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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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