Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife: How to Drink Less, On Your Terms
**A Spotify 'Rising Star' show** Practical moderation for the way you want to live.
Why can't I drink like I used to? How do I drink less without quitting completely? Should I go for low, no or light alcohol drinks? Why do alcohol-free drinks cost so much?
If you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond and asking these questions, this is your podcast.
Welcome to the essential show for midlife adults who want to drink less, on their own terms—without the pressure to quit completely, follow rigid rules, or label themselves as sober.
I'm Denise Hamilton-Mace, your mindful drinking mentor, writer and public speaker on all things low, no and light. Each week, I help stressed parents and busy midlife adults navigate their relationship with alcohol through practical approaches grounded in real-world experience and behaviour change strategy, not willpower or wellness culture
What you'll get:
Mindful Moderation Solo Episodes – Deep-dives answering the questions that matter to sophisticated drinkers who want to moderate smartly:
How do I cut back when my partner still drinks at home?
What really works: willpower vs. strategy?
Why do premium alcohol-free drinks cost the same as full-strength versions?
How do I navigate social situations when I'm the only one moderating?
This podcast is for you if:
You're looking for practical advice that fits your demanding life, not another wellness overhaul
You recognise that coasting with mid-strength drinks, zebra-striping, or bookending your evening with something non-alcoholic are all valid strategies
You want better mornings without giving up celebrating life's special moments
This isn't about going completely dry or reinventing yourself. It's about keeping energy for what matters most: family, health, career, and living life on your own terms.
Join the moderation revolution happening in midlife – because while Gen Z gets the headlines, you're the one actually doing it.
There’s tons of advice for drinking less when you go.
The pub also comes with its own brakes: you need shoes, a coat and a fair bit of cash. Other people are there, you have to queue at the bar, and someone else decides when it’s time for last orders.
At home there’s none of that. You’re king or queen of your castle, and you can drink if you want to.
So this week on the pod, I’ve put together a simple four-phase approach to adding what I call friendly friction to drinking at home.
These are small, practical changes that slow down the reach for a drink without leaving you feeling deprived.
On top of that, there are five quickfire bonus tips for when you want to go a bit further.
I’ve kept it short and actionable on purpose, because I really want you to go and try these and discover the benefits of adding just a touch of friendly friction to your home drinking.
By the end of this episode:
You’ll be able to answer “why do I drink more at home than when I go out?”
You’ll leave with easy ways to make drinking at home less automatic, without relying on willpower
You’ll know where your weekly food shop fits into all this
You’ll know what to try if you’ve got nowhere to hide the booze
0:00 Home & Away 3:16 Phase 1 - Out of Sight 4:25 Phase 2 - One Step Further 5:44 Phase 3 - Say No to BOGOFs 7:22 Phase 4 - Don't Deprive Yourself 9:36 Quick Tips for Quick Wins 13:07 Get Your Beginner's Guide to Mindful Drinking
We spend a lot of time looking at how to handle social situations outside the house when it comes to drinking differently. But many times, when it comes to the challenges of changing the way, the amount, or the frequency of your drinking, the call is coming from inside the house. You're listening to the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife podcast, where it's my goal to help you take back the power of choice from alcohol. I'm your host and mindful drinking mentor, Denise Hamilton Mace, and this is the start of your journey to a life less intoxicating. In some ways, drinking out of home is easier to manage. It has built in friction, okay? For a start, going to the pub in your dressing gown is widely discouraged. But beyond the need for, say, clothes and shoes and at this time of year a raincoat, it involves other people, first of all, and their encouragement or judgment, either of which you might be trying to avoid. It requires a bigger financial outlay. We all know that it costs a lot more to order the same drink in a bar than it does to have it at home. If you're in a pub and you've got yourself a nice table or area that you're all sitting at, you've then got to get up, you've got to go to the bar, wait to be served, hope they've got what you want. Or if you're at a restaurant, it's that awkward attempt, isn't it, to attract the waiter's attention without seeming rude, never click your fingers. Uh and then and then pretending you know which wine you actually want rather than just asking for the second cheapest one on the list. And then after all that, it's over when they say it's over. At home, however, things are different. You are the king or queen of your castle, and you'll drink what you want when you want it. And with online delivery services, uh, you don't even have to take your 90 off and slip to the corner shop. If you want it, it can be delivered right to your door along with your pasta sauce and your lem sip. Although, interestingly enough, you will need photo ID for both the alcohol and the lemsip. Um, so today I want to expand on some of the friendly friction for at-home drinking because I don't think it's a topic that we give enough attention to. I've touched on it on the podcast before, and I've actually dedicated a whole section to it inside the beginner's guide to mindful drinking and moderation in midlife, which is available now, and I will link to it in the show notes for you, of course.
