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We've all woken up the morning after, the night before, feeling a little bit worse for wear. You had a few too many shandies, things got a little bit more lively than you had planned. But sometimes that morning wake up is accompanied by an uneasy feeling that you just can't shake. It stays with you and it grows into uncertainty, self-doubt, and a genuine concern for your reputation. That, my friend, is anxiety, and that is what we are talking about today. Because whether you are drinking mindfully, moderating, or looking to go completely alcohol-free, the stress, discomfort, and emotional toll of anxiety is very real for all of us. But there are a few things that you can do to help both before and when it hits. 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.

What Hangxiety Actually Feels Like

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So, what does anxiety actually look like? Well, like I said in the introduction, it is about waking up with that sort of unexplainable sense of unease and discomfort about the events of the night before. This isn't just the usual sore head and queasy stomach. It's something less tangible, but that somehow feels more real than those things. And it grows. The more awake and the more alert you become, the more you feel certain that something somewhere might have gone horribly wrong last night. And then there's the memory gaps that make it worse. So when we overdrink, it can lead to uh the underprocessing of new memories, is why you can't always remember the events of last night. And then in steps anxiety, ever so kindly offering to fill in the gaps for you. But because you are feeling uh currently anxious uh and already uneasy, that's what it fills the gaps in with. And so you're left thinking, well, I must have said something stupid, or oh my god, I did that dance on the bar again, or shit, I told that story about that time in that place with those people, and my boss was standing right behind me. True story, folks, I have done that. Um but these memories, these memories, they might be true, or they might not, or they might be embellished, because your anxiety has a way of exaggerating them and then only highlighting to you the very worst possibilities, right? Because you never wake up, do you, thinking that you dance like Magic Mike. Um, and then there's the replay and the repeat of it all. So as the bits that you can remember get twisted and distorted into something else completely different, you then find yourself replaying conversations over and over in your head, wondering what Tommy meant when he said that that thing, and wondering why the other person looked at you that way when you said the other thing. And again, these conversational slights could be real or they could be imagined, they could be exacerbated. But that's the trick of anxiety. Your brain finds it hard to tell the difference, and so the stress that you feel either way is completely real. And if you are naturally a uh shyer or more socially anxious person at times, there is some research that suggests that you might feel anxiety even more intensely.

The Simple Biology Behind Why Hangxiety Happens

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So, why does it happen? There is a lot of uh nerdy neuroscience that I could go into about uh GABA receptors and glutamine imbalance, uh, but it's all very dull. And uh it won't actually help you if you're all listening to this on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning, wondering how you'll face the next eight hours in the office or with your family. Um so the simplest of terms, in the simplest of terms, anxiety is the result of alcohol messing with your natural balance of your brain and your nervous system. So when you drink, alcohol slows down brain activity, which is why you've gotten into that habit of using it to help you feel more relaxed or or or to de-stress or feel less bothered by things that would normally annoy you. But your brain likes balance, okay? So while you're drinking, it starts making adjustments to compensate for the alcohol. When that booze wears off, those adjustments take a bit longer to realign themselves. And so your brain temporarily becomes more alert, more excitable, more on edge, and that's what leaves you feeling anxious and restless. Alcohol also messes with your sleep. I've told you this many times before. You know it's a hill I'm going to die on because sleep is so important. But even if you think you've passed out for eight hours, you don't actually get the restful sleep that your body and your mind need. And as I'm sure you've realized by this time in your life, a poor night's sleep impacts so much of your mental ability and capacity the next day, including things like emotional regulation, stress management, and decision making. So all things that help to add to that anxiety feeling that you might have sometimes. And speaking of stress, I spoke to you in episode 176. Okay, that was the hidden biology behind brutal hangovers in midlife. Uh, that one is a little bit nerdier. So if you are interested in the science behind these things, then definitely go and give that one a listen. I will link it in the show notes, of course. But in that episode, I talked about how cortisol, which is the stress hormone, can spike and stay elevated after a night on the tiles, and how in our midlife, in our 40s and 50s and beyond, it can be harder or take longer to bring those levels back down. Then add to that the already existing stress load of actually being in midlife and caring for aging parents and kids that still need you, and proper grown-up responsibilities at work,

Why It Can Happen Anytime

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and perimenopause, and aching knees and a sore back and general midlife health. Add all of those things together, and you've got this perfect recipe for increased stress, decreased peace. And if you were using your evening drinking session to help you de-stress, which I obviously don't recommend, but if that's what you were doing, it only leaves you worse off than you were before when you add all of those things together. And that is where anxiety thrives. So does anxiety only happen after a big night then? No, that would be too easy. Um, you don't actually have to have gone

