News and views: How hypnotherapy can help to cut down your drinking
Many of them have fibbed to their families about where they are. One neat young mum, who would look more at home at an NCT coffee morning, admits that she can't remember when she last managed a day without a drink. An older woman, with big curls and an emerald kaftan, says she feels deprived if she can't look forward to several glasses of wine in the evenings. Her neighbour, elegant and fortyish, says she got so worried when she found she was drinking more than a bottle of wine a day that she went to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it wasn't for her.
These women could hardly be described as binge drinkers or ladettes. Yet, along with other middle-class wine-lovers, they are the latest focus of government concern about alcohol. This month the Department of Health fired the latest salvo in its Know Your Limits campaign, after comments by the Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo in March: “Professional women who drink too much, but do so without causing harm to others, have for a long time gone under the radar. People need to be reminded of the health consequences. It is not only the issues around breast cancer but also, increasingly, liver disease and ruptured bladders.”
Because they drink at home (or in bars with oversized glasses) it's easy to knock back far more than the recommended limits without even noticing it. The consequence has been an alarming rise in women's alcohol consumption and related health problems: the number of women aged 35 to 54 dying as a result of alcohol-related damage has more than doubled over the past 15 years.
When “me-time” means opening the wine
About 80 per cent of Foster's clients are women in their thirties and older, mainly high-flying professionals who have little time to relax and working mums for whom “me-time” means uncorking the pinot grigio as soon as the kids are in bed. Foster says the body quickly gets used to that extra glass, and before they know it people may be downing a bottle or more a night. “I mainly deal with people who are not ruining their lives with alcohol but recognise that they drink more than they should, and they have got into a bit of a rut. Many people have got themselves into an automatic pattern of drinking, which is pure habit. They start drinking because of social shyness, or to de-stress and turn off from the difficulties they face daily, and that slowly creeps up because the more they do it the more the mind thinks it's normal.”
Foster helps people to unlearn these habits and establish healthier ones.