Alcohol, Health & Consciousness
Alcohol, Health & Consciousness with Dr. Ula Heywood & Claire Robbie
Online - Wednesday, April 29
7:00PM NZT
Sliding Payment: $5 - $25
In this conversation, Dr Ula Heywood, Founder of Autonomy Health - a preventative health clinic helping people understand their bodies, regulate their systems, and take ownership of their wellbeing, and SOMM's Claire Robbie, explore the role alcohol plays in modern life, and why so many of us are beginning to question it.
Blending lived experience, clinical insight, and years of working with people navigating habit change, they speak to alcohol not just as a substance, but as a pattern, one deeply woven into our culture, our coping mechanisms, and our nervous systems.
Together, they unpack what’s actually happening in the brain and body when we drink, how alcohol impacts mood, anxiety, sleep, and long-term health, and why something that feels like relief in the moment can quietly destabilise us over time. The conversation also moves beyond physiology into something deeper, how alcohol affects awareness, presence, and our relationship with discomfort. What happens when we remove it? What becomes possible when we’re no longer relying on it?
This is not about judgment or restriction, but about understanding and, most importantly, creating the space for more conscious, informed choices.
About Dr Ula Heywood:
Dr Ula Heywood is a medical doctor with a special interest in preventative health, metabolic wellbeing, and the intersection between lifestyle, mental health, and long-term disease risk. In 2018, she co-founded and served as Clinical Director of New Zealand's first precision medicine clinic focused on reversing Type 2 diabetes and addressing the causes of heart disease, reducing clients' heart and phenotypic ages. She established Autonomy Health as a preventative health clinic focused on helping people understand and take ownership of their health. Her work focuses on helping people understand the deeper drivers of their health, from nervous system regulation and hormonal balance to behaviour patterns and daily habits. With a holistic and evidence-informed approach. Dr Heywood supports individuals to move beyond symptom management and toward sustainable, long-term change. She is particularly interested in how modern lifestyle factors, including alcohol, stress, sleep, and nutrition, shape both physical and mental health outcomes.
About Claire Robbie
Claire Robbie is a meditation and yoga teacher and the founder of The School of Modern Meditation (SOMM). Over the past 15 years, Claire has been studying and practising meditation as a way to support her own sobriety. Along the way, she has trained with Dr Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, and works at the intersection of meditation, nervous system regulation, and behaviour change.
Claire is fascinated with the deeper patterns that sit beneath habit and addiction, both through lived experience and clinically-informed training. She is the creator of The Alcohol Reset Pathway, a structured programme that supports people to shift their relationship with alcohol through awareness, meditation, and practical, evidence-informed tools; and Sans, a one-month self-led guide to support a month off booze.
Alcohol, Awareness, and What Opens Up When We Stop
When it comes to alcohol, something has shifted. In the almost 10 years since I gave up drinking, I’m no longer the anomaly. It’s now pretty mainstream to consciously choose to be 100% alcohol-free. People aren’t necessarily hitting rock bottom or making dramatic declarations, they’re just noticing their sleep isn’t great, the anxiety the next day feels disproportionate, the mental load is heavier, and underneath all of that, there’s often a quieter question - is this actually helping me live the way I want to live? Throw in the fact that the demo I land in (a 46-year-old woman), and it's glaringly obvious to my peers and me that alcohol and peri-menopause are not friends.
Hydration is the new black.
I’m really excited about the online talk Dr Ula Heywood and I are having on April 29: Alcohol, Health & Consciousness. We’re going to cover some topics that will make those of you choosing to drink differently really excited/relieved. And those of you questioning things, but maybe who need some subtler evidence, we’re going to go into some surprising things about alcohol, and its energetics. Ula approaches this topic from her clinical perspective in a very human way. Her work is about helping people understand their bodies properly - not in a superficial, symptom-management way, but in a deeper, systems-based way. Learning about the inextricable link between mind and body has been so powerful for me. She’s interested in how your nervous system functions, what your hormones do, and how your daily habits shape your long-term health. When you start to look at alcohol through that lens, it becomes less of a harmless social norm and more of something that has very real physiological consequences. She’s written about it here: Alcohol - The Hidden Power of Subtraction.
When I first realised that I drank problematically, I hadn’t even cognised that what I was doing was a kind of self-prescribed regulator. It was the way I softened the edges. I relied heavily on it to manage emotions and shift uncomfortable internal states. I also hadn’t contemplated that what I consumed affected my mental and emotional well-being, either.
What Dr Heywood articulates so clearly is that alcohol isn’t actually regulating the system; it’s overriding it. Whilst it may create the feeling of relief, it’s actually quietly disrupting the very systems that would allow us to feel steady and well in the first place. Sleep becomes lighter and more fragmented, even if you fall asleep quickly. Cortisol rhythms shift, blood sugar becomes more volatile, and then mood follows suit. So while it works in the short term, it often creates a baseline that is a little more anxious, a little more depleted, a little less resilient.
That was certainly my experience, although I didn’t have that language for it at the time. There was just a growing sense that the way I was living and the way I wanted to feel weren’t quite lining up. I could feel the interference, even if I couldn’t fully explain it. The worst part was that I kept trying to quit or at least have breaks from drinking, but the habit was so entrenched that I couldn’t stop through willpower alone. It makes perfect sense that alcohol is so embedded in our culture. We are, for the most part, running slightly too activated, slightly too switched on, and alcohol gives us a reliable way to change that state. Part of how I was able to let go of booze from my life was through finding other ways to down-regulate, find excitement and joy and of course, connection.
That’s where meditation came in and changed everything for me. And nowadays the work I do and the way I want to live relies on being able to feel what is actually happening and to be present to my own internal experience - even (especially) when it’s uncomfortable, as this is where the magic happens. To notice patterns, to sit with discomfort, to respond rather than react - and alcohol, by its very nature, interrupts that. When you remove it, you don’t just remove the thing itself; you remove a buffer, a distraction, a shortcut. You come into much more direct contact with your life, and so you MUST have something you can implement in its place to support you in integrating and processing things/moods/feelings that you have been avoiding.
That can be confronting at first, and there’s no real way around that: the only way out is through. You will feel things more clearly and notice the patterns you might have been skimming over. You become aware of where you’re tired, or disconnected, or not quite living in alignment with what you actually want. Alongside that, there’s more stability, your sleep deepens in a way that is hard to describe until you’ve experienced it, and energy becomes more consistent. Many things become more consistent. Perhaps most importantly, your relationship with yourself begins to change. You start to trust your own experience more, because you’re actually in it.
This is something I see again and again in the people I work with. When alcohol is no longer part of the picture, it creates space. And the real question becomes what you do with that space because it doesn’t just fill itself, it will ask you to engage with your life more directly and more honestly.
That’s where inner-work practices like meditation become so important. Not as another thing to “do,” but as a way of learning how to be with what is already there and to regulate the system from within rather than relying on something external to change your state. Step by step, day by day, we build a kind of steadiness that isn’t dependent on circumstances.
What I appreciate about Ula’s work is that it meets this from the other side as well. She’s looking at the same patterns, but through the lens of physiology and long-term health. How these small, everyday choices compound over time and how something that feels relatively insignificant can have a meaningful impact on your metabolic health, your mental health, your overall trajectory, and when you bring those two perspectives together - the lived experience and the clinical understanding - it becomes much easier to step out of the old narratives around alcohol.
Our conversation on April 29 isn’t about telling anyone what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s about understanding and about being able to see more clearly what alcohol is actually doing in your body, your mind, your life, and then making a choice from a place of self-value and presence.
Claire xx