The Sleep Fix by Diane Macedo

Author:Diane Macedo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2021-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Booze and Snooze

NOT A DAY PASSES THAT I don’t see an ad for some new drug or device claiming it can help me sleep (target marketing is on to me). But despite this booming industry, the most commonly used sleep aid is still an old favorite: alcohol.

According to the Sleep Foundation, “as many as 20 percent of Americans use alcohol to help them fall asleep.” It’s easy to see why: booze does help you fall asleep. Drink enough, and it can even make you pass out. For those with sleep problems, this can be especially tempting.

I can recall the many times I would have “one more drink” during our occasional early morning happy hour—for the sole purpose of getting that extra push to pass out once I got home from the night shift. And it would work . . . kind of. On those days I would get in bed, put my head on the pillow, and within minutes I was out. It was such a nice contrast to my usual routine of lying in bed awake and frustrated. But despite the popularity of the nightcap, alcohol is a terrible sleep aid, as I would come to learn a few hours later.

For starters, alcohol helps us fall asleep by boosting adenosine and relaxing our muscles, but the adenosine boost is short-lived, and that muscle relaxation also affects the throat muscles—making us more prone to snoring and sleep apnea. Then, as explained in chapter 10, as we sober up in our sleep, alcohol withdrawal messes with our body temperature rhythm, as well as our cortisol rhythm and melatonin rhythm. For those with restless legs syndrome, alcohol can also make that worse. And alcohol is a diuretic—it makes you pee and leaves you dehydrated, which can each wreck your sleep too.

So while we might fall asleep more easily after a few drinks, staying asleep is a different story. As our adenosine level comes down and our circadian wake signals start to fire off at the wrong times, our sleep is disrupted. Even more so if your breathing is interrupted or your legs are restless. For some, this might mean very brief awakenings that you’re not aware of, but that wreck the quality of your sleep. For others, like me, within a few hours you’re wide awake, heart racing, dehydrated, and unable to get back to sleep—despite feeling exhausted.

In an extra-cruel twist, Dr. Timothy Roehrs says his research shows someone with severe insomnia may not experience the negative effect on sleep right away. “When these people drink alcohol, their sleep is normalized,” he tells me. After a low dose of alcohol right before bed, “they fall asleep quickly, and they actually stay asleep the whole night.” But Roehrs, the director of research at the Sleep Disorders and Research Center of Henry Ford Health System, says after just three nights, insomniacs develop a tolerance to those initial sedating effects and the alcohol starts to disturb their sleep. The common response to this? Drink more the next night.

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