Why Alcohol Might Make You Sleepy, But Not Sleep Better

After a long day, there is something quite appealing about having a drink in the evening. You feel yourself relaxing, your thoughts slow down and eventually you feel sleepy. A perfect de-stressor.

So if alcohol makes you fall asleep faster, surely it must help you sleep? Not quite.

Alcohol is a depressant. It slows down activity in the brain and body which is why it can make you feel relaxed and drowsy. This can make it easier to fall asleep, particularly if you are feeling stressed or wound up. But falling asleep isn't the same thing as getting good quality sleep.

by Perveen Kaur

Quality Of Sleep

Sleep is highly important. It is critical to mental and physical development. While we sleep, our body repairs itself, supports memory consolidation, learning and emotional regulation. This occurs with the cycles of sleep that our brain and body goes through.

When sleep is disrupted because we wake up early say, or because the quality of the sleep isn't at good due to things like alcohol, these processes are disrupted. This can lead to sleep deprivation, which can affect your body, mood, concentration, even immune responses and other health factors.

Sedation Isn't Sleep

When ethanol enters the brain, it changes the activity of several different brain systems. At higher levels it has a sedating effect, which is why you can become sleepy and eventually fall asleep after drinking. The problem is that the brain doesn't simply switch off and stay in a nice, peaceful sleeping state for the rest of the night.

Alcohol can alter the normal pattern of sleep, including reducing rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. It can also make sleep more fragmented and increase the likelihood of waking up earlier. So you might fall asleep quickly but wake up feeling like you haven't really had a proper night's sleep.

The Alcohol Wearing Off

There is another part to this. As the body processes the ethanol, the level of alcohol in the bloodstream gradually falls. The sedating effect therefore doesn't simply continue throughout the night.

The brain has to keep adjusting to the changing chemical environment created by the alcohol and then its removal. This can contribute to disturbed sleep as the night goes on. When you had your last drink and how much you have drunk during the hours before, can impact this even more. If you had a lot of alcohol, your body will continue to breakdown alcohol well into the early hours of the morning.

This is one of those situations where something can appear to work because of its immediate effect while actually interfering with the thing we wanted in the first place. Alcohol makes you sleepy and sleep is what you actually wanted. But alcohol doesn't give you a good quality of sleep. Evidence suggests that one drink is enough to affect REM sleep.

Our bodies evolved to regulate sleep according to internal biological rhythms and environmental signals. Modern alcoholic drinks are a potent external chemical that changes the brain's activity, rather than being part of the normal machinery of sleep.

So if the goal is sleep, alcohol might get you unconscious quicker, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is helping you sleep better.