Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about her experience with menopause. During a conversation with Dr. Mary Claire Haver — author of The New Menopause — on the Goop podcast this week, Paltrow, 52, said she recently noticed that drinking alcohol made her menopause symptoms worse.
Paltrow said she’d felt that her symptoms were “pretty well under control,” until January, when she started drinking more amid the L.A. wildfires. “I was medicating,” she joked. Explaining that she typically doesn’t drink much — ”maybe I’ll have one drink a week” — she said that for two weeks, she was drinking every night. “And my symptoms were completely out of control,” she said. “It was the first time I really noticed causation in that way.”
Research has yet to prove a link between alcohol and hot flashes, though, as Haver notes, many aspects of menopause remain understudied. Haver added that many of her patients have made similar observations about their own alcohol use. “They’ve really just spontaneously realized that they’ve cut back on alcohol or just quit altogether, because it just hasn’t been worth it,” she said. “They don’t bounce back the same way,” she added. “They’re seeing so much sleep disruption, and their hot flashes are horrible.”
Paltrow, who said in 2023 that she was “really in the thick of perimenopause,” also discussed her experience with insomnia. “I would get crushed with anxiety, which I’ve never had in my life,” she said. “I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every person’s feelings I’ve ever hurt, and I would be up for like, six hours. It was crazy.”
Haver said that, in her experience, women who have “more unhealthy habits” — which she described as drinking alcohol, eating more processed foods, and not exercising regularly — have worse menopause symptoms. However, she noted that “when those hormones start fluctuating … even the healthiest person could be absolutely debilitated.” Alluding to receiving hormone therapy for her symptoms, Paltrow expressed disbelief at “how my mother went through menopause without hormone replacement.”
