'Michael Jackson started my path away from alcohol'

A wellness and sobriety coach said a panic attack in a supermarket and a Michael Jackson song made him look at his own problems with alcohol.

Andy Smith, who lives in Sandhurst, Berkshire, said growing up in the Shetland Islands and its drinking culture, plus a stressful job, fostered an unhealthy relationship with drink.

He now runs seven-day courses which reshape people's relationship with booze.

Mr Smith was speaking as the guest editor of BBC Radio Berkshire's breakfast show on Thursday.

The charity Alcohol Change UK predicted 8.5 million people across the country planned to go alcohol-free in January 2024.

"As a young man growing up, your value was whether you could drink everyone else under the table," Mr Smith said.

"All that had quite a big impact on me as I went to university and got involved in a corporate career.

"Back in the late 1980s it was very much that work hard, play hard myth."

The father of three said alcohol increasingly had "more and more of a hold" on his life but it eventually took its toll, memorably in Wokingham's Tesco supermarket.

"I remember being helped up by this lovely old lady who was asking me if I was OK," he said.

"I lied and I said I was fine. I remember looking at my feet and saying, 'This is not right, what are you doing here?'."

Another awakening came in his car, aged 50, as he waited at a crossing and Jackson's hit Man in the Mirror came on the radio.

He said it helped him re-evaluate his choices.

"The word 'asking' [in the song's chorus] completely reframed everything," he explained.

"It made me cooperate with myself rather than beat myself up.

"My background was in coaching, selling, influencing across the healthcare arena. I was really good at changing how everybody else felt about things.

"But I didn't seem to be able to turn that onto myself. So I treated myself like a client and thought, 'OK, if I was someone else then what would be the process that I would take them through?'

"Gradually I just started to feel things moving inside me and that wiring change. And then at that point I thought, 'I'm ready to take a break.'"

One of Mr Smith's former clients, Anne, said people would not have necessarily thought of her as having a drink problem.

But she recognised she had to change herself.

"I dropped off my son at university and came back and I downed a bottle and a half of wine and woke up the next morning at 05:00," Anne told BBC Radio Berkshire.

"I thought, 'I can't do this any more. I have just got to stop.'

"I went online…and without thinking, because I was still half cut, I got out my credit card [and paid for Mr Smith's course].

"At 07:00 I woke up at thought, 'What have I done?' Being a good Scot, a bit like Andy, I thought I have got to make the most of this. I did Andy's course and I've never had a drink again."

The BBC previously reported that more than 8,200 people died in England because of alcohol in 2023, a record and a 42% rise on 2019.

Health bodies said alcohol consumption could be cut if a minimum price for each unit of alcohol was introduced, like in Scotland.

Alcohol Change UK said more than 100,000 people downloaded its Try Dry app to track the financial benefits of Dry January in 2024.

It said on average people saved £118 that month.

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