Gwyneth Paltrow came clean about her alcohol intake, sharing she “drank every night” as the wildfires scorched through Los Angeles early this year.
The Oscar winner, 52, addressed her booze consumption during the tragedy while revealing that drinking made her menopause symptoms worse in a frank conversation on her latest Goop podcast episode with Dr. Mary Clare Haver, OB-GYN and author of “The New Menopause.”
“I’m really in the thick of it right now, so I’m all over the place,” Paltrow shared about her menopause stages. “But I noticed my symptoms are, like, pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in L.A. I’ve, like, used alcohol for its purpose.”
Several fires broke out around LA earlier this year, hitting the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods the hardest. Tens of thousands of residents were displaced, and at least 29 people died.
While several stars lost their homes in the Palisades Fire, Paltrow revealed early on that she and her husband, Brad Falchuk, were safe, but “so many of our close friends… have lost everything.”
“I think I drank every night,” the “Avengers: Endgame” actress told Haver.
“I was medicating,” she confirmed, admitting, “Normally, now at this point, I don’t drink a lot at all. Maybe I’ll have one drink a week.”
Paltrow explained that her menopause symptoms spiraled “completely out of control,” which made her pause.
“It was the first time I really noticed, like, causation in that way,” she opened up.
According to Dr. Haver, that’s completely normal.
“Lots of my patients say the same thing. 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. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer,” she told the star.
She also said that her patients usually experience sleep disruption after they consume alcohol, adding, “Their hot flashes are horrible.”
“I’ve always been a real sleeper,” Paltrow shared, but “went through a particularly bad time with it” after going through menopause.
The “Shallow Hal” actress also revealed that her anxiety went through the roof.
“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,’” Paltrow said.
“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.”
But there’s finally relief for the star at the end of the tunnel.
“I feel like hopefully I’m coming out the other side,” Paltrow added.
