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"Glib advice aside, what is the recommendation when it comes to sleep and alcohol? It is hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol's harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise would be doing you, and the science, a disservice. Many people enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, even an aperitif thereafter. But it takes your liver and kidneys many hours to degrade and excrete that alcohol, even if you are an individual with fast-acting enzymes for ethanol decomposition. Nightly alcohol will disrupt your sleep, and the annoying advice of abstinence is the best, and most honest, I can offer."

- page 246, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Walker is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.

I stopped drinking alcohol when I was 18 (I am 33 now) as I could see it was effecting how well I could study. Poor sleep, hang overs, etc. made me want to take a break for a few months to concentrate on other things in my life.

6 months later I realised life was way better without alcohol. I was more motivated, I slept much better, I felt better, I could study and retain things much better than before.

I wasn't a super heavy drinker, I am from the UK so started to drink with friends at around 16. Over the past 15 years binge drinking has become a big problem IMHO. I feel I am lucky to have avoided that!

So here I am 15 years later and still not drinking at all. I would recommend taking a year off alcohol and see how it changes your life. Maybe it won't make as big a difference as it did for me but I would be shocked if it didn't make some noticeable differences to your brain.

Couldn't agree more. UK here as well and there is a rather idiotic culture of social and binge drinking which I got into in the mid 1990s driven by "the pub" and "the club". I quit alcohol entirely in 2002 (15 years ago as well!) after getting married and decided to replace it with the magical elixir that cures all ills: water.

The revelation of water came from having a saline drip after an accident. I felt fantastic afterwards. Full of energy, drive and able to actually process things in my brain. Turned out I'd spent the few years before this point entirely shrivelled up with dehydration caused by drinking only tea and alcohol.

Trying to shake the caffeine monkey of my back now. That's just as bad. Drinking lots of water does help however.

Currently taking a break from caffeine now too. Just had lunch at my favorite place, the usual staff knows to serve me a huge mason jar of sweet tea (its a barbeque joint). I was bracing myself to refuse and ask for water - but a different guy was on duty. So no problem.

But I feel the gravitational pull of caffeine every time I see the road sign for one of my regular places. It almost a physical rush.

I would love to completely put alcohol aside as you did. However, I don't know how I would put beer and wine aside permanently. I couldn't tell you the last time I had a cocktail or distilled alcoholic beverage, but I love to drink craft beers and occasionally a glass of wine, solely for the taste. I cannot stand the feeling of being buzzed or drunk, I just enjoy drinking a few beers on Friday and Saturday night. I've noticed that it does affect my sleep though as I am often tired on Saturday and Sunday, even if I got 8-9 hours of sleep.

I have a similar issue with other foods, like cheesecake. I love eating cheesecake on occasion but every time I eat it the very high fat and sugar content upsets my stomach.

Maybe move the beer and wine to lunch giving the body time to break it down?

I recently got an apple watch and along the way installed a sleep tracking app. I was skeptical of its accuracy until I realized that I could identify the nights I'd been drinking with 100% accuracy as those nights the tracker didn't seem to think I slept hardly at all. I always knew I'd be tired the next day but this was eye opening.

This is because alcohol is an anesthetic. And the human body will tend to wake up after an anesthetic wears off. I believe the anesthetic properties of alcohol lasts roughly 4 hours, so if you sleep you'll probably begin to stir and wake up 4 hours after your last drink. Very similar to surgery patients who naturally wake up after the anesthetic used for surgery wears off.

That's just how sleep works. Everyone's REM sleep cycles last 90-120 minutes.

https://www.howsleepworks.com/types_rem.html

4 hours for me like clockwork after a few drinks before bed.

This is crazy but I'm pretty similar, is this a documented effect that I could read more about?

Almost always after a night of heavy drinking I wake from anywhere between 5am - 8am and have a rough time getting back to sleep for at least a few hours. Knowing my drinking patterns, those times would tend to correlate to about 4 hours earlier passing out.

This happens to many people in around the same timeframe, I'm pretty sure it's due to GABA rebound https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind-read/alcohol_sleep...

