Benefits with Sycamore Community Schools

Alcohol and Sleep

It's a popular myth that a drink or two in the evening will help you sleep—but it's not true. Having alcohol in your system may make you fall asleep more quickly, but it won't help you sleep through the night. Having even a moderate amount of alcohol in the evening disrupts the restorative phases of sleep later in the night, leaving you tired the next day.

How Alcohol Affects Sleep

Because sleep is so important to good health and clear thinking, it's important to understand how alcohol affects your sleep. Sleep occurs in stages, and alcohol affects the stages of sleep in different ways. The effect of alcohol on your body and mind also changes as the alcohol is metabolized in the hours after drinking.

During a normal night of sleep, you cycle through four stages:

• Stage 1—Light sleep. As you fall asleep, your heartbeat, breathing, and eye movements slow down, and your muscles relax.
• Stage 2—Deeper sleep. Your heartbeat and breathing continue to slow, your body temperature decreases, and your eyes become still. This is non-rapid-eye-movement (non-REM or NREM) sleep.
• Stage 3—Deep or slow-wave sleep. Your heartbeat, breathing, and brain activity reach their lowest levels. Eye movement stops, and muscles are completely relaxed. This, too, is non-REM sleep, and it is the deepest stage of sleep.
• Stage 4—REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep. Eye movements resume, and your heartbeat and breathing speed up. This is the stage of sleep in which most dreaming occurs.

Without alcohol in your body, it typically takes about 90 minutes to cycle through the first three stages and begin REM sleep. After a period of REM sleep, the cycle begins again. In an eight-hour sleep, you might cycle through each of the stages four or five times. The stages of deep and REM sleep are thought to be the most important for your physical and mental health. These are the stages in which the body and mind are restored after the exertions of the day. REM sleep is thought to be when memories are consolidated.

After drinking alcohol, you may fall asleep and enter the early stages of sleep more quickly. This is because alcohol initially acts as a sedative. With moderate to high levels of alcohol in your system, the sedative effect significantly reduces the amount of REM sleep in the first hours of sleep, so this is likely to be dreamless sleep. Then, as your body metabolizes the alcohol, the sedative effect wears off, and you spend more of the second half of your sleep time in light sleep. You might experience this as fitful sleep, with vivid or stressful dreams that you remember.

The overall effect of alcohol before bed is less REM sleep. As a result, you're likely to feel tired the next day, and your memory may not be sharp. Lack of sleep can also affect judgment, motor function, reaction times, and ability to focus, increasing the risks of errors and accidents.

Note that this applies to sleep after moderate to heavy alcohol consumption. The evidence is less clear as to the effects of light alcohol consumption on sleep, though some research suggests that even light drinking before bedtime reduces REM sleep.

Alcohol, Snoring, Sleep Apnea, and Insomnia

Alcohol can have negative effects on sleep in other ways, too:

• By relaxing the muscles in the throat, alcohol can intensify snoring and increase the risk of sleep apnea, a disorder in which irregular breathing disrupts sleep. If you have sleep apnea, alcohol can reduce your brain's ability to notice interruptions in breathing during sleep, resulting in lower blood oxygen levels.
• Alcohol use can also aggravate insomnia (problems falling or remaining asleep). If you come to rely on the sedative effect of alcohol to get to sleep, you risk creating a self-fueling cycle of alcohol consumption and poor sleep. When you wake up feeling tired from light or interrupted sleep, you're more likely to drink coffee or use another stimulant to feel more alert. That, in turn, can make it more difficult to fall asleep the next night, increasing the temptation to drink alcohol to get to sleep night after night.

Break the unhealthy cycle.

If you think alcohol in the evening may be interfering with your sleep and leaving you tired during the day, break the cycle:

• Take a vacation from alcohol. Try going at least two weeks without a drink. Notice the effect on the quality of your sleep and how you feel during the day.
• If you have a drink at the end of the day, have it at least four hours before bedtime. You might have a beer or a glass of wine after work or with your dinner. Limit yourself to two or three drinks a week. (One drink is defined as a 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1-1/2 ounces of 80-proof liquor.)
• Substitute a new bedtime drink habit: a cup of herbal tea or a mug of warm milk.