So, how can you drink less at home when it's just so damn easy? Um, I call this adding friendly friction, as I mentioned, and it happens in four phases. Okay, so phase one is out of sight, out of mind. This is where it starts with keeping your booze out of your main living areas. So for most people, that's the living room and the kitchen. That's where most of us spend most of our time. Obviously, for you it could be different. But if you are sitting on the sofa, trying innocently to watch a movie, and all the while your favourite bottle of whatever is watching you instead, daring you to drink it, it becomes a lot easier to give in to that temptation than if it's not a constant visual reminder. So phase one is simply about taking it off display, remove it from the fridge, get it out of the mini bar in the living room, and put it into phase two. Because
phase two is where we go one step further. So not only are we removing your at-home booze from your line of sight, we're going to remove it from the line of convenience to. So putting it in a cupboard, okay, that is step one, but putting that cupboard somewhere really annoying to get to is so much better. So this is things like moving your home booze to somewhere super inconvenient, like the garage or the attic or the basement. Okay, so not somewhere that's impossible and not somewhere that you're gonna hurt yourself, but somewhere that's going to add enough friction that it's gonna make you think, oh god, can I really be asked to go and get it? I don't want you running a sort of life or death gauntlet here, but somewhere that you know you'll really have to put the effort in. Um, I don't know, if there's a lot of spiders in your basement, I know I'm not gonna fight through spider webs just to go and get a bottle of wine. I'm gonna wait till Hubby gets home and make him do it instead. Because this is the type of um at-home friction that introduces both effort and a time delay to your home drinking, and you will be surprised at how often you tell yourself that actually you just can't be bothered. It's just not worth it.
Okay, phase three is to only buy what you need. So this phase will in fact make the first two phases in time even easier because it's to only buy what you actually want to drink when you actually want to drink it. Forget the bog-off offers and the uh ignore the uh the multi-pack savings, that's how they get you. Um, but if you want a glass of wine with dinner tonight, then that's fine. Buy yourself a single serve bottle and have a glass of wine with your dinner tonight. Say, for example, you've got a uh a friend coming over for a movie night or whatever it is you're doing. That is absolutely lovely, and you're gonna have a few drinks, that's fine. But decide before they get there how much or what you want to be drinking that night. And if your friend happens to bring over a little bit extra, then let them take it away with them when they go. And I know this works because it worked for me in the past with booze, and it continues to prove itself to me every week when I tell myself, no Dee, you do not need to eat an entire box of Guillain Belgian seashells. But the only time that I'm successfully able to not smash an entire box of Guillain Belgian seashells is when I don't have them in the house in the first place. If you make the decision not to buy more at the supermarket, that's one decision that you have to make one time. Once you bring it home, that's a decision that you have to make again and again and again.
