- Anne Hathaway is celebrating over five years of sobriety.
- “That feels like a milestone to me,” the actor told The New York Times.
- In 2019, Hathaway said she wanted to quit alcohol “for 18 years” until her son is grown up.
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Anne Hathaway, 41, is celebrating over five years of sobriety.
The actor spoke to The New York Times about her health and what it’s like being in her forties.
“There are so many other things I identify as milestones. I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me. Forty feels like a gift,” Hathaway told The New York Times.
The actor also shared that she wasn’t comfortable referring to herself as middle-aged because “we don’t know if this is middle age.”
“The fact of the matter is I hesitate at calling things ‘middle age’ simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today,” Hathaway added.
Hathaway first spoke about quitting alcohol during an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in January 2019.
“I quit drinking back in October,” Hathaway told DeGeneres. “For 18 years. I’m going to stop drinking while my son’s living in my house because I don’t totally love the way I do it and he’s getting to the age where he really needs me all the time in the morning.”
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She later clarified in an April 2019 interview with Modern Luxury that she stopped drinking not because she had an alcohol problem but because she had really bad hangovers, per People.
“My last hangover lasted for five days,” Hathaway told Modern Luxury. “When I’m at a stage in my life where there is enough space for me to have a hangover, I’ll start drinking again, but that won’t be until my kid is out of the house.”
Hathaway has two sons, Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4, with her husband Adam Shulman. The couple have been married for 12 years.
In a Vanity Fair interview from March, Hathaway also spoke about how her mental health has improved since she quit alcohol.
“It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves,” Hathaway said. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow.”
A CDC report found that the loss in productivity due to hangovers cost the economy almost $90 billion in 2010, per The Atlantic.
Although they can vary from person to person, hangover symptoms typically include fatigue, headache, and nausea, among others.
Research has also found that the effects of a hangover can continue to affect a person even after the alcohol has already left the bloodstream.
Apart from Dry January, there are also other ways for people to cut down on their alcohol consumption, including the “One Week No Booze Method.“