What Science Really Says About Drinking Before Bed

There’s a lot of evidence that drinking before bed is doing you no favors in the sleep department. Most experts ? including the National Sleep Foundation ? put avoiding alcohol in the evening on the list of things to do to improve your slumber.

But as the temperatures start to fall and red wine season begins, is a little vino before bed really going to wreck our rest?

“Initially you might feel sleepy and fall asleep easily, but you end up awakening more often in the middle of the night and the alcohol has a disruptive effect on sleep,” Timothy Roehrs, director of research at the Sleep Disorders and Research Center of Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, told The Huffington Post.

Cabernet lovers everywhere, take note: That doesn’t mean one nightcap will guarantee a night of tossing and turning. “Usually it takes more than one drink to have any disruptive effects on sleep,” Roehrs said. 

Here’s everything you need to know about drinking before bed:

Why alcohol is so bad for your sleep

Alcohol knocks you out.

At first alcohol does make you drowsy, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever indulged in a glass of wine at the end of a long day.

Studies that compared brain activity in individuals after drinking with brain activity when the same people were sober show that our brains actually “turn off” quicker (and subsequently we fall asleep faster) after imbibing. The same sleep-inducing effect happens after drinking during the day, Roehrs said.

Unfortunately for our sleep, that’s not the end of the story.

As we move through our first cycle of sleep ? and sometimes the second cycle of sleep, depending on how many drinks we’ve had ? alcohol actually suppresses rapid eye movement sleep, Roehrs explained. REM is our lightest stage of sleep, when we dream and when a key part of the learning process happens that makes long-term memories “stick.” 

You’ll be tired and irritable the next day.

Instead during those first cycles of sleep, we fall (and stay) in the deepest and most restorative stage of sleep: slow wave sleep.

This sounds good, but research suggests after drinking, the quality of that deep sleep isn’t quite the same caliber our bodies tend to hit on nights we don’t imbibe ? and this lack of quality is linked to daytime drowsiness, headaches and irritability the next day.

You’ll wake up in the middle of the night.

What’s more, as our bodies metabolize the alcohol (i.e., as blood alcohol concentration returns to 0), our sleep experiences a rebound effect, Roehrs said. During that second half of the night, our bodies ? in an effort to make up for what was lost earlier in the night ? spend more time in REM sleep.