Alcohol use and poor sleep quality: a longitudinal twin study across 36 years PMC

Again, differing definitions and measurement of insomnia and alcohol dependence, as well as varied case mix among the samples, make comparison of these studies difficult. Chronic insomnia is generally defined as difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep for a period longer than three weeks. Briefer periods of sleep disturbance are most often stress-related or due to acute illness (4).

• Some have argued that misuse of this class of medications is most common in severely dependent patients, and that less dependent patients may have little abuse potential (81,82).
• For the low SWS group, REM sleep exceeded baseline on the second withdrawal night (Supplementary Fig. S3).
• Sleep architecture is biologically driven and finely calibrated to meet the body’s needs during nightly rest—changes to the natural, typical structure of sleep aren’t generally good for health or well being.
• Participants were categorized as “heavy drinkers”, “moderate drinkers”, “light drinkers” and “abstainers”.
• However, whether this difference in impairment between the sexes is due to differences in their sleep behaviour or in their susceptibility to the resultant impairments remains unclear.

How to sleep better after drinking alcohol

Once alcohol is eliminated from the body, however, these adjustments result in sleep disruption. This hypothesis is supported by the known rate of alcohol metabolism, which leads to a decrease in BrAC of 0.01 to 0.02 percent per hour. One reasonable conclusion is that if risky drinking and AUD cause insomnia and disturbances in sleep architecture, then successfully treating AUD would also treat sleep disturbances. However, such data are limited, largely because of the lack of studies and paucity of effective treatments for AUD. Acamprosate was approved by the FDA in 2004 as a medication for the treatment of AUD 257.

How Alcohol Affects Your Sleep

Gabapentin, an anticonvulsant, in an open label, uncontrolled study, also showed promise as a safe and effective treatment for alcohol-dependent patients with insomnia during early recovery (88). As shown in Table 1–6, most studies of the effects of acute alcohol on sleep either did not investigate female subjects or had sample sizes that were too small to evaluate possible sex differences in the data. The two studies with sufficient numbers of men and women reported different results. Arnedt et al. 40 found that drinking to does alcohol help you sleep intoxication resulted in more sleep disturbances (i.e., decrease in sleep efficiency and increase in wakefulness) but a similar impact on sleep architecture (i.e., %SWS and %REM sleep) in healthy women compared with men. However, Chan et al. 42 found no sex differences in the effects of alcohol on sleep in older adolescents.

General Health

• Anyone experiencing insomnia should speak with a doctor to learn more about what treatments may work best for them.
• These effects, plus the alcohol-induced release of GABA in the brainstem 100, may also play a role in alcohol’s suppression of REM sleep in the context of high doses of alcohol.
• Participants were asked to report the number of alcoholic drinks they had consumed in the last 7 days.
• Prinz et al. 45 reported a decrease on night 1 that was still present on night 9 for the first half of the night but did not present data for the second half.
• Research shows that between 33% and 40% of people who consume alcohol experience mild to severe anxiety.

Researchers from a 2020 study concluded that those with AUD need at least 5–9 months of abstaining from drinking in order to normalize their sleep duration and rhythm, so try to be patient with yourself during this time. 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. Alcohol use and dependence appear to interfere with circadian rhythms—biological patterns that operate on a 24-hour clock.

Understanding the effects of alcohol on sleep

A subset of 15 of the AUD subjects was followed for a further 12 months and had significantly higher amplitudes of the average K-complex response 84. Finally, in the Willoughby et al. study 76 above, no further recovery was observed in either the proportion of trials in which K-complexes were elicited or the amplitude of the average K-complex response at 3 months sober over that seen at 1 month sober. Alcohol’s sedative actions on the central nervous system (CNS) can lead to sleepiness and sleep. Thus, over the duration of an extended period of sleep, blood levels of alcohol and major metabolites (e.g., acetaldehyde and acetate) vary substantially and are expected to impact sleep differently at different points in the sleep cycle. In addition to the direct effect of alcohol and metabolites on sleep and possible early withdrawal opponent processes, it is also necessary to consider more prosaic secondary effects, such as diuresis, on sleep disturbances.

Finally, several papers in the past have highlighted REM latency or some measure of the intensity of eye movements in REM as distinguishing features of sleep in alcoholics 5. Although these measures are indeed interesting, we have chosen to focus on the percentage of REM as a key measure in this review. This decision was based on the practical consideration that many more papers report REM% than the other measures. Regarding alcohol use disorder (AUD), research consistently indicates a high comorbidity with insomnia, with a large proportion of AUD patients reporting insomnia symptoms either whilst drinking or during recovery 13, 14.

• This provides enough room to enjoy an after-work cocktail with friends, indulge in a glass of wine at your favorite restaurant, and crack open a beer after a weekend’s worth of chores around the house—all without interfering with healthy sleep and circadian rhythms.
• Furthermore, long-term consequences of alcohol may lead to changes in sleep regulation.
• In an alcohol challenge study, in which healthy young men received a certain alcohol dose, the men’s drinking histories predicted their subjective responses to alcohol (Schuckit and Klein 1991).
• Another limitation is that we were not able to capture fully patterns of consumption in terms of binging.
• For the second half of the night, both studies reported decreases in SWS that stayed flat over the three nights (Fig. 2).
• The interactions between alcohol use disorders, affective disorders, and sleep disturbance remain understudied, but it is clear that sleep problems in substance-using patients often have more than one cause.