Counting Sheep: One woman’s real data on sleeping and drinking
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Sleep can be elusive for many middle-aged women, so when Laura* downloaded a sleep app, she was just curious about her sleeping patterns. What she stumbled across was surprising — the knowledge that something as innocuous as a cocktail or a glass of wine was having a deep impact on her quality of sleep.
Laura had been casually listening to health podcasts when her curiosity was piqued.
“They were talking about the importance of sleep, and not just regular sleep, but the importance of really deep sleep,” she says. She always felt she slept normally, but the podcasts ignited in her a harmless but compelling desire to map the nocturnal contours of what she thought would be average sleeping patterns.
“I always felt like I slept well,” Laura says. “Other than once in a while, I'm not the type that generally wakes up in the night and can't fall back to sleep right away. I never really thought I had an issue with sleeping. But I was curious more than anything — what does deep sleep really mean? And am I actually getting deep sleep? How much sleep am I actually getting?”
Spurred by this curiosity, Laura downloaded a sleep-monitoring app.
USING ALCOHOL TO FALL ASLEEP
After a few weeks of tracking her sleep with an app, Laura noticed two major things. “My quantity of deep sleep was much less on weekends after I had a few drinks,” Laura says. “And secondly, my heart rate stayed high for my entire sleep cycle — sometimes it would stay high at the beginning of the period of sleeping, and then it would finally start to come down towards the end of the sleeping period.”
Laura’s drinking habits could be considered casual: generally avoiding alcohol on weekdays, she would have a few drinks on Friday evening, throughout the day on Saturday, and a couple on Sunday afternoon. She had never considered that sleeping and drinking were related.
It was clear from the data that during the week when she made a more concerted effort to refrain from consuming alcohol, there was a noticeable difference. Her heart rate dropped fairly quickly at the start of her sleeping period, and remained low the whole night. “That results in deeper sleep,” she says. In other words, her sleep during the week was normal and healthy.
What Laura discovered about her sleeping patterns, especially those during leisurely weekends and on nights after one or two drinks, disproved a belief most people don’t ever question: alcohol carries you into a good, restful night’s sleep. This belief is more powerfully held than you might think. Twenty per cent of adults in the U.S. have used alcohol for the purpose of swiftly bringing on sleep.
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF SLEEP AND DRINKING
Abby Goldstein, Associate Chair of Applied Psychology and Human Development at University of Toronto, says Laura’s findings are something researchers have been aware of. “Alcohol is perceived as something that often facilitates sleep when in actual fact it's quite disruptive to sleep,” Goldstein says. “It disrupts the sleep cycle and leads to much poor sleep quality, even though it may help to increase the onset of sleep.”
Alcohol affects sleep in a very interesting and counterintuitive way. Sleep consists of two states, that of non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and REM sleep. When alcohol is present in the system, as you can see from Laura’s results, we are less likely to spend a significant amount of time in REM sleep in the first half of the night. The reason why this is troublesome is REM sleep is deeply restorative, it’s when we dream and process our emotions. As the night goes on and as the body metabolizes alcohol, “a rebound effect is observed and our ability to enter deep sleep is compromised,” writes biochemist Gillian Tietz, M.S.
This is the feeling of alertness you might have experienced in the middle of the night after an evening of drinking: you wake up abruptly, thirsty, feeling as though your sleep has been shallow, not all-consuming. This is what Tietz is talking about: “Since we are less able to enter deep sleep in the second half of the night, we wake up a lot.”
Deep sleep is responsible for the health and wellbeing of our bones, blood, and proper immune function. The sleep cycle after a night or day of drinking will be disrupted, and this means you are likely to wake up the next morning feeling as though your mind is muggy and your body exhausted.
Goldstein says this experience of a bad night’s sleep traps many in an unfortunate cycle. “Because [alcohol is] used as a way to induce sleep, but it actually leads to extremely poor quality sleep, there's that holdover of fatigue and difficulty falling asleep that sort of persists into the next day,” Goldstein says. “So it really contributes to a vicious cycle of cumulative poor sleep response.” In other words, groggy and tired after a night of restless sleep brought on by alcohol, you are more likely to turn to alcohol the following night to help bring on the restorative sleep your body craves. The next day, this vicious cycle will repeat.
