HEALTHGwyneth Paltrow's Menopause Symptoms Got 'Out of Control' From Drinking 'Every Night' During L.A. Wildfires: 'It Was Crazy'
Gwyneth Paltrow's menopause symptoms worsened due to nightly drinking during the L.A. wildfires.
Gwyneth Paltrow opened up about an unexpected way she coped amid the Los Angeles wildfires — and how it backfired on her body.
On the March 4 episode of her "Goop" podcast, the actress revealed that she turned to alcohol as a way to deal with the stress of the fires. But instead of helping, it made her menopause symptoms worse.
Gwyneth Paltrow talked about her menopause struggles.
"I'm really in the thick of it right now, so I'm all over the place," Paltrow, 51, told guest Dr. Mary Clare Haver, a board-certified OB-GYN and author of The New Menopause. "But I noticed my symptoms are pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in L.A., I, like, used alcohol for its purpose."
She continued, "I think I drank every night. I was medicating. Normally, now at this point, I don't drink a lot at all. Maybe I'll have one drink a week. My symptoms were completely out of control. It was the first time I really noticed causation in that way."
The actress said drinking made her menopause symptoms worse.
Although Paltrow and her husband Brad Falchuk's home was spared during the Palisades wildfire, she was still overwhelmed with “deep grief.”
"So many of our close friends have lost everything," she shared.
Haver acknowledged her experience, explaining, "In perimenopause, we call it the zone of hormonal chaos. It's all over the place. It is completely unpredictable, and our brains hate chaos."
Paltrow agreed, stating, "I feel like I've been in it for years."
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The Iron Man actress also detailed another major struggle — sleep deprivation.
“I've always been a real sleeper [but after menopause], I went through a particularly bad time with it,” she detailed. “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.’”
“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,” she added. “I feel like hopefully I'm coming out the other side.”
The L.A. wildfires left Gwyneth Paltrow feeling stressed and anxious.
Paltrow has long been focused on maintaining her health. In 2023, she talked about adjusting her diet after struggling with "high levels of inflammation" due to “long COVID.”
"So I’ve been working with Dr. [Will] Cole to really focus on foods that aren’t inflammatory — lots of cooked vegetables, all kinds of protein, and healthy carbs to really lower inflammation. And it’s been working really well. This is based on my medical results and extensive testing that I’ve done over time," she shared.
Gwyneth Paltrow said she sticks to a healthy diet to reduce inflammation due to COVID-19.
She also defended herself against critics who called her diet "restrictive,” adding, "By the way, I eat far more than bone broth and vegetables. I eat full meals. And I also have a lot of days of eating whatever I want and eating French fries and whatever. But my baseline really has been to try to be healthy and to eat foods that will really calm the system down.”
