Alcopops and drinking before the age of 18 will increase the likelihood of dependence as we get older
When she thinks back to those years of teenage drinking Ellen realises that for her “fun and alcohol” became so closely linked she couldn’t imagine one without the other – a situation that continued for the next decade
For many of us alcohol is perceived as the “gateway to fun” and Ellen talked about the “false promise of alcohol”
Millions of us bought into this false promise and it took me decades to realise that alcohol is just 10% ethanol and 90% marketing!
The fun comes from the people who are with and the environment you are in
When Ellen went off to Uni she was expecting to find lots of other enthusiastic drinkers but soon realised that not many of her contempories were in her league – she was the ringleader - always the one wanting to make every social event about drinking!
By her second year at Uni she had found a weekend job in a bar and had started to enjoy drinking alone, at work and at home
By her early 20’s a bottle of wine a night was the norm
She went through a period of unemployment when she was 25 and that was when she totally “lost it” as she puts it
She treated the pub as a social club and went there every day, she met someone who invited her to his house to continue drinking and sleep over if she needed to
She would often drink to oblivion and wake up not quite knowing where she was
Ellen would lie to her boyfriend and parents about where she had spent the night
Fortunately Ellen got a job which put some kind of structure into her life so her drinking was confined to weekend binge drinking
Then came Covid so home drinking became the norm as the pubs were closed
As she no longer had access to the pub she recreated her comfort zone in her spare room
A home pub – complete with beer mats, signage and bar snacks!
The pubs were busy delivering containers of alcohol people’s homes so the drinking could continue in spite of lockdown
As the UK gradually opened up again drinking was allowed in outside in beer gardens
Ellen was so excited by this development that she drank to blackout the first 3 times she went to the pub!
In spite of this she maintains she wasn’t physically addicted – her addiction was more psychological
If you listen to Tribe Sober podcast episode 48 you can hear Mol

Published on 2 years, 11 months ago

Podcast Episode Details

The False Promise of Alcohol with Ellen Newstead