From what I recall, alcohol binds to GABA receptors, GABA builds up in the body, eventually metabolizes to glutamate which takes a few hours depending on how much you drink, but seems to be around half a night's sleep. The glutamate wakes you up and gives you energy, hence the strange "feeling great after a night of drinking on no sleep" thing.

Anecdotal, but my fitbit gave me the same result.

Every single time I had drunk - even 1-2 - there was a spike of restlessness that night, 10-20 restless periods vs the 3-4 I would have normally.

Ya, I just got an apple watch a couple of weeks ago and noticed this as well. It's crazy - ~4 hours of deep sleep on a normal night and 1.5-2 on a night where I've had even just a single drink

What app did you use? I want to try this also.

Not OP but I use Autosleep. Works well.

Also autosleep

As a completely anecdotal and medically irrelevant personal counterpoint, I actually frequently find myself having much better sleep after having had two glasses of good cognac before sleep. I've certainly not made a daily habit of it, nor do I recommend it to anyone else, but the observation is rather consistent for me.

I do have a host of sleep quality issues in general, and I'm a very pronounced "night owl". Perhaps that has something to do with it, I don't know.

I don't understand the relevance of this comment. The article makes no reference to alcohol.

The whole sleep rhythm thing; sorry, I've just read a handful of articles in the past few weeks talking about how alcohol disrupts our normal sleep cycles which prevents a lot of the brain's...I dunno, whatever hygiene it has to do when we sleep. And that is what the article is about.

I'm 33 and I've definitely lost interest in drinking. I'll do it on occasion at social things, but I usually partake in very limited amounts. (My girlfriend is actually a little sad that she's never had a chance to see me wasted.) It might just be that my body can't handle it anymore, but sometime over the last few years it just lost its appeal.

The thing is: alcohol is a very crude intoxicant, and we seem to have arbitrarily standardized on it as the Socially Acceptable Drug. I know this is obvious, but it really is stupid and it's worth reminding people how stupid it is.

I mean, take khat, for instance. Khat is a stimulant chewed by people in Yemen; it's their socially acceptable drug-of-choice. (It's so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes a significant portion of the country's agricultural resources.) But here? It's a controlled substance. Why? I don't know. Our drug laws are just crazy stupid.

I feel like we could do so much better in terms of recreational substances. People are finally getting smart about cannabis, but there are still so many possibilities we're not exploring. The fact that we're stuck with alcohol is ridiculous. Hell, even opioids are less harmful to the body than alcohol is (if taken at a steady, stable dose, which I guess is the hard part).

We should definitely be spending most of our scientific brainpower on curing diseases, but I feel like we could spare a few brilliant minds to work on better intoxicants. The masses deserve a safer opiate.

Khat is a good deal stupider as drug-of-choice in Yemen than alcohol would be. It's a crop that takes up tons of the scarce arable land and even more scarce water in a very poor country in which 17% of income is spent on khat.

More stupid? Alcohol kills 16,000 people in car crashes alone. 88,000 alcohol related deaths a year making it the third most popular cause of preventable death.

Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.

It's not that alcohol is good, it's that it'd be better than khat for Yemen.

For example: Yemen has 35 cars per 1000 people to the US's 797. Yemen would have to leapfrog through several stages of development for drunken driving to become a blip on their public health radar.

Half of that country currently doesn't have clean water, and they're draining their acquifers dry … to grow khat. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

Cholera outbreaks and a water-scarcity exacerbated civil war are simply a different class of problem.

Agreed, but I'm super interested in learning more if there's evidence.

They have similar/almost identical preoccupations, ie, the preservation of one's mental capacities when aging

I stopped drinking 20 months ago. Australia has a big drinking culture so not drinking is confusing to friends and family. I've found that it's had a huge positive impact on my life - much improved mental function, motivation and stress/emotion management. I'll likely never drink again.

Alcohol isn't mentioned once in the linked article - what is the context here?

Alcohol consumption ruins your chance at good sleep.

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh25-2/101-109.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23347102

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21323679

Agreed that alcohol is Bad. Not related to sleep, but there is also lots of science stacking up now on the connection between alcohol and cancer.

are you saying alcohol is the cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems?