Episode 174: Alcohol and Work
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time… women are drinking a lot more alcohol than they did a few decades ago…and sometimes the stress of work can help turn a habit into a problem.
“You know it’s very easy for us to creep into imposter syndrome as young professionals: ‘I don't know why they hired me. I'm going to get fired.’ All of those things. And drinking can shut that voice out.”
And you might assume the pandemic had made things worse for anyone struggling with an addiction to alcohol. But that’s not universally true.
“Women take this opportunity of isolation and lockdown, and actually use it to their advantage on their recovery journey. So they are saying things like wow, I’m not drinking because I’m not being put in social situations where I’m feeling pressure to drink.”
Women, alcohol and work…coming up on The Broad Experience.
Britain is a boozy culture, and one of the things I remember from my first ever job is how much socializing was a part of office life. And socializing always meant drinking. My abiding memory of that time is going to the pub at lunchtime on a Friday and spending at least two hours there – drinking lots of wine – then coming back to a sleepy hour or two of work.
Today depending on where you work drinking can still be a big part of the culture. Women now share in what was formerly a man’s world – the workplace – but our bodies don’t deal as well with alcohol. Yet we often feel pressure to join in and keep up.
Lisa Smith was in her twenties and working as a lawyer at one of the big corporate law firms in New York City when her extremely social drinking became something else…
“That is actually when I became a nightly drinker when I was in my first year of practice, living in Manhattan alone for the first time.”
Lisa says she’d always drunk a lot as a young adult. She was a big partyer in college. But looking back, she sees the seeds of her drinking were planted in childhood.
“I grew up in the seventies, my parents had happy hour every night. My dad got home. Like my mom would pull out the JMB scotch and the Triscuits and put it all out. My dad would change his clothes and they would drink to good health. And, you know, for a kid who was really anxious and fearful like myself, like there was a lot of safety in that, that I saw growing up that was, ‘we're all together.’ This is... They would drink to your health each night. But it became my favorite time of the day.”
It wasn’t until much later – after she finally sought treatment for alcoholism – that she was diagnosed with serious depression, and anxiety…but she already had those underlying issues when she began her job at a prestigious firm.
And like so many law associates before and after…she found it grueling.
“I might not get my assignment turned around from the more senior lawyer or hear what was going on, what I needed to get done that day until noon, maybe, sometimes it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and then the day would start. And when the work came in, it had to get done. So there were all-nighters all the time. And a lot of it as a junior lawyer, you know, it is really, it's the grunt work you're not doing, you know, sophisticated, exciting, legal work. You're really learning. I mean, the best way I learned how to be a lawyer was by watching the lawyers around me and sitting in meetings and listening. But the things that I was responsible for were incredibly detailed. And, you know, so the fear of making a mistake on something was incredible and so it's a scary time. It's a stressful time. And it's exhausting.”
On a good night she’d get out of the office at 7p.m. Other nights it was more like 9p.m., 11, or later. So she’d go home, stand in front of her fridge in her underwear and pick a beer or wine or whatever she had in there. She’d have a glass or two in an attempt to wind down…
“… trying to find out a way to, for one, go from 60 to zero and get to sleep at the end of the day, but also, to just shut my brain off, you know, all that stress of the day, all that thinking about all these things and being in this intense place all the time, I just wanted to turn it off. You know, it's very easy for us to sort of creep into imposter syndrome as young professionals. You know, there's a lot of, kind of, I don't want to say fear, but there's a lot of apprehension that, ‘Oh my gosh, am I not doing a good job. I don't know why they hired me. I'm going to get fired.’ All of those things. And drinking can shut that voice out.”
Meanwhile she says the legal profession normalized heavy drinking. Every client victory was celebrated with drinks…many nights after work ended at the bar…and Lisa just saw it as blowing off steam. Which she very much needed to do. But when she was home alone it was different. She was drinking more and more…
“I would say, you know, I really shouldn't be having that third glass. And you know, that's not the cocktail hour that my parents had anymore. That's really drinking. And then it would be a bottle. And I would think, well, that's when I sort of crossed into, you know, I need to drink because it's the only way I can cope with this job - I cope with my life overall. And it did, it creeped from that sort of couple of drinks to three to a bottle to then I'd start waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, did I open a second bottle last night?’ And I usually had, and at a certain point, I just got used to having that feeling. that hung over, kind of, I operated that way. That's that was just, I was never, truly not hung over once I started drinking every night.”
