The Seeds We Plant Young

PART ONE: How Early Drinking Shapes Women's Health Journey

I remember the first time a woman in one of my Mana Yoga Medicine circles shared her story. She was 48, navigating a particularly difficult perimenopause, and through tears she said, "I never thought those party years in my teens would still be affecting me now."

She's not alone. And she's not wrong.

As someone who works intimately with perimenopausal women - many of whom are adult children of alcoholics (like me) or examining their own relationship with alcohol – I've witnessed a pattern that medical research is only beginning to fully document. The choices we make in our youth, particularly around alcohol, don't just fade away. They plant seeds that can grow into challenges decades later.

The Long Game of Women's Health

Here's what we know: the teenage years are a critical window for hormonal development. A young woman's endocrine system – the intricate network of glands and hormones that will govern everything from her menstrual cycle to her fertility to her eventual menopausal transition - is still establishing its rhythms and patterns.

When we introduce alcohol (not to mention, medications like the Contraceptive Pill and vaccines) during this delicate developmental phase, we're essentially throwing sand into finely tuned gears.

Research shows that girls who begin drinking before age 15 face significantly increased risks for hormonal disruption throughout their lives. Binge drinking during adolescence – defined as four or more drinks in a single occasion for women - can alter the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis. This is the communication highway between the brain and the ovaries, the very system that orchestrates a woman's hormonal symphony.

But here's what the medical journals don't always convey: these aren't immediate, obvious effects. And this is the challenge. A 16-year-old who drinks heavily on weekends doesn't wake up the next week with clear symptoms. The body is remarkably resilient at that age. It compensates. It adapts over time.

The consequences accumulate quietly, like sediment at the bottom of a river.

The 20-30 Year Timeline

In my work with women, I've observed what the research confirms: there's often a 20–30-year lag between early alcohol exposure and the full manifestation of hormonal dysfunction.

This isn't coincidence – it's the nature of how our endocrine system ages.

Think of it this way: if you begin drinking heavily at 15, by 35 you might notice irregular periods, difficulty conceiving, or unusual PMS. By 45, you might enter perimenopause earlier than expected or experience it more severely - hot flashes that feel unmanageable, mood swings that seem to come from nowhere, cycles that become chaotic.

The liver, our body's primary detoxification organ, also bears the burden. Every time we drink, our liver must process the alcohol, which diverts it from its other crucial job of metabolizing hormones, particularly estrogen. Years of this can lead to estrogen dominance patterns that create their own cascade of symptoms.

One study found that women with a history of heavy drinking in adolescence entered menopause an average of two years earlier than those who didn't drink during their teen years. Two years might not sound significant, but in the context of women's health, it represents a substantial shift in life quality and health outcomes.

Nobody wants to talk about this however, because it’s either too uncomfortable, or they are afraid of being labelled anything from judgemental and uneducated, to offensive – even a “conspiracy theorist.”

The Layers We Don't Always See

What makes this even more complex for many women is the inherited aspect.

If you grew up in a household affected by alcoholism, you may have started drinking younger, or drinking more intensely, as a way to try and cope with familial chaos, pain, or confusion. You didn't choose your circumstances, but your body still registers the impact.

Many of the women I work with carry a double burden: the biological effects of their own early drinking, and the unprocessed trauma of growing up with a parent's alcoholism. These aren't separate issues – they're interwoven threads in the same tapestry.

The autonomic nervous system of a child raised in an alcoholic home is often in chronic stress mode – the sympathetic “fight or flight” response becomes the default setting. This chronic stress state affects everything: sleep, digestion, immune function, and yes, hormonal regulation. When that same person then uses alcohol themselves to manage the anxiety and hyper-vigilance they've developed, the effects compound.

The Other Side of the ACOA Story

But there's another pattern I see frequently, and it's just as important to understand: adult children of alcoholics who swear off alcohol entirely.

“I watched what it did to my mother,” one woman told me. “I promised myself I'd never touch the stuff.”

And she didn't. Not a drop.

But by the time she came to one of my Mana Yoga Medicine circles at 49, she was drinking six cups of coffee a day, eating sugar to manage her energy crashes, and had developed a dependence on sleep medications. Her perimenopause was just as chaotic as women who drank alcohol.

This is the shadow side of growing up with alcoholism that we don't talk about enough: when we reject alcohol, we often simply transfer the addiction to something else. The underlying pattern – using external substances to regulate our internal state – remains unchanged. We just swap one substance for another.

Coffee for energy. Sugar for comfort. Ambien for sleep. Xanax for anxiety. Shopping for the dopamine hit. Work for the sense of control.

The mechanism is the same: we're seeking outside ourselves for what we don't know how to create within. And our hormonal systems still pay the price.

Caffeine dysregulates cortisol just as alcohol does. It is not your friend. Sugar creates insulin spikes that disrupt all our hormones. Another foe. Sleep medications prevent the deep, restorative sleep our bodies need for hormonal production. Ditto.

The cycle continues, just with different players.

Why This Matters Now

You might be reading this and thinking, “But I can't change the past. I can't undo those years.”

You're absolutely right. And that's not what healing asks of us.

What we can do is understand the terrain we're working with. When we recognize that current symptoms – the brutal hot flashes, the anxiety that seems to appear from nowhere, the cycles that have become unpredictable, the sense of being disconnected from our own bodies – might have roots that go back decades, we can approach our healing with more compassion and more precision.

This isn't about blame or shame. If you drank heavily as a teenager, you were doing the best you could with the tools and awareness you had at the time. If you grew up with alcoholic parents, you survived an incredibly difficult situation. If you've been self-medicating with coffee, sugar, or other substances because you were terrified of becoming your alcoholic parent, that makes perfect sense.

All these things can be true: those experiences shaped your biology, and you are not defined by them.

The Invitation Forward

In my Mana Yoga Medicine containers, I work with women who are at this crossroads – recognizing the long game their bodies have been playing, and ready to write a new chapter. Through remedial yoga that speaks to the nervous system, fascial work that releases stored tension, food as medicine that supports hormonal balance, and seasonal practices that reconnect us to our body's natural rhythms, we create space for genuine transformation.

The body has an extraordinary capacity for healing, even decades after the initial harm. But it requires us to look honestly at where we've been, to honor what we've survived, and to commit to practices that support deep, cellular renewal – not just swapping one crutch for another.

In the next blog in this series, we'll explore exactly how alcohol affects our hormonal balance and why the perimenopausal years can be particularly challenging for women with a history of drinking. We'll also look at what hormonal healing actually looks like in practice.

Because here's what I know to be true: it's never too late to begin again.

AHO