From the editor
Now that your work ‘commute’ possibly involves stepping a few paces into the next room, have you noticed that you’ve lost that useful sense of separation between office life and home life? At the end of each day, how do you ‘decompress’ from the mental whirl of the hundreds of emails and switch off when there isn’t a bus ride or a car journey between your computer and your couch? Why… perhaps it’s time for a gin and tonic? I know I’m not alone in feeling that pouring a drink feels like a pleasant, even celebratory, way to bookmark the end of a busy working day, for right now alcohol sales are soaring. Certainly when this whole work-from-home life began, for me a drink before dinner quickly became a nightly fixture, and one I’m making a conscious effort now to replace.
Research tells us that women at midlife are the highest consumers of alcohol among females in Australia. And I get it: in a world that demands so much of us to juggle so many things, an evening tipple can seem both a small reward and a nice way to pull our foot off the accelerator. Even this month’s cover star, Allison Langdon, talks about how she’d pour a couple of glasses of wine each night as part of her evening wind-down ritual when she first started co-hosting Today on the Nine Network. But she goes on to say that she realised it was actually sapping her energy rather than replenishing it, and for her, the remedy has been to swear off drinking on workdays.
The reality, of course, is that the latest health guidelines tell us there is no safe drinking threshold.
So, this month, we look at the trend towards finding alternative ways to seek that sense of calm come wine o’clock. It’s a movement that’s been dubbed ‘sober curious’, as in what would I be like if I didn’t have this evening fix? And how would I feel different?
We talk to women who open up about their own drinking habits. What struck me was how all of them said that when they found alternatives to alcohol, they felt that they became more authentic, truer versions of themselves. Curious? See page 66.