Our Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr Chris Davis, spoke to Body+Soul about why the evening glass gets harder to refuse in midlife, and how to tell when a treat has quietly become a crutch.

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Wine o'clock has become a ritual for a lot of women in their forties and fifties, a line drawn under a day of work, children and everything else. Dr Davis explained to Body+Soul why perimenopause makes that ritual so much harder to leave alone. Allopregnanolone, the calming metabolite of progesterone, gradually falls away, and with it the brain's natural brake on stress and anxiety through the GABA system. Alcohol acts on that exact pathway, which is why the first glass feels like such relief. The trouble comes afterwards, in the rebound that wrecks sleep and flattens mood, and in the tolerance that means the same glass slowly stops working.

The more useful part of what he said was not about quantity at all. Most of us measure our drinking in units, glasses or nights off, and Dr Davis offered a different test.

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A wine you enjoy belongs to the moment, and you could take it or leave it. A coping pattern is when the drink has a job to do, switching you off, getting you to sleep, taking the edge off, and going without it would leave you unsettled. That is a question worth sitting with, whatever the number on the bottle says.

You can read the full article on Body+Soul.

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