Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed she turned to alcohol during the LA wildfires, saying her menopause symptoms were made worse by “drinking every night”.
The Oscar-winning actress had a frank conversation about menopause on the March 4 episode of the Goop podcast with guest Dr. Mary Clare Haver, an obstetrician-gynecologist and author of the New York Times bestseller The New Menopause.
“I’m really in the thick of it right now, so I’m all over the place,” Paltrow said of her symptoms. “But I noticed my symptoms are, like, pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in LA. I’ve, like, used alcohol for its purpose.”
Paltrow previously said she was in “deep grief” about the wildfires, which broke out in Southern California in January this year. While she shared that she and her husband, Brad Falchuk, were not directly affected by the fires, “so many of our close friends have lost everything”. It was during this time, Paltrow says, “I think I drank every night”.
“I was medicating. Normally, now at this point, I don’t drink a lot at all. Maybe I’ll have one drink a week,” she said, adding that drinking every night drastically impacted her menopausal symptoms. “My symptoms were completely out of control. It was the first time I really noticed, like, causation in that way.”
Haver said in response: “Lots of my patients say the same thing. They’ve really just spontaneously realised that they’ve cut back on alcohol or just quit altogether because it just hasn’t been worth it. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer.”
Paltrow also shared that she’s been struggling with insomnia, explaining, “I’ve always been a real sleeper” but after menopause, “I went through a particularly bad time with it.”
“There were nights where my anxiety — like, I just thought it meant, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna be able to sleep because you don’t have enough progesterone or whatever’,” The Avengers: Endgame actress explained.
“I would just wake up [and] I would get crushed with anxiety, which I’ve never had in my life. And I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every person’s feelings I ever hurt, like, every bad, you know, And I would be up, like, for six hours. It was crazy.”
“I feel like hopefully I’m coming out the other side,” she added.
Back in December Paltrow shared skepticism over her Spotify Wrapped playlist, insisting that her data “was not accurate”.