Sober Curious by Ruby Warrington

Author:Ruby Warrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Blissful Sleep Piece

You know what else costs nothing and is about one of the best things for your mental, emotional, and physical well-being? A good night’s sleep.

It’s just coming up on 6 a.m. as I begin writing this section. Yes, I am a morning person—but not usually this morning, as I’m actually in what I call “jetlag training” ahead of an upcoming work and family trip from NYC to the UK. A week before I make the journey I begin setting my alarm ten to twenty minutes earlier each day, until I’m waking between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. The idea (and it really works) is to mitigate the impact of the transatlantic time difference. Because you know what’s the worst? Being shocked out of deep, middle-of-the-night sleep by your alarm going off five hours ahead of schedule—and it being time to get up.

For me, this is usually accompanied by a foggy head, an aching, empty feeling in my chest, and a creeping sense of dread/extreme grumpiness. And knowing what I know now about how alcohol affects our sleep patterns, when I look back at my drinking years it’s like I was permanently jet-lagged—the sensation of the very worst jet-lag being not entirely dissimilar to the grogginess of a lingering three-day hangover.

Alcohol is one of the most common self-administered sleep aids, with an estimated 20 percent of Americans using booze to help them nod off. But as you will discover as soon as you remove it from your life, overall it has the opposite effect on sleep. I mentioned “dramatically improved sleep” as one of the main benefits for me of not drinking, and I am actually going to go right ahead and upgrade this one to MY VERY FAVORITE THING ABOUT NOT DRINKING.

Because sleep, people.

I have a friend who describes the velvety blackout sleep that the human body uses to restore energy, repair muscles, and reset our hormonal systems as “orgasmic sleep.” It’s the kind of sleep where you wake up feeling so deeply satisfied, your physical and psychic energies so replenished, that you can’t wipe the smile off your face. The kind of sleep your body is letting you know it likes a lot. And the kind of sleep I get a lot of nights since getting Sober Curious.

To any new parents out there, I apologize if this comes off as annoyingly smug. But to the same new (and not so new) parents who may be using wine as a swift way to transition from kid-mode into me-time at the end of another tantraumatic day, know that any amount of Sober Curious sleep is better than an entire grown-ups-only weekend’s worth of mildly sozzled sleep.

Why? It’s all about our “sleep architecture”—or the basic structure of a night’s sleep. Normally, we cycle between two types of sleep: non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. The sedative effects of booze make it easier to slip into NREM sleep, but REM sleep—when our muscles are completely paralyzed as we roam through

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