Bella Hadid’s Reasons for Quitting Drinking Are Surprisingly Relatable
Supermodel Bella Hadid recently confessed that she struggled to “control” herself around alcohol
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I’ve never paid a lot of attention to Bella Hadid. As a sporadic consumer of celebrity news, some famous people will spike my interest — be it for their wild talent, shameless antics, or outrageous outfits. For me, Bella has never been one of those people. I remember thinking that she looked staggeringly good at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in that infamous red dress, but that sums up the extent of my interest in Bella’s career.
And yet, I’ve been repeatedly googling the 25-year-old supermodel after finding out that she stopped drinking alcohol for many of the same reasons that I did.
Bella is one of several Hollywood celebrities who recently opened up about their problematic relationship with alcohol. Jessica Simpson celebrated four years of sobriety by sharing an old, “unrecognizable” photo of herself looking intensely hungover. Adele told Oprah she got sober for six months after a period of heavy drinking amid her divorce. And Jennifer Garner hosted an Instagram Live where she discussed the warnings signs that led her to take an extended break from drinking wine.
And now, Bella told InStyle that she too decided to give up booze — and her reasons are all too relatable.
“I loved alcohol and it got to the point where even I started to, you know, cancel nights out that I felt like I wouldn’t be able to control myself,” she said.
Bella’s admission that she struggled to control her alcohol intake — to the point where she stopped herself from leaving the house — is actually a pretty big deal. Typically, as a society, we have classified drinkers into two categories: those who can moderate their drinking at will (“the normal drinkers”) and those who can’t (“the alcoholics”). Though most people who drink alcohol understand that moderation isn’t as easy as the disclaimers on liquor ads make it out to be, we still like to pretend that people’s drinking habits fit neatly into these two boxes.
There’s also a heavy expectation that if you’re a “normal” drinker, you can and should drink alcohol whenever it is made available to you. This is why Bella’s comment about not being able to “control” her drinking (to the point of avoiding going to parties) is so interesting. She admits to sometimes feeling powerless over alcohol without saying that she suffers from alcoholism. This is a subtle distinction but an important one — because she didn’t feel the need to label her drinking before giving herself permission to stop. Here’s another way to look at it: she didn’t hit rock bottom but quit drinking anyway.
In the same article, Bella also opened up about the severe anxiety she experienced after drinking too much — and how that influenced her decision to go sober. “I don’t feel the need because I know how it will affect me at 3 in the morning when I wake up with horrible anxiety thinking about that one thing I said five years ago when I graduated high school,” she said.
This is a pretty accurate description of the psychological purgatory of what I like to call the 3 AM hangxiety attack. As anyone who has ever struggled with drinking too much knows, waking up in the middle of the night as the alcohol leaves your system can be a hellish experience. Whenever I experienced a 3AM hangxiety attack, I would ruminate over my inadequacy, dipping into my well of bad memories. Like Bella, I would pick something random that happened years ago, mull over it, and use it as “proof” to convince myself that there was something deeply, inherently wrong with me. After experiencing one too many of these episodes, I decided I couldn’t handle them anymore, and I quit drinking for good.
Now, let’s keep in mind that Bella is the partner and co-founder of a non-alcoholic beverage company called Kin Euphorics, which features heavily in the same InStyle article where she talked about her sobriety for the first time. So a cynical reading would see Bella’s candor as nothing more than a promotional strategy. But I’m not going to dismiss her experience as just a PR stunt. Besides, at a time when every celebrity and their mother is launching a tequila brand (Kendall Jenner, I’m looking at you), getting a supermodel to hype up booze-free spirits doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
This article is part of my sobriety series, where I examine society’s relationship to alcohol, as well as my own. If you’d like stories like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Medium.
