During a normal night of sleep, we cycle through periods of light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Each sleep stage plays an essential function, but deep sleep and REM sleep are considered the most important stages for physical and mental restoration. When you’re in the first two stages, you’re in “light sleep.” When you’re in the third stage, you’re in “deep sleep.” And the fourth stage is your “vivid,” or dream, stage. While every person’s individual sleep cycle varies, it’s generally true that each of us goes through four to six rounds of it. Each cycle lasts around 90 minutes total, which adds up to between six and nine hours of sleep. But part of a smart, sleep-friendly lifestyle is managing alcohol consumption so it doesn’t disrupt your sleep and circadian rhythms.
0 Possible neurochemical mechanisms of the acute and chronic alcohol effects on sleep
For example, people with moderate or severe anxiety who use alcohol in hopes of sleeping better are actually more likely to have sleep problems. Similarly, studies on bereaved individuals have found that using alcohol to cope with grief increases the risk of developing major depression, which is itself a risk factor for sleep disturbances. Our circadian rhythm is sometimes called our “biological clock”—the process that regulates the way our bodies function during each 24-hour daily cycle. Nearly half of adults over age 65 report having consumed alcohol in the past year, according to NCOA guest author and alcohol use researcher Paul Sacco. And sometimes, they say they’re drinking to cope with a challenging symptom like insomnia.
Does Alcohol Affect Sleep? What You Need to Know Before Bed
In healthy people, even relatively minimal (i.e., 1 to 3 hours) reductions in nocturnal sleep time for a single night can reduce alertness and performance efficiency during the following day. Moreover, these effects can accumulate across nights (Roehrs et al. 2000a). Similarly, a disruption of sleep continuity by auditory stimuli, without reductions in overall sleep time, results in reduced alertness and performance efficiency in healthy people (Roehrs et al. 2000a). This fragmentation of sleep continuity is characterized by increased amounts of stage 1 sleep and brief awakenings. Alcohol is often used as a sleep aid due to its sedative effects, but its impact on sleep quality is far from beneficial. While it may help people fall asleep faster, it disrupts the natural progression of sleep cycles, leading to fragmented rest and next-day fatigue.
2 Acute alcohol: sleep EEG data
- Your daily habits and environment can significantly impact the quality of your sleep.
- Topographicdifferences in EEG spectral power during sleep evaluated in alcoholics compared withcontrols revealed that slow frequency activity was maximal over frontal scalp regions inboth alcoholics and control subjects (Colrain, Turlington,and Baker 2009b).
- People who wake up tired every morning may be more likely to lean back in to drinking to help them sleep better.
- The “evening” type (greater eveningness) individual prefers a later bedtime and a later rise time and has a greater need for sleep.
- Alcohol acts as a relaxant, making the airway more likely to collapse during sleep and potentially increasing both the frequency and severity of sleep apnea events.
- Once alcohol is eliminated from the body, however, these adjustments result in sleep disruption.
She’s using a brain imaging technique called functional MRI to assess how sleep changes biological function in the regions of the brain that process emotions. She and her team are using cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, for patients with insomnia. They’re helping patients improve their sleep habits (such as making the bedroom a relaxing place and addressing anxiety about the ability to get to sleep), then seeing how, for those whose sleep improves after the therapy, brain activity and moods change.
- ‘Bottoms up’ is simply not a long-term recipe for restful sleep – instead, the bottom line is that although there may be a perceived sense that alcohol promotes faster and deeper sleep, it’s in fact just a ruse.
- Some school districts have shifted start times later in recognition of this biological change.
- “I’ve had many patients who came back to me after curtailing alcohol use entirely and their sleep disorders resolved,” shares Dr. Foldvary-Schaefer.
- While it may help people fall asleep faster, it disrupts the natural progression of sleep cycles, leading to fragmented rest and next-day fatigue.
- Second, the doses used in sleep studies are generally much larger (i.e., resulting in BrACs greater than 0.05 percent, which corresponds to more than three drinks) than the doses that insomniacs typically report using (i.e., one to two drinks).
If sleep issues are lasting weeks or months, it could be time to see a sleep specialist. The problem could be a chronic condition such as sleep apnea, circadian rhythm disorder, narcolepsy or chronic insomnia. This surprised Zeitzer and his colleagues, who thought it would be healthier to live in alignment with one’s “chronotype,” the sleep patterns a person naturally tends toward.
Is there a connection between alcohol and sleep disorders?
To investigate these issues and identify the mechanisms underlying the relationship between alcohol and sleep remain important tasks, as does documenting alcohol’s effects on other physiological functions during sleep. For several reasons, studies conducted in healthy people sleeping at their usual bedtimes, such as the studies reviewed in this article, do not adequately represent the hypnotic potential of alcohol in people with insomnia. First, in healthy people, sleep latency and sleep efficiency are already optimal, and further improvement is difficult to demonstrate.
Carbonated drinks are absorbed by your body easier, which makes you drunk faster. It’s easier to fall asleep if you do so at the same time each night regularly. Sleep apnea is when throat muscles intermittently relax and block the airway during sleep, leading to symptoms such as snoring. As a result, you may wake up during the night feeling thirsty or needing to use the bathroom more often. These disruptions affect the quality of your sleep, leaving you feeling tired and groggy in the morning.
Alcohol and Sleep: What You Need to Know
This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the impact of alcohol on the characteristics of night-time sleep, with the intent to identify the influence of the dose and timing of alcohol intake. A systematic search of the literature identified 27 studies for inclusion in the analysis. Changes in sleep architecture were observed, including a delay in the onset of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and a reduction in the duration of REM sleep. A dose-response relationship was identified such that disruptions to REM sleep occurred following consumption of a low dose of alcohol (≤0.50 g∙kg-1 or approximately two standard drinks) and progressively worsened with increasing doses of alcohol.
Alcohol appears to consistently delay the first REM sleep episode, and higher doses of alcohol appear to reduce the total amount of REM sleep. Suppressing REM sleep can have detrimental consequences for memory consolidation and other cognitive processes. That’s because alcohol and sleep apnea often go hand-in-hand—even in people who don’t otherwise have the condition. Circadian rhythms regulate nearly all of the body’s processes, from metabolism and immunity to energy, sleep, and sexual drive, cognitive functions, and mood. REM sleep leaves us feeling rested and helps with memory, learning and concentration. If you choose to drink, be aware of the cancer risks, aim to drink less often and have fewer drinks.
Normally, melatonin levels rise in the evening to establish a stable sleep pattern. Studies show that even moderate alcohol consumption can delay melatonin release by up to 40%, pushing back the body’s internal clock and making restful sleep harder to maintain. This disruption is particularly pronounced in regular drinkers, as chronic alcohol use can lead to long-term circadian misalignment, making sleep disturbances more persistent. As alcohol is metabolized, its sedative effects wear off, leading to increased lighter sleep stages and frequent awakenings. This shift is especially pronounced in the second half of the night, when REM sleep typically dominates.
Supporting Mental Health Through Physical Health
As in theprevious study (Nicholas et al. 2002), alcoholicswere significantly less likely to produce K-complexes than controls. P2 amplitude was,however, smaller in alcoholics than controls with the alcohol and sleep difference being largest at Cz,where the component was maximal, but smaller at other sites (see Figure 5). There were no sexdifferences or interactions between diagnosis and sex for K-complex incidence, P2amplitude or P2 latency.