Still, like so many young women in big cities she put pressure on herself to go to gym first thing in the morning. And she says no one at work knew. She operated fine at the office. This was all going on in her twenties into her thirties. And she knew it was getting out of control.
“And so one morning I woke up and thought, okay, I, this has got to end. And I can't, I am not buying a bottle of wine tonight. I am not drinking. And if I go to the wine store tonight, if I buy a bottle of wine, then I'm an alcoholic. Then I have an addiction to alcohol. And I remember that night standing in the wine store, picking out a bottle of wine.
And I used to go to different wine stores in my neighborhood. I lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan because I didn't, you know, God forbid the people who own the liquor store thought I came in there every night. And, I remember that when I picked up that bottle of wine, I remember just thinking, okay, this is it. I guess I am an alcoholic…and that's okay. That's going to be okay because I'm a quote unquote, high functioning alcoholic.”
She says every time she entered a new stage she had a justification for it. Drinking at lunchtime with workmates? Didn’t the French drink wine at lunch? Americans were so uptight about this stuff.
She made peace with what she knew was a bad situation. At around 30 years old she stopped contributing to her work retirement account because she told herself, what’s the point? I won’t live to be 40. I drink too much.
This slide of Lisa’s went on for 12 years…now during that time she switched jobs – she stopped practicing law and went over to the administrative side of the business.
She was married for a while and moved out of state. But when that marriage ended she came back to New York. This was just after 9/11, which was a terrible time for the city. And for Lisa. She was drinking in the morning by this time, and she says she soon added cocaine into the mix to offset the effects of the alcohol and be able to function during the day.
“If you saw me, when I sort of came to, at like seven in the morning, you would look at me and go, that woman is sick. There's something really wrong with her. You know, I'd be throwing up, it was a mess. And then if you saw me two hours later, once I got calibrated with cocaine and alcohol together and got that sort of crazy balance going, then you would think like, Oh, hi, there's Lisa. And I would sit in meetings like that at 8.30 in the morning with a room full of partners.”
AM-T: “Was there one particular incident that spurred you to get help?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was in, I was really, you know, I’d wake up in the morning and wish I hadn't woken up. I would just like roll my eyes and be like, Ugh, not again. But then when morning it was a Monday morning, I had gotten all calibrated and I had to go into work. So I was in, you know, my work stuff. I had my, I had my makeup on, I had my laptop, my New York times heading to the elevator to go to work. And I became like, overcome with this physical sensation. And I thought, Oh my God, I'm having a heart attack. Or, Oh my God, I finally overdosed. I now know that it was a panic attack, but somehow for some reason in that moment where I really thought like, okay, I am going to die now. Like something snapped in me. And I said, wait, wait, I don't want to die right now. I don't want to die right here in the hallway. And I knew the only thing I could do was get help.”
So she turns around, goes back to her apartment and calls her doctor. And tells them she needs to go into detox – and she knew she’d need a medicated detox in a hospital. So she gets that set up. And then after that, it wasn’t her family she called, or her friends…
“The first thing I did was open my laptop and email my office and say, listen, I had a medical emergency over the weekend, please don't worry about me. All is fine, but I am in the hospital. So I'm going to be out of touch, but I'll see you next Monday. And please don't worry. All is fine. Um, because, you know, while I would come clean to anybody in my life, I was not coming clean at work. Uh, I was afraid of the stigma. I was afraid that I had left on the Friday before considered, you know, a reliable, capable, smart member of the team and that if somehow they found out which I assumed they would, what was wrong, I would never be considered the same again. I would be seen as weak, deficient, certainly not reliable, possibly amoral, I just wasn't willing to take that chance.”
AM-T: That’s very telling that work was the first person you contacted…but you didn’t let on…”
“Yeah. And I know now I really was far from alone in that, there was a big study done by Hazelden, Betty Ford and the American Bar Association. And the numbers are super high for lawyers with alcohol use disorder. And when the survey asked, why don't you seek help, um, then there were two answers far and above the rest. One was, I'm afraid of what my colleagues will find out and think less of me. And second was, I know you're telling me that there are these free and confidential resources out there, but I don't believe that, I think my privacy is going to be violated. And then I'm back to number one. So it's all stigma. So when I talk about the fact that stigma kills it's true - stigma is keeping people from getting help and too many times that not, not everybody by far is as fortunate as I have been in, you know, in getting help and getting better.”
