How Do Alcohol And Caffeine Affect Our Sleep?

For as long as I can remember, have been struggling with sleeping on time. Have you ever had those days where you’re sleepy all day long and then suddenly post 7 pm-8 pm you’re so active as though you won’t require sleep for days?

Yeah? Well, that was my life. Every single day!

It was affecting my mental health, my weight, my job, my career, and was also affecting my mood a lot as well. It needed to stop, so I did what every person would have done today, I hit Google.

I realized that amongst other things, coffee was the biggest culprit here. Many of us like to start our day with a cup of coffee, we need coffee even before we brush our teeth or go take a bath! It is an ADDICTION. Likewise, it is an obvious and comforting thing we will end our day with that glass of wine.

So, let me tell you the surprising effects caffeine and alcohol have on our sleep. Starting with the love of my life, caffeine. Caffeine is a part of the class of drugs that we call psychoactive stimulants, and everyone knows that caffeine makes us psycho! But yes, caffeine makes us more alert. It gives us that morning kick that we need to survive (clearly I’m pretty sentimental about my love, hence comparing it to my basic survival). But there are two additional features of caffeine that most people are not aware of, let’s get into it.

CAFFEINE

1. The duration of the action of caffeine

For an average adult, caffeine has what we call about half-life i.e. about 5–6 hours. What that means is that even after half an hour 50% of that caffeine still circulates in your system, what it also means is that caffeine has a quarter-life of about 10–12 hours. Say you had a cup of coffee at 2 pm, chances are that 25 percent of that coffee is still swilling around in your brain at midnight and naturally as a result this makes it harder for an individual to fall asleep or to stay asleep soundly for a long period.

2. Changing the quality of sleep

Now the second issue with caffeine is that it causes a hindrance to the quality of your sleep. I have been one of those individuals who would just have a shot of espresso and go to sleep immediately and stay asleep all night long, but what caffeine does is that it decreases the amount of deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep that we have. That is the restorative part of sleep. As a result, we wake up the next morning not feeling refreshed or restored by our sleep and move towards having two cups of coffee.

Did you know that caffeine was banned or restricted by anti-doping sports authorities from 1984 to 2004??

Moving on to alcohol and how it affects our sleep.

Alcohol

I know what you’re thinking, but believe me, alcohol is one of the most misunderstood sleep aids out there. It is anything but a sleep aid. It affects our sleep in two ways —

1. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call sedatives

Sedation is not the same as sleep, they are two different things. Sedation is where we are simply switching off the firing of the brain cells, particularly in the cortex, and that is definitely not natural sleep. In fact, in the deep non-rapid eye movement sleep the brain has this remarkable coordination where hundreds of thousands of cells fire together and then they all go silent and then fire together again, creating these amazing big powerful brain waves of deep non-REM sleep.

2. Fragments your sleep

The second problem with alcohol is that it can fragment your sleep. Alcohol tends to trigger and activate during your sleep the “fight or flight” branch of the nervous system, which of course results in your waking up more frequently throughout the night and alcohol increases the amount of alerting chemicals throughout the night that are released by your brain, once again ruining your deep sleep.

REM or Rapid eye movement sleep actually provides a lot of benefits. It improves your emotional and mental health and also increases and benefits your creativity.

Because sleep health has to be our number one priority.