DRINKING AND HOW IT AFFECTS WOMEN’S SLEEP
“I do know that women metabolize alcohol differently and because of that, they experience effects differently,” Goldstein says. “[Women] certainly experience the effects even at lower doses of alcohol. So that likely also has an impact just in [the sense that] lower doses of alcohol are likely to have a negative impact on sleep for women perhaps more so than they do for men.”
Indeed, over the course of the pandemic, the effects of alcohol on sleep for women have taken on a prickly texture.
“Groggy and tired after a night of restless sleep brought on by alcohol, you are more likely to turn to alcohol the following night to help bring on the restorative sleep your body craves. The next day, this vicious cycle will repeat.”
COVID-19 has affected women uniquely, and research on this is still just emerging. The U.S. National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report found that, compared to men, women reported experiencing more noticeable and pandemic-related changes in their sleep patterns, worries about their own and others’ health, productivity, mood, and a general frustration relating to an inability to do what they previously enjoyed doing. The report also found that the pandemic has had a greater emotional impact on women under 50 than on men. These effects of the pandemic on women are intricately entwined with women’s increasing alcohol consumption over the past year.
“One of the things I think about the pandemic in particular is just how much uncertainty has been associated with it, just not knowing what things are going to look like a week or a month down the road — that contributes to a lot of stress and anxiety that can lead to difficulty sleeping,” Goldstein says. “People who struggle with sleep often talk about how it's a time when your mind races, it goes back to all of the worries that you may have had during the day. And so the uncertainty of the pandemic and the worry that that's prompted is a major contributing factor to people struggling with sleep.” This brings us back to the vicious cycle that Goldstein mentioned earlier: sleeping troubles can lead to a dependency on alcohol, and alcohol brings on sleeping troubles.
DRINKING LESS TO SLEEP BETTER
Laura is grateful for the data she received from her sleep-tracking app for two linked and crucial reasons. First, it explains the fatigue, due to a rough night of sleep, she feels on Sundays. “I have always observed a general pattern just before I got the sleep app that I was always really, really tired on Sunday night,” Laura says. She explained this tiredness away, rationalizing that she was out late the night before — but this explanation left room for doubt. “I was sleeping in,” she explains. “So it's not like I was getting less sleep all the time. So, I did find that I was usually more fatigued on Sunday night, and then when I saw the pattern in the sleep app, it made sense — like, oh, that's probably why I'm fatigued, because I just had two nights of poor sleep.”
(Vladislav Muslakov/Unsplash)
The second reason why this data is crucial for Laura is because it is a path out of the vicious cycle Goldstein describes. Laura says that gaining a better understanding of how her body functions with alcohol, both during the day and night, has allowed her to be more cognizant of and intentional with her drinking habits.
“[I’m] still recognizing that maybe it's okay to have a glass of wine at dinner, but maybe after nine o'clock, I’ll switch to water, so that there's like more space between when I might have a drink and when I'm going to bed,” Laura says. “I think when I saw the hard and fast data about the impact [alcohol] was making on something that I know is really important to my health — this makes you more conscious.”
Laura is a generally healthy person, but she says that if she did have prior health concerns, this data about her sleep would be a very important component in spearheading a measurable lifestyle change. She recommends that others try tracking their sleep, especially on a night after drinking — it is a powerful illustration that prompts a visceral desire to rethink your relationship to alcohol, and can be a handy tool in informing the decisions you make if you choose to consume alcohol.
As a woman, Laura is very aware of the pandemic’s unique stresses, and she understands what it feels like to want to reach for a glass of wine after a particularly stressful day.
“I think being conscious of this [data] means I know the impact of [having] one glass of wine before bed,” Laura explains. “During the week when [consuming alcohol] might not normally be a habit, but when [...] you might be triggered by something stressful at work, or something in your external environment [like the pandemic], you're like, oh, I'll just have one drink tonight. I think that [this knowledge has] made me [understand that on] my weeknights [I should refrain]. I might still be indulging in a drink or two on the weekend, [and I know] it's going to impact my sleep on the weekends, but for workdays and for mental acuity, when [I know I need to be] at work the next day and all of that, [it’s important] recognizing that I shouldn't do that.”
Armed with her new arsenal of knowledge, Laura is rethinking drinking. “When you think, [this glass of wine is] going to affect my sleep, it's going to affect my ability to deal with whatever the stressful thing is today, and it's going to affect my ability to deal with it tomorrow,” Laura explains.
“[With this data], it feels more like black and white to me and helps me out in the decision-making,” she says.
*Name changed to protect interviewee’s privacy.