Lisa never told that firm what had happened – they never knew she’d been an addict or was in recovery. When she left there after a year or so and went somewhere else she only told that employer just before her memoir came out – ten years into her time there. She says they were wonderful. But that fear of crashing her career – it hovered over her for more than a decade.
Today, Lisa lives in California with her husband. She is the author of the book Girl Walks Out of A Bar. She left her last law firm a few years ago to concentrate full-time on speaking to law schools, law firms about addiction, support, and recovery – and how to create work cultures that don’t rely so much on alcohol.
I’m going to talk to her again about alcohol and workplace culture a bit later in the show.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Lisa went through her hell long before the pandemic hit.
But we know that alcohol sales are significantly up this last year…and we know from a recent study that women – mothers – are drinking more.
Dawn Nickel is…co-founder of the She Recovers Foundation. She started it with her daughter ten years ago. It provides support to women in recovery from a lot of different things – although Dawn says around 80 percent have struggled with substance use.
Dawn is based in Victoria, British Columbia. We spoke by phone.
I asked her first, do women face different issues from men in coming forward and saying…’I have something I need to recover from…’ is it different for women?
“Incredibly so, and there’s one main reason for that, and that is the stigma associated with mental health or substance use disorders, right. If I’m a mother who am I gonna tell that I have a substance use problem but not be afraid someone’s gonna come and take my children…if I have a mental health disorder who am I gonna tell and not be afraid my boss is gonna find out? It is different for men, it just simply is…and with regard to substance use disorder, although it affects more men than women, women have much more negative experiences with substance abuse disorders, for physiological reasons as well as stigma and other reasons, so it disproportionately affects women negatively.”
AM-T: “It’s interesting, I mean it can’t be that great for men either to tell a supervisor that they have a problem and might be going to rehab…I mean do you think it’s worse for women in particular because we have an expectation to quote – behave ourselves?”
“Absolutely, it’s a whole gender role thing right, we’re supposed to be good women, good mothers, good wives. So we’re demonized I think when we have these issues. For men I think – if there’s a husband in a family, or the male partner, off he goes to treatment while the wife or female partner or other partner stays home…in gay couples may be different…but men can go off to treatment if there’s somebody who stays home to take care of the kids.”
She says with women, it is still different. Being the primary caregiver does hamper many women from getting treatment.
“Women seek treatment and support at lower numbers than men do.”
Now my theory about life in the pandemic had been that if you already had a problem with alcohol, it was bound to get worse with all the pressures of the last year…and Dawn says for some women in the She Recovers community, that’s true…
“The pandemic and all of the things that come along with it, whether it’s worries about your job, or your partner’s job, or your parents who you can’t visit because they’re in a care home, or your children who you have to take care of, you don’t know how to home school – for some women, for a portion of women in our community it was a last straw, this was it – some of it returned to drinking, or increased their drinking and they’re off now, they’re off doing their thing. So that’s been hard to watch.”
But for others, she says, this crazy year has had the opposite effect…
“The other side of the spectrum which has been such a beautiful surprise actually for me to witness, has been watching women take this opportunity of isolation and lockdown, slow down, and use it to their advantage on their recovery journey. So they are saying things like, ‘wow – you know, I’m not drinking because I’m not being put into social situations where I’m feeling pressure to drink.’”
They’re not meeting up with friends for dinners out, and Dawn says crucially most of them are not going into work so there’s no after-work socializing pulling them in. These women have been able to use the time at home to the benefit of their health.
Dawn says there’s another thing she’s noticed about her community of women in recovery during these past months.
“I think there’s a high percentage of women who have really taken this opportunity to reflect on whether they’re in the right work or not. We are kind of facing death in the last year, we’re seeing so much of it, we’re learning so much about it…I’m one of them, right, thinking just in case my time is more limited than it might be a year or so ago, am I in the right work right now, am I doing the right thing? So for the women who have the privilege of having the mental and emotional space to explore what this time has meant for them, I do see a lot of re-thinking.”
As I said earlier, my first job was in an office where heavy drinking was a given. My second job wasn’t much different. And when I got to New York and worked in advertising, it was similar – a testosterone-filled workplace where drinking with your colleagues after work was just being a good team player. It was about fitting in.
The only difference was in New York, no one slunk in late and obviously hungover after a night out.
Lisa Smith says in the legal world, drinking and career progression have been aligned for ages.
