This is an ABC podcast.

We just presume as soon as a woman gets pregnant, she's just going to suddenly become this

earth mother with paleo wraps and the perfect cotton wraps over the pram.

But that's not the case, and it wasn't the case for me.

My transition to motherhood was very, very difficult.

I'd gone from being this crazy backpacker girl who had a party at her fingertips,

you know, with glitter boobs at Glastonbury,

to then being in an apartment on my own with a crying child.

And of course, the only escape I knew throughout my whole life for anything was to have a drink.

This is Victoria Vanstone, and as you can probably tell, she is very candid about her life,

especially when it comes to her drinking and what it did to her mental health.

And of course, I used to just deal with hangovers with a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea or a coffee and a laugh round a table with my mates with a roast dinner.

But something changed. When I woke up that first hangover with a crying baby in the room beyond, that was a huge wake-up call for me.

Not enough to stop me drinking, I may add, but something infiltrated

my hangovers that day, and that was the anxiety and the guilt and the shame, all the things

that go along with you, not being able to parent properly. Alcohol and anxiety, but as it turns out a pretty common one.

What we do know is that if you have an anxiety disorder, then you're two to three times more likely to have an alcohol use disorder.

So not everyone who has anxiety is going to experience problems with alcohol,

but we do find that for some people, they can tend to what we call self-medicate.

So alcohol can be a way that people cope with their anxiety symptoms.

But the opposite can also be true,

where drinking can lead to anxiety,

...