If you drink, practice moderation and prioritize your health with strategies like staying hydrated and maintaining good sleep hygiene to minimize the negative effects on your sleep. Avoiding alcohol altogether is recommended for a truly restful and restorative night’s sleep. Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep when the airways are partially or fully blocked.
- While everyone metabolizes alcohol a bit differently, the best way to ensure that booze doesn’t harm your sleep is to avoid it entirely or drink it earlier in the day—at least 4-6 hours before bedtime.
- And sometimes, they say they’re drinking to cope with a challenging symptom like insomnia.
- Ultimately, your overall sleep quality will take a hit as the alcohol starts to metabolize and its effects begin to wear off.
- If you have alcohol in your system when you hit the hay, you may not sleep very deeply, or for very long, on and off throughout the night.
- We used structured questionnaires, including Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test-Korean revised version (AUDIT-KR) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index-Korean version (PSQI-K).
Wait Between Drinking and Bedtime
Alcohol is highly effective at suppressing melatonin, a key facilitator of sleep and regulator of sleep-wake cycles. Research indicates that a moderate dose of alcohol up to an hour before bedtime can reduce melatonin production by nearly 20 percent. Alcohol has a direct effect on circadian rhythms, diminishing the ability of the master biological clock to respond to the light cues that keep it in sync. Those effects of alcohol on the biological clock appear to persist even without additional drinking, according to research. Research shows that poor sleep quality and disrupted sleep raise heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood pressure while you sleep, which can stress the heart and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Anyone who has experienced a restless night after a few drinks can attest to alcohol’s disruptive effect on sleep.
Health Challenges
Moreover, it can take one hour for your body to process one serving of alcohol. If you’ve had several drinks, it’s best if your last drink is finished at least several hours before you go to sun rocks strain bed. While most people think REM sleep is the deepest stage of sleep, it’s actually the lightest sleep stage next to N1. The N3 sleep stage, where we experience slow-wave sleep, is the deepest stage of sleep. For most people, alcohol induces a deeper-than-usual sleep in the first half of the night, followed by disrupted sleep in the second half of the night. Dr. Iatridis says it’s important to stop drinking at least four hours before bed to prevent sleep disruption.
It may offer some temporary relief by raising your alcohol levels and masking symptoms like jitteriness or anxiety, says Marino. The only surefire way to prevent a hangover is to abstain from drinking, he says. And once you have a hangover, the only thing that will get you over it is time. At this point, you still have a high level of alcohol in your blood.
Finally, regular drinking has been linked to insomnia and other sleep disorders, especially later in life. 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.
Top 6 Bedtime Mocktails for Sleep
In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effects of alcohol use on sleep quality. Alcohol is a muscle relaxant, so consuming alcohol at bedtime can make a person more prone to experience a blocked airway. People who typically snore or who have obstructive sleep apnea tend to display more severe snoring and lower blood oxygen levels after drinking alcohol, especially when they drink close to bedtime. People who regularly drink alcohol are 25% more likely to have obstructive sleep apnea, although the connection may be partly due to other shared risk factors such as obesity. Disrupted sleep can increase the production of stress hormones like cortisol. People who get good-quality sleep typically have higher cortisol levels in the morning that decline throughout the day, reaching their lowest level at bedtime.
Unfortunately, no, says Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and an emergency physician at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. “I wish there was some magic drink everyone could have, but there isn’t.” By Lindsay CurtisCurtis is a writer with over 20 years of experience focused on mental health, sexual health, cancer care, and spinal health.