“I started working in New York in 1991, and total old boys club. It was a bonding thing with the team. You know, I might be sitting at my desk at eight o'clock at night and a partner on a deal would come by and say, ‘Hey, a bunch of us are going to go to the bar. You want to come?’ And I would say, yeah, I want to come, because one, I wanted to drink. And two, you know, I wanted to be part of that scene and part of that culture. And I was one of the few women who was, and I have to say, I do think that the fact that I was one of the women who could go to the bar and talk about sports and all of those kinds of things, I think that was part of why I was well-liked in my job.”
She’s pretty sure she got career opportunities she wouldn’t have if she’d stayed at her desk or gone home, instead of going out.
And she says other women lawyers still face this dilemma…
“We tend to want to please everybody, right? So when the partner knocks on the door at eight o'clock at night and says, do you want to go to the bar…that people pleasing idea of trying to make everybody happy can be a bit of a conflict I think for women, more than men, as I've seen it happen.
I do think that this next generation coming up is a lot more able to find their footing on that. I have seen now for the first time, junior lawyers who have said, when they've been approached to go out to the bar at the end of the night, and they'll say, ‘no thanks, I've got a yoga class’ or ‘no, thanks. I've got plans tonight.’”
Today in her work she talks to law firms about their cultures…and how they should focus less on alcohol as a social glue. She had been doing this for a while and it wasn’t getting much traction, until a few years ago.
“And then the #MeToo movement hit. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to talk about it because the firms had put together the fact that most times you are dealing, you know, with something, with a #MeToo incident gets reported, or there is some inappropriate activity, invariably there's alcohol involved…I spoke to one firm and this is right after #MeToo. And the managing partner said, he's like, ‘you know, we are taking on this drinking issue all the time. And we told everybody, when you go out for drinks, the firm is not paying for shots anymore. No more shots.’ And I was like, well, it's a start, I guess.”
At the last law firm where Lisa worked they had a 100th birthday party…invited all their clients…it was held in a fancy venue in Manhattan…and normally they’d have a lot of alcoholic drinks waiting for guests to pick up on the way into the venue, including a signature cocktail. This time they also included a signature mocktail – a virgin Mohito…that guests could pick up on their way in…
“And there were so many people that did that and I had a client say to me, ‘I'm so glad you did this. This was such a great idea. You know, I felt like I had to come tonight to celebrate, but I have to get on the train and go home and do math with my kid…it's Tuesday night, I wasn't going to drink.’ I would never advocate for removing alcohol from the workplace. But what I do advocate for is understanding that it's not the only thing and that if we are going to not make it so that the person who goes out to the bar the latest gets the best bonding experience and opportunities, we have to be conscious. And I do think the pandemic gives a lot of workplaces a real opportunity to reset and rethink alcohol coming back. Right? What used to always be doesn't have to be the same anymore.”
Maybe it won’t be.
And as Lisa said a little earlier, she sees young women having a really positive effect on the workplace. In her work in support of lawyers in recovery she’s noticed them speaking up, talking to management about things she’d never have dared to in her day…really taking on office culture.
“Women are starting to become more vocal about what that means for not just drinking, not just saying, you know, we really need to deemphasize here. We really should be doing something else, or I don't want to participate in that, but saying what they think all around about what the workplace should be like - we've always just kind of conformed to the male workplace. And I think that we're seeing more and more of women being willing to speak up, to try to help better their workplace. And I think that redounds to the benefit of women, but also to men. There are a lot of men out there who have no interest in going to the bar just as much.”
Lisa Smith is the author of Girl Walks Out of a Bar. Thanks to her and to Dawn Nickel of She Recovers for being my guests on this show.
I will link you to more information about Dawn and Lisa under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
And just one more thing about this topic before we go – Lisa and I discussed something we’ve both noticed a lot here in the US. The way that drinking is clearly marketed directly to women as a lifestyle. There are those glasses you can get saying ‘mommy juice’ or ‘wine o’clock’ – there are yoga and wine sessions…art and wine…Lisa saw crates of wine at the supermarket stacked right next to the back-to-school supplies…
“All these things are very targeted to tell women, look it’s OK, and it’s even feminine, it’s even something that is special to the women, it’s not just you tagglng along with the guys. It’s your own thing.”
If you think this episode could be helpful to someone else please share it with them. This show really has traveled by word of mouth. Thanks to all of you who have told your friends and colleagues about it.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.