This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and I'm answering Readers questions and today I have a question from Erin.

Erin says, hey Annie, I'm 10 days without a drop. Thank you very much.

But now I'm having a craving and I just started my cycle and I'm having PMS.

So is there any link in your research to alcohol craving my wine and having just started my cycle?

So this is a really interesting thing because I think there's a lot of things going on here and some of them are physiological and some of them are certainly just mental.

So first of all, we drink to numb and we drink to numb pain, right?

So when you are doing that and you know it's going to be kind of an emotional or a painful time of the month, you would be more apt to drink.

So there's a good chance that you have in the past just drink more on this time of month anyways so the cravings could could have increased.

And there's actually some research that goes beyond that. So there's a theory that's been out there for a long time and it basically says that women around this time of the month can get tipsier, easier to get drunk faster than at other 10s of the month and interestingly.

There's been numerous studies on this and that has never been proven to be true.

So so that's not necessarily true. So the theory that maybe it affected you faster or that you got tipsier faster.

Well, a lot of people say that that's true. I think that I thought I believed that was true as well when I was drinking.

That's not actually been proven, but it is interesting because you could have a mental idea that okay, it's more alcohol has more of an effect.

And so you've developed this craving around that time of the month. But like I said, researchers have not been able to prove that link.

However, there are two things that are very interesting. There was a 2012 study done by the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

And what this study found is that we're actually much more likely to drink and have your amounts during the PMS week than in other weeks.

And I think this is again because we turned to alcohol to less in pain. They didn't conclude why this is.

But it is definitely more of a time for heavy drinking for women than other weeks of the year. And I think it's again my theory would be because we turned to alcohol.

And I remember thinking and it was one of my many excuses that if I was having cramps, oh great alcohol is a muscle relaxant, which I don't even know if that's true.

I actually haven't found that in my research, but during my drinking days, this was true in my mind.

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