Paula McInally stood at her kitchen sink one morning and poured every bottle of alcohol she owned down the drain. It was not a sudden conversion to teetotalism, nor a grand declaration of lifelong abstinence. It was, she says, a decision to stop using drink as a way to go numb. “If I was going to feel awful,” she told herself, “I was at least going to feel it clearly.”
The 37-year-old from Wolverhampton had spent the previous few weeks signed off work with burnout and depression. Like the writer Gemma Correll, whose piece “Welcome to Anxietyland” described alcohol as a “bandage” for anxiety, McInally had found drink extraordinarily effective at taking the edge off – until it stopped working. She had not given up alcohol entirely, but she had stopped drinking alone. She had stopped using it to achieve numbness. That morning’s act of pouring everything away was a physical marker of a psychological line she had drawn.
What she began to confront, once the bottles were gone, was the cost of that earlier reliance. The cost included nights when the alcohol’s temporary relief wore off and the feelings became too big to contain. McInally says she hurt herself on those nights. It took her a long time to connect the two: the drinking made the dark nights darker, and the dark nights made her reach for more. This cycle is well documented in clinical research. Alcohol initially slows the central nervous system and reduces inhibitions, providing a short-term sense of calm. But long-term or heavy drinking depletes the brain’s neurotransmitters – the chemical messengers that regulate mood – and can worsen symptoms of depression and anxiety. Research by the charity Alcohol Change UK found that people drinking more than 14 units a week reported higher levels of depression and anxiety than non‑drinkers; for those classified as harmful drinkers – 35 or more units weekly for women, 50 or more for men – the rates were significantly higher still.
The link between burnout and alcohol is also striking. McInally’s own burnout, diagnosed as part of her depression, is part of a wider picture. A 2025 report found that 65% of UK workers feel burnt out, an 11% increase from two years earlier, and another survey reported that 91% of UK adults had experienced high or extreme stress in the past year. The overlap between mental health conditions and alcohol problems is substantial: people with common conditions such as depression and anxiety are roughly twice as likely to drink in harmful ways, a pattern of self‑medication that often deepens the original distress.
Yet for McInally, the real revelation came after she stopped drinking alone. The feelings that had been numbed for years did not arrive gently. “They arrive all at once, at night, when you’re alone and there’s nothing left to hide behind,” she says. “They are loud and frightening and completely real.” This is the difficulty of “feeling clearly” that she chose. It is not a simple process. The neurochemical disruption caused by alcohol means that when the substance is removed, the brain’s ability to process emotion is often overwhelmed – the very thing drink had been used to suppress floods back. McInally describes that flood as a sudden, disorienting encounter with everything she had been running from. The data on self‑harm in the UK underlines what can happen when that flood meets a lack of support. Nationally, 10.3% of adults aged 16 to 74 report having self‑harmed non‑suicidally in their lifetime, up from 3.8% in 2007. Among young people aged 17 to 24, nearly a third have self‑harmed; for those with a probable mental health condition the figure rises to 69.5%. McInally’s own mention of hurting herself on the worst nights places her squarely within that troubled statistic, and she recognises that the drinking itself fed into the darkness.
But she is also learning that feeling the emotions is the only way through. “Not around. Not with something that promises to make them quieter. Through,” she says. “It is hard. It is also, slowly, freeing.” That freeing quality is not the same as a cure. She echoes Gemma Correll’s observation that giving up alcohol (or, in McInally’s case, changing her relationship with it) did not solve all her problems. Correll, whose book Anxietyland uses the metaphor of an amusement park to depict her lifelong struggles with anxiety and panic attacks, wrote that quitting alcohol helped her break a cycle and make progress – but did not eliminate the underlying conditions. McInally agrees. The change, she says, has not solved everything, but it has done something important: it has made her stop running long enough to look at what she has been running from.
The economic and social context of alcohol harm in the UK is stark. In England alone, alcohol‑related costs to the NHS, criminal justice system, social services and the wider economy total an estimated £27.4 billion annually – more than double the roughly £12.5 billion raised in alcohol tax each year. The NHS bears £4.91 billion for hospital admissions, A&E visits and ambulance call‑outs. The criminal justice system spends £14.58 billion on alcohol‑related crime and disorder. Lost productivity costs the economy £5.06 billion. Social services spend £2.89 billion on the impact on individuals and families. On a personal level, the average UK drinker spends approximately £62,899 on alcohol over a lifetime; spending £20 a day amounts to more than £7,000 a year. McInally’s cost, however, was never only financial.
For those in her area, support is available. Wolverhampton Talking Therapies offers psychological treatments, including cognitive behavioural therapy, for common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, accepting self‑referrals from anyone aged 16 and over registered with a local GP. Crisis helplines such as Samaritans (116 123) and MIND (0300 123 3393) provide immediate support. McInally’s experience is not one of reaching out to formal services – her account is a personal testament, not a referral story – but it speaks to a wider need for spaces where people can stop running and start looking.
She describes her current state not as a cure but as a beginning. The process of pouring the bottles away, of sitting with the loud and frightening feelings that arrive at night, of learning to go through rather than around – it is, she says, a start. And that, for someone who had spent years using alcohol to hide, feels like a victory.