To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. This sentence may very well be what started Chrissy Teigen’s path toward sobriety. It also happens to be the sentence that started Holly Whitaker’s 2019 book, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. When Teigen posted an Instagram photo of the epigraph on December 2, 2020, Whitaker knew things were about to shift in her life, as well as Teigen’s. "My book had really stayed within recovery circles and I had meant it to be a book anyone could see themselves in," she says. In late December, Teigen officially name-checked Quit Like a Woman as the inspiration for her decision to quit drinking, and Whitaker, the founder of the online sobriety program Tempest, beautydrops.shop finally felt a sense of redemption, five years after an editor told her no one cared about women and alcohol.
Not only do people care, but many are clamoring for support as the continued psychological, economic, and makeup existential distress of the COVID-19 pandemic has decidedly driven more people-specifically women-to drink. As early as last spring, researchers began documenting the facts. A study published in Addictive Behavior found that pandemic-related psychological distress was consistently related to alcohol use, and women were the ones most likely to cope by drinking. According to a survey published in the JAMA Network Open, not only was there a 54% increase in alcohol sales for the week ending March 21, 2020, Sales but the overall frequency of alcohol consumption increased by 14% among adults over 30, compared to the same time the previous year. "The increases in economic and emotional distress stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic have been linked to higher levels of alcohol use," says the study’s lead author, Michael Pollard, a senior sociologist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
"People often use alcohol to cope with depression and stress, but alcohol can also make mood disorders worse-particularly for women." Pollard says that while his study included a sizable portion of people who curbed their drinking behaviors during the pandemic compared to the year before, the overwhelming increases in drinking behaviors outweighed those cutbacks. While there’s no one-size-fits-all treatment strategy to address problematic drinking, many people turn to 12-step programs for peer support-most notably, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). For Whitaker, the program, which was developed in 1935 and requires participants to admit a powerlessness over alcohol, has never resonated. When Whitaker began exploring sobriety at age 32, she didn’t identify with the core concepts of the sobriety programs she encountered. So when she set out to design her own recovery program, she knew it had to address four major issues she perceived as problematic with programs like AA: the requirement to identify oneself as "an alcoholic," the lack of integrated, holistic therapies, the mandated anonymity, and the lack of opportunity to develop agency or self-trust. This content w as do ne by GSA Conte nt Gener ator Dem oversi on.
"Even though I had brought myself to the point of being able to look at my addiction, I would then have to listen to other people because they knew better about what path I should take than I knew myself," she says. Of course, when Whitaker got sober in 2012 and when she launched Tempest (originally known as Hip Sobriety) in 2014, the world we lived in hadn’t yet launched headfirst into a pandemic of unprecedented proportions-one that would claim over 406,000 American lives, decimate the job market, amplify loneliness, and effectively wipe out all in-person treatment options for anyone suspecting they may need support around alcohol. Heather Gallagher, LCMHC, LCAS, an addiction therapist at the University of North Carolina’s Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program, says her clinic has seen a rise over the last year in both new patients and returning patients who have resumed drinking during the pandemic.