And then phase four, and this is really important because this caps everything off, is don't deprive yourself. Okay, because each of these phases become a lot easier if you find something else to indulge in. So remember the three hours of mindful drinking from episode 152, where we reduce and then we replace and then we remove. One of the replacements is to replace your full strength drinks with low, no, or mid-strength ones that can work for you just as well in those moments. Okay, because sometimes when we want a drink, we do just want alcohol. But many times when we have that urge for a drink, it's because we're craving a feeling or a moment, a sensation or a memory that we think only alcohol can replicate. But in truth, in those moments, it's the ritual of drinking that's really moving us to want the drink. It's the sound of the cork squeezing out of the bottle, it's the sound of the glug as it fills the glass, it's the smell, it's the taste. So find a beer or a wine or a ready-to-drink cocktail or several that you can enjoy in those moments and treat it in the same way. Okay, keep it chilled, pour it into a nice glass, add a garnish if that's what you usually do, and enjoy it for what it can give you. Another way to achieve the feelings that you wanted, but without the hangover, without the brain fog, and without the overdrinking that you've decided that you don't want in this moment. Okay, so that is your simple four-step, four-phase, four-point sequence, whatever you want to call it, to introduce in some friendly friction at home. And I've kept it purposefully short and actionable because I actually want you to go and do these. I want you to go and try it and see which of these phases actually helps you. It might be all of them, it might be one or two of them.
Um, but I do have a few other quickfire at-home friendly friction tips for you as well. So if you've tried those and you want to try some more, save this episode, come back to it, and you can give these quickfire ones a go too. So, number one, don't keep it cold. Okay, so if perhaps you live in a flat, for example, and you don't have an attic or a basement or a garage to store your drinks out of sight, you can do the next best thing and keep them um hot to trot. Okay, so opposite to phase four, where we were keeping our low, no, and mid easily ready for drinking, storing your wine or your beer at room temperature. So, like I said, if you're in a flat, maybe and it's in a closet in a hallway where you keep your vacuum cleaner or something. But storing it at room temperature means that you have to actively get them out of the cupboard, put them in the fridge, and then wait for them to chill for half an hour. That natural time penalty could work wonders for you as uh an easy bit of friendly friction. Okay, number two is to separate the bottle from the glass. So if you do have yourself a bottle of wine and you want to pour a glass and just have one, pour your drink in the kitchen or wherever you're keeping it, out in the garage or wherever it is, and then put the bottle away before you sit down. Don't bring it with you to the living room so that you can grab hold of it easily. Because when topping up means getting up and you're feeling really lazy, that is exactly the kind of small annoyance that interrupts the sort of autopilot drinking patterns for those of you who've got the uh autopilot drinker type from the quiz. Number three, smaller glasses, smaller pores. So put your one-gallon balloon glass away, give it away, put it away, whatever it is, and replace them with some really cool retro uh diddy glasses that can't hold nearly as much liquid. And use a measure for your wine and a measure for your spirits. Okay, studies show that smaller vessels often lead to smaller servings. Number four, write it down before you pour. Now, this one might not work for everyone, but if you are the type of person who likes to track your drinks and you like to keep a note of what you're having and how it's making you feeling, maybe you're using a tracking app, maybe you're using your journal, whatever it is. Even if you're not, you could give this a try, okay? Logging what you are about to have before you have it, not afterwards, but before you even get up to pour it, adds just a moment of reflection that could work in your favor. But remember, this is not to punish yourself with, okay? I don't want you writing down a list of all the drinks that you have that you you shouldn't have. This is about being more aware and turning a habitual action into a conscious choice. And number five is to reduce the variety of booze that you keep at home. Let your drink stash run down and don't automatically replace your favorites when they're finished. The fewer options that there are at home, the easier it is for you to make a different choice. Because when you're all you're left with is creme de month or uzo, you're most likely to go and have a bottle of alcohol-free beer that you've got chilling in the fridge.
Okay, that's it from me for this week. I hope these tips will help you to add some friendly friction at home. And remember that if you do want a bit more help and guidance on this topic and others, uh, some of the biggest challenges and questions that you have about drinking differently in midlife, the beginner's guide to mindful drinking and moderation is ready for you now. I will link to it in the show notes. Once you go through it, you will walk away with a personalized action plan to help you take back the power of choice from alcohol on your own terms. I will see you next Wednesday, and until then, cheers to a home less intoxicated.
