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Alcohol and Sleep
- Experts recommend avoiding alcohol at least 3 hours before bed.
- Consuming alcohol before bed can lead to frequent wakings and overall low-quality sleep.
- Long-term alcohol use can result in chronic sleep problems and disorders like sleep apnea.
If you are one of the nearly two thirds of Americans who drink alcohol, chances are, you’ve had a drink in the hours before bedtime. Maybe you enjoy a glass of beer or wine after dinner, or your weekends include drinking with friends at bars or social events. Maybe sipping a nightcap is part of your bedtime ritual.
While some people find that drinking alcohol helps them fall asleep more easily, alcohol ultimately has a negative impact on sleep. Even in moderate amounts, alcohol consumed in the hours before bedtime can cost you sleep and leave you feeling tired the next day.
How Does Alcohol Affect the Sleep Cycle?
How much alcohol you drink and when you drink it can both influence sleep. As you consume alcohol, it is rapidly absorbed into your bloodstream, where it remains until your liver is able to metabolize it, typically at a rate of about one drink per hour. If you have alcohol in your bloodstream when you go to sleep, you are likely to experience alterations in sleep architecture—that is, how your body cycles through the four stages of sleep.
The typical sleep cycle begins with three non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stages of sleep and ends with rapid eye movement (REM). During sleep, the body cycles through all of these stages every 90 to 120 minutes, with NREM sleep dominating the first part of the night and REM increasing during the second part of the night. Each stage is necessary for sleep to feel refreshing and for vital processes like learning and memory consolidation to occur.
When you go to bed with alcohol in your system, you’re likely to experience more N3 sleep—known as “deep sleep”—and less REM sleep than usual, at least initially. Later in the night, once your body has metabolized the alcohol, you’re likely to experience a rise in N1 sleep, the lightest stage of sleep. This can lead to frequent wakings and fragmented, low-quality sleep.
Can Alcohol Disrupt My Sleep?
In addition to altering your sleep architecture, alcohol can disrupt your sleep by interfering with contributing to sleep disorders and interfering with circadian rhythms. Alcohol’s effects on sleep can be both acute—that is, immediate—and chronic, affecting heavy drinkers in the long term.
Snoring and Sleep Apnea
For people who snore or who have sleep apnea—a disorder that causes repeated pauses in breathing during sleep—drinking alcohol tends to aggravate symptoms.
Consuming alcohol causes physiological changes that affect snorers and people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which occurs when tissues in the nose or throat collapse and temporarily obstruct the airway. For example, alcohol causes tongue and throat muscles to relax. It also causes changes to blood vessels in the nose, leading to greater airway resistance in the nasal passages. These alterations significantly increase the likelihood and duration of breathing events during sleep.
Alcohol also affects people with central sleep apnea (CSA), which occurs when the brain periodically stops sending certain signals involved in breathing. Alcohol interferes with the brain’s ability to receive chemical messages involved in breathing, which decreases the body’s respiratory drive and increases the likelihood of pauses in breathing.
People with alcohol in their systems are also generally harder to wake, which means that they’re less likely to experience “arousals” that help them recover from OSA- and CSA-related pauses in breathing.
Insomnia
Heavy alcohol use can contribute to the development of insomnia, a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. As many as three quarters of people with alcohol dependence experience insomnia symptoms when they drink. Insomnia is also very common in people who are in withdrawal or early recovery from alcohol addiction.
While heavy alcohol use can trigger insomnia, the opposite is also true. People with insomnia have an increased risk of developing alcohol use disorder, potentially because many individuals turn to alcohol as a sleep aid.
For people with alcohol dependence and insomnia, a destructive pattern can develop: Individuals drink alcohol at bedtime to help them fall asleep, but they end up sleeping poorly for much of the night. To counteract the excessive sleepiness they feel during the day, they rely on caffeine—but this makes it hard to fall asleep at bedtime, and the cycle begins again.
Circadian Rhythm Disruptions
Alcohol use and dependence appear to interfere with circadian rhythms—biological patterns that operate on a 24-hour clock. Evidence suggests that consuming alcohol may decrease the body’s sensitivity to cues, like daylight and darkness, which trigger shifts in body temperature and secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin. These fluctuations play a vital role in the sleep-wake cycle, and when they are weakened—or absent—a person may feel alert when they want to sleep and sleepy when they want to be awake.
When Should I Stop Drinking Before Bed?
Experts recommend that you avoid alcohol for at least three hours before bedtime. That said, some people may benefit from avoiding alcohol for even longer or abstaining altogether. There are many factors that influence how quickly your body can metabolize alcohol and, therefore, the likelihood that alcohol will disrupt your sleep. You may need to stop drinking more than three hours before bedtime if you:
- Consume multiple drinks over a short period of time
- Drink alcohol on an empty stomach
- Are especially sensitive to the effects of alcohol
- Are sleep deprived
- Take any medications that intensify the effects of alcohol
It’s also worth noting that the sleep problems caused by alcohol consumption can intensify hangover symptoms.
Frequently Asked Questions About Alcohol
Experts do not recommend using alcohol as a sleep aid. While many people report that alcohol helps them fall asleep, it ultimately compromises sleep quality and quantity by causing sleep disruptions later in the night. Moreover, heavy drinking and alcohol dependence are both associated with difficulty falling asleep.
While drinking alcohol before bedtime may help you feel relaxed and sleepy, enjoying a nightcap puts you at risk of experiencing repeated wakings and low-quality sleep later in the night.
The more alcohol your drink and the closer you drink it to bedtime, the stronger its effects will be. Depending on how your body metabolizes alcohol, consuming a small amount may or may not lead to sleep disruptions.
Medical Disclaimer: The content on this page should not be taken as medical advice or used as a recommendation for any specific treatment or medication. Always consult your doctor before taking a new medication or changing your current treatment.
Lucy Bryan is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience in higher education. She holds a B. A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Penn State University.
Dr. Singh is the Medical Director of the Indiana Sleep Center. His research and clinical practice focuses on the entire myriad of sleep disorders.
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References
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