7 Tips: Manage Hangxiety Before It Happens & In The Moment

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hell for leather for anxiety to take effect. Your beautiful mind is a delicate balance of mystery and wonder, and sometimes just a couple of drinks can spark an anxious morning uh the morning after. Uh, and at other times when you've had a slightly bigger night, you might feel nothing more than a headache and and dry eyes. It's not something that you can predict, but here comes the practical part of the episode because it is something that you can prepare for. I've got seven quick fire tips because nobody needs long, protracted explanations when they're feeling this way, that you can use before and during a bout of anxiety to help you manage how you feel. So save this episode to your playlist so you know where it is when you need to come back to it. The first thing is to teach yourself now to recognize that extreme feelings in the morning after a night out are likely to be fueled by the chemical imbalance that we've spoken about, glutamine and GABA and all of that science y nerdy stuff, rather than being fueled by you being a terrible human being. Okay? Just because you have this feeling of unease, it doesn't mean that you did something terrible that you need to feel bad about. It likely means that you just need to give your body time to return to a more balanced state. Number two, know therefore that this is temporary and that if you can ride it out for a few hours, maybe a day, okay, it might take a whole day, but if you can ride it out without spiraling, without overreacting, you will likely feel better by the evening or at the very least by the next day. Of course, these things can be really uncomfortable during the time it's happening, just like a craving that I've spoken about in previous episodes. In the moment, it feels like it's never going to end. But it will. This is not your new state of permanent normalcy. Number three, to help you do that, please don't succumb to the urge to scroll through all of last night's WhatsApp messages and start replaying conversations over and over again in your head. Tell yourself and remind yourself that what you read into something now, how you feel about it now, what those messages look like now, will not be the same way that you will see it tomorrow. So just wait 24 hours. If you do feel, however, this is number four, because if you do feel that you need immediate reassurance, then reach out to a trusted friend rather than stewing in your own self-doubt. So maybe if there was somebody out with you who um whose opinion you trust, who perhaps has a clearer memory of the night, who has always had the ability to help calm you down when you're feeling on edge. Reach out to that person. Try to avoid reaching out to your most extravagant uh drama queen friends, you know who they are, we've all got them, um, who thrive on the drama of things that weren't really that dramatic. You know, this is a time to be a little bit more discerning about who you lean on. In that same vein, then, number five, see, there's a through line here, guys. Uh, number five is to stay away from social media, please. Um, mostly in general, but particularly the morning after and night before. The pictures that you see are not going to help you feel better about things. Plus, they'll be surrounded by posts and memes and pictures from people living their best sober lives and telling you how wonderful they are and how wrong we are for you know trying to moderate. Just stay away. It's not going to help you in the moment. Save that crap till tomorrow. Number six, I want you then to do all of your usual hangover recovery stuff. Eat well. Go and pick some healthy stuff. Find something that grew from the ground or off a tree that hasn't been completely processed. I know a hangover, we always want the processed stuff. My go-to used to be um salt and chili spare ribs from the Chinese. I don't know why, but it seemed to work wonders. Um, but you've got to get some vegetables in there. Hydrate well. You know how important I think it is for you to stay hydrated. Water is your friend. And sleep when you can. You know, if you are, for example, working from home, I can highly recommend you putting a uh air quotes meeting in your calendar for the afternoon and going to take a two-hour nap. Uh, you might feel a bit guilty, but you'll feel much better afterwards and then would be able to actually do your work. Um, please don't do that if you're in the office. I don't want you getting in trouble. And then number seven is to not, this is a do not try to satiate your feelings of anxiety with the hair of the dog. I promise you, it doesn't work. And even if you think it might work, all you're simply doing is pushing the problem further down the road for future you to deal with. And that's just mean. So, how does all of this play into the life of mindful drinkers and moderators? Because, as always,

Does Moderation Improve Hangxiety?

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this show is about helping you find ways to bring balance to the way you want to allow alcohol to show up in your life. And I'm not going to tell you that the only way to avoid anxiety is never to drink again. That's just not my bag. But there is no special dispensation just because we're choosing to be more mindful about our drinking, anxiety can still hit us at any time. So when you are working on your moderation, anxiety um or or dealing with anxiety rather requires more awareness of how alcohol is affecting you the day after. So, yes, you can choose to experiment with different moderation techniques and different drink types. Obviously, the moderation hub on the website, which you can find at lonodrinker.com forward slash moderation dash hub. I'll put it in the show notes for you. Uh, has a lot of different techniques that you can use to experiment with on a night out or a night in. But as well as thinking about the actual techniques that you're using to manage the way that you drink, I also want you to consider how those different drinking techniques and different types of alcohol and different social situations affect you emotionally the next day rather than just physically. So you could, for example, use one of the trackers from the beginner's guide to note how well zebra striping or pacing worked for you in the moment, but you can also in there note a score out of 10 for what it did for your anxiety the morning after. You can make a personal note of whether you feel it more or less when you, for example, eat before you drink, when you have spirits instead of wine, or if there's a particular cutoff point that tends to produce a stronger reaction for you the next morning. I was speaking to a friend of mine at uh at uh another friend's 40th birthday recently, and he was saying how he started to realize that he became a different person once he'd had more than four drinks. So he made a personal cutoff that he would have three drinks on an occasion, and then that was it, because during the night and the next morning, it affected him differently. It didn't matter what those drinks were, that just happened to be his cutoff point. So maybe there's a cutoff point that works similarly for you. Maybe it's about the people that you are around that tend to set you off more than others. We all know that there can be certain friends, certain individuals who you love dearly, but it gets to a point where you just rub against each other and things tend to get a little bit carried away, and that leads to a psychological and emotional reaction that you might carry through to the next morning. It might be something like the environment, you know, when you're in a live, uh loud dive bar, for example, versus a chilled restaurant. There are a lot of variables here. So the best thing that you can do is find a way to keep track of them rather than just keep guessing at what might be exacerbating it or making it worse for you. Just like learning to moderate is a matter of trial and error and progress over perfection.

Why You Need to Be Kind To Yourself

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I always want you to remember that. Adding your awareness, increasing your awareness of anxiety when and how much it affects you is all part of that learning curve as well. And remember, okay, feeling anxiety after a day out, a night out, or a night in is not an automatic sign that things have gone wrong. It does not mean that you are a horrible person who did a terrible thing. It likely just means that your mind and your body are still processing the events and the contents of last night, and that a little bit of self-patience and a little bit of self-grace will help it to pass without you needing to move cities or go on a statewide apology tour. That's it from me for this week. I will see you next Wednesday when we will be starting to have a look at our run up to the festive season. Yes, it is coming. There is nothing you can do about it except be prepared, and that is what we are going to do. Until then, cheers to a life less intoxicated.