Ever noticed that you can't sleep after alcohol? Or felt like you spent all night waking up from drinking? A well-known benefit of cutting down on alcohol is that it improves the quality of your sleep. A better nights sleep is one of the motivations for many people who are sober curious, or trying mindful drinking.

Whilst people often feel like alcohol helps you sleep, it doesn't actually give you a better nights rest. It can help you feel sleepy initially and drop off quicker, but that's where its uses end! 

How Does Alcohol Affect Your Sleep?

Drinking alcohol, particularly just before bed, harms the quality of your sleep in multiple different ways.

Alcohol Is a Diuretic

This means that after drinking alcohol, you will need to go to the toilet more regularly all night, which can really affect your sleep. At the same time, it causes you to sweat more, meaning you will wake up dehydrated.

Alcohol Affects Your Circadian Rhythm

Drinking alcohol messes with your circadian rhythm. This is because alcohol affects the normal production of chemicals in your body.

The initial sleepiness caused by alcohol is due to the overproduction of adenosine, a sleep-triggering chemical. Because this is all released at once, as quickly as its been released, it subsides, meaning that you wake up in the night and struggle to get back to sleep.  

In the long term, problems with your circadian rhythm can cause sleep disorders or other health complications because it leads to disruptive, non-restorative sleep.

You Get Less Deep Sleep

Drinking alcohol can cause you to spend more time in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is less restorative and is typically the sleep period when you have dreams.

To have a fully restorative night's sleep and wake up feeling refreshed, you need to spend some time in deep sleep. But alcohol and deep sleep do not go well together. Deep sleep is hard to reach with alcohol, not only because it affects the chemicals helping you get there but because it takes time to get into the deep sleep phase of sleep. If you keep waking up all night, you are less likely to get there.

Alcohol Increases The Chance of Sleep Apnoea

We all know that people tend to snore more when they drink alcohol. This can be disruptive and be a sign of a more serious sleep disorder: sleep apnoea.

Sleep apnoea is a sleep disorder that causes temporary loss of breath or abnormal sleeping patterns during sleep, causing your sleep to be less restful and restorative. That means your body doesn't get a full chance to heal and can cause you to be exhausted and lack energy during the day time. 

Alcohol causes the throat muscles to relax, which disturbs breathing and causes more resistance in the throat. This can be enough to trigger obstructive sleep apnoea.

Cutting Down on Alcohol Can Help You Sleep Better

An easy way to get better and more refreshing sleep is to cut down on or cut out alcohol. It already helps not to drink directly before bed.

If you stop drinking up to four hours before you go to bed, you might find an improvement in sleep. But the best way to improve your sleep is to cut down or cut out alcohol altogether.

Other Ways to Get Better Sleep

There are many other tips and tricks for getting a better night's sleep:

• Try and keep a regular sleep schedule so that your body clock knows when to sleep and wake up.

• Practice good sleep hygiene, including not using screens before bed, sleeping in a dark room and using a comfortable mattress and pillow.

• Try meditating before you go to sleep to calm your mind down from a potentially busy or stressful day.

• Gentle yoga or stretching can also calm your body down in preparation for going to sleep.

Enjoy Alcohol-Free Alternatives to Get a Better Night’s Sleep

If that sounds dull to you, then you haven’t tasted an alcohol-free alternative. Head to the JOMO bottle shop, and you will find a huge range of delicious alcohol alternatives which give you the experience of drinking alcohol but with none of the negative side effects.

Want to motivate yourself to get better sleep? Sign up for a JOMO subscription box and receive delicious alcohol-free drinks directly to your front door once a month. You’ll get delicious drinks and sleep like a baby! What more could you want?