Avoid the chaos festive momentum can bring.

As we get closer to Christmas and we're rushing around trying to find those last minute bits and pieces, often the chaos and exhaustion can become overwhelming and effect how we enjoy our own festive season while we try to make everyone else's perfect!

What is Burnout? Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands which covers nearly all women at some point in our lives who feel the pressure to do it all and be everything to everyone.

Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.

The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life—including your home, work, and social life. Burnout can also cause long-term changes to your body that make you vulnerable to illnesses like colds and flu.

So how does drinking alcohol impact the speed that we head towards burnout?

1 Alcohol is a depressant

2 Alcohol causes anxiety

3 Alcohol interrupts sleep patterns

And all three of these things have a huge impact on burnout.

Alcohol is a depressant

Regularly drinking above the low risk drinking guidelines of 14 units a week is linked to symptoms of depression. However, it can be difficult to know whether drinking is the cause of these symptoms or whether the symptoms of depression are leading to harmful drinking. Alcohol affects the systems of nerves and chemicals, in the brain and body, that help to control our mood and it slows down the brain and the central nervous system's processes.  It means we can’t think as clearly, we’re not as sharp when it comes to making decisions, we can’t focus effectively and theses all lead to feelings of anxiety that we can’t do our job properly or we’re not doing the best by our children. We worry about these things and it leads us to feeling emotional, drained and exhausted. 

Alcohol causes anxiety.

Alcohol acts as a sedative, it can help you feel more at ease so you can’t be blamed for thinking it helps with anxiety. However, these benefits are short-lived. 

When we drink alcohol it disrupts the balance of chemicals and processes in the brain. The relaxed feeling you experience when you have your first drink is due to the chemical changes alcohol causes in your brain. But these effects wear off fast and the pleasant feelings fade. If you rely on alcohol to mask your anxiety problems, you may find you become reliant on it to relax needing to consume more and more for the same effect as you become tolerant.

When we drink to relieve stress and anxiety, after the high of the first drink as our bodies process the alcohol to get us back to a normal state, our minds demand more, it wants to feel like that again so we have more, and if we don’t, we feel like we’re depriving ourselves and or we eventually cave in and then berate ourselves. “Why can’t I just have one?” is a question I often get asked.  The truth is it’s not our fault, it‘s the chemical in-balances within our body that takes over. Hangxiety or beer fear is the expression used to describe when you wake up in the middle of the night or the next morning and remember that you said something you shouldn’t or you think you might have said something you shouldn’t but you can’t quite remember what you said or to who, that over-riding feeling of dread and anxiety. People who drink heavily or frequently are more likely to suffer from mental health problems. 

Drinking disrupts sleep

You’ve had a long and busy day. A drink or two always helps you nod off. It might seem like that but even just a couple of drinks can affect the quality of your sleep. This is because alcohol disrupts your sleep cycle.  When you drink alcohol before bed you may fall asleep more quickly but as the night goes on you spend more time in a deep sleep rather than the restful restorative REM stage of sleep so you end up waking feeling groggy and tired. We know that lack of sleep has a massive impact on our mental health, it makes us feel exhausted and low energy levels make us impatient and affects our decision making and ability to deal with situations and stress. The fact that you’ve had a bad nights sleep may be contributing to your stress at work. In the long run it can contribute to feelings of depression and anxiety and make stress harder to deal with and we start all over again .

What 3 things can we do so alcohol has less of an impact on us?

Avoid having a drink as soon as you come in the door or when you get to Wine O’Clock if you work from home. Try just having one, say with dinner. Drinking with food slows down the rate that alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream. You’re also likely to drink more slowly if you’re eating a meal at the same time. If you stop when you've finished eating it also allows your body more time to process the alcohol before you go to bed (it takes about an hour to process one unit of alcohol, although this varies for person to person) which should help you to get a better night’s sleep.

If you catch yourself thinking about the bottle of wine you’re going to open when you get home, pause and have a think about whether you really NEED to have that drink or if it’s just a habit you’ve slipped into. Could you choose something equally satisfying but without alcohol in it.  If you like a cold drink are there ingredients you could stop to buy on the way home to make something with amazing flavours and pizaz, look on the internet for inspiration. Could you swap a cold drink for a heart warming coffee with your favorite sugar free syrup (mines hazelnut!) or a luxury hot chocolate that you can savour the thought of during the day. Promise yourself you’ll wait until the kids are in bed to sit and enjoy the warmth of the cup, the smell of the steam and really enjoy the flavour of every sip as you sit there in peace. Thinking about it will take your mind off the alcohol through the day and enjoying the moment in the evening will be a fantastic reward and really help with a positive mindset as well as making you smile on the inside as well as the outside.

Get support.  If your thinking about your drinking and are curious about becoming a more mindful drinker have a think about who might want to go it with you, a friend or a family member.  Having a ‘Goal-friend’ can be immensely motivating and it’s someone to swap ideas with and to celebrate with too.  

Watch our interview with Natasha Louise from Breakthrough Burnout on the bog page, it may help with getting your feelings in check before it becomes a bit too much!

For more ideas or if you have anything you can share head over to our Facebook group The MIndful Sips Community. We share lots of hints and tips about mindful drinking as well as some other gems from our 5 pillars, Myth Busting, Momentum, Mindfulness, MIndset and the Magic that happens when you drink mindfully or take a break from the booze.

Through December we've got an Alcohol Free Advent on Instagram where we are sharing a new drink each day to inspire you to be mindful.

Feeling adventurous? Take our Mindful Drinking Festive Booze Frazzle course to see what benefits mindful drinking over the festive season can have for you.

Thanks for being part of Mindful Sips x