This article is part of The Belief Bucket series, where we examine ten common beliefs about alcohol.
- Introduction: What is the Belief Bucket?
- Belief #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax)
- Belief #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy)
- Belief #3 – Reward (Alcohol is my reward)
- Belief #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering only the good times)
- Belief #5 – Taste (Alcohol tastes amazing)
- Belief #6 – Social Ally (Alcohol helps me socially)
- Belief #7 – Sleep (Alcohol helps me sleep) ← you’re here
- Belief #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession)
- Belief #9 – Boredom (Alcohol solves boredom)
- Belief #10 – The Buzz (Alcohol feels amazing)
We can have a few drinks, fall asleep within minutes and still wake up at three in the morning feeling wide awake. We might be thirsty, anxious, sweating or unable to get comfortable. Then we lie there for hours, drift in and out of sleep and wake up feeling terrible.
And we can still say, "Alcohol helps me sleep." That’s because we’re remembering how quickly we fell asleep. We’re not always thinking about the rest of the night.
Alcohol can make us drowsy. For heavy drinkers, it might knock us out very quickly. But being knocked out isn’t the same as getting good sleep.
Why this belief feels so true
Many of us started drinking at night because it seemed to switch our brain off.
We could be tired but unable to switch off. Our thoughts were going, we felt restless and we knew we had to be up again in the morning.
Then we drank, felt calmer and fell asleep. So of course it looked like alcohol had helped us relax and solved the problem.
And when something works that quickly, we tend to remember it. The problem is that we could be judging the whole night by the first twenty minutes. That was only the start of it.
Falling asleep is only the beginning
Alcohol can help us fall asleep faster, but it can also make our sleep lighter and more broken later on. We might wake several times without remembering all of them. Other times, we wake properly in the early hours and can’t get back to sleep.
Even if we stay in bed for eight hours, that doesn’t mean we’ve had eight hours of decent sleep. We know the difference when we get up. Our mouth is dry. Our head feels heavy. We’re tired before the day has even started. We’ve technically slept, but we don’t feel rested.
So when we say alcohol helped us sleep, it’s worth asking what we mean.
Did it help us fall asleep, or did it help us sleep well?
Why we wake up in the early hours
The drowsy feeling doesn’t last all night. Our body tries to balance alcohol. While the drink is slowing us down, our brain and nervous system work harder to keep us going.
Then as the alcohol wears off, we might feel wide awake, restless or anxious. And for some of us, withdrawal could already have been starting. So we fell asleep quickly, but the second half of the night was broken, uncomfortable or completely gone.
The tiredness can keep the drinking going
Poor sleep can make the rest of the day harder as well. We drag ourselves through the day, rely on caffeine, feel irritable and have less patience than usual.
By late afternoon, we’re exhausted. We want something that will help us switch off, and alcohol looks like the answer again. So we drink, fall asleep quickly, sleep badly and wake up tired. And by the next evening, we’re so worn out that another drink looks tempting.
After a while, feeling worn out can start to seem normal. We might not realise how much of it is coming from the way we’re sleeping.
Then we start thinking alcohol is helping us recover from the day. But it could be one of the reasons every day feels so hard.
The first nights without alcohol may feel different
If we’ve used alcohol to fall asleep for a long time, we might not sleep perfectly as soon as we stop. We could take longer to fall asleep. Sleep might be light or broken, and our thoughts can feel more noticeable because we’re no longer knocking ourselves out.
That doesn’t prove we need alcohol to sleep. Alcohol had become part of what our body expected at night. Sleeping normally again could take some time. That difficult sleep doesn't mean alcohol is the answer. Another drink may knock us out again, but it also resets the same sleep and alcohol cycle.
So one difficult night doesn’t tell us what our sleep will be like from now on.
Look at the whole night
So look at more than how quickly we fell asleep. What time did we wake up? How often were we awake? How did we feel in the morning? And how much energy did we have during the day?
We could even keep a short note for a week or two. Nothing complicated. Just when we went to bed, how the night went and how we felt the next day.
After a week or two, we might start seeing what the alcohol is really doing to our sleep.
Alcohol might have knocked us out. But if we woke up shattered, anxious and desperate to get through another day, it wasn’t giving us the sleep we needed.
Next, we’ll look at whether moderate drinking is still an option.
— Brent
Next in the series: Belief #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession) →