How to stop alcohol from ruining your sleep (a kebab won’t help)

Last Friday I celebrated the end of another week with a glass of rosé. The evening was sunny, the work done and the weekend stretched out invitingly before me.
Of course one glass led to another — both possibly larger than they should have been — and boom, at about 3am I found myself awake, with my head fuzzy and mouth dry, feeling both shrivelled and also desperate to pee. My brain was wired and racing. Just before dawn I finally fell back into a fitful sleep that left me deeply unrested the next day.
We’ve all been there, especially in the summer months, when even something as seemingly innocuous as a post-work drink in the pub on a Thursday evening can write Friday off.
What can we do about it? Not indulging at all is the obvious answer, but if you’ve accidentally gone slightly over the limit is there anything that will mitigate the effects?
It’s tempting to think a glass or two will help us sleep. And it’s true that after drinking we will often drop off faster than usual, because alcohol is a relaxant that decreases our sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep).
However, the sleep scientist Dr Caroline Horton warns that drinking will also have an impact on the depth and quality of our deep and light sleep cycles, which our body needs for rejuvenation. Hence we often feel more tired the day after a night before — even if technically we’ve had as many hours in bed as usual.
The reason we often find ourselves waking in the small hours after drinking is because alcohol also affects rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. A full night of uninterrupted sleep will transition through these stages (of light, deep and REM sleep) in roughly 90-minute cycles, but we will often wake briefly between cycles. These awakenings are, Horton says, “usually micro-awakenings, when we’re just going into or coming out of a period of REM. But if there are other things in the environment that we experience at those times” — such as the room spinning, our head hurting or needing the lavatory because we’ve drunk too much — “that’s when those things can wake us up.” If we do get back to REM sleep it will be short, with more brain awakenings, and throwing the latter half of our night’s sleep into total disarray.
All this is compounded by what’s going on with our sugar levels. Blood glucose is affected by sleep. It naturally drops during the night, as we don’t need the sugar for energy.But in order to process alcohol the liver must stop releasing glucose, which can cause our blood sugar levels to fall quickly.
“The liver is responsible for metabolising and getting rid of the alcohol, and also for maintaining our glucose levels between meals,” explains Professor John Whitehead, a biochemist. “Our body strives to maintain homeostasis [balance] and responds to challenges by prioritising. So the liver can take its eye off the ball in terms of maintaining glucose levels if it’s dealing with a large amount of alcohol.”
If you’re committed to (gentle) hedonism, there are some things you can do. First, take a look at what you’re drinking and don’t assume that low-alcohol versions of things are necessarily the solution. Something with a low alcohol content — a low-ABV wine or beer, for example — will typically still have a high sugar content. Popular red wines such as Yellow Tail Jammy Red Roo can contain more than 25g of sugar in a bottle, which will definitely mess with your glycogen levels (the excess glucose stored by the liver as a way of maintaining glucose levels between meals).
High-alcohol spirits won’t have the same effect on sugar levels, but the high ABV will compromise your liver and other tissues — so it’s better to dilute it with, say, soda water. Beer has a higher water content than most booze but you’ll still be dehydrated in the morning because alcohol paralyses the anti-diuretic hormone produced by the posterior pituitary gland, promoting water loss through urine on those night-time trips to the toilet.
Don’t get that kebab. In fact, avoid eating before bed altogether — mainlining something carb-heavy such as toast or chips might feel as if it’s soaking up the alcohol, but it is also adding to the carb load your poor body is having to deal with. “Drink early, eat early, don’t eat too many carbs and then don’t eat for at least two hours before you go to bed, because your system needs time to do the housekeeping,” Whitehead advises.
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The same goes for popping a couple of paracetamol before you go to bed. You might think you’re doing yourself a favour, but that’s just another thing for your liver to metabolise.
Do drink water before you go to bed (or, better, throughout the evening): it will wake you up to use the loo, but you’re going to do that anyway. Plus your body will be essentially in liquid withdrawal — you’ve been putting lots of drinks in your mouth all evening and then you’ve suddenly stopped, hence the dry mouth that wakes you up.
Don’t think that falling into bed at midnight will counteract waking a couple of hours later. “The best thing we can do is try to get to sleep at the normal time,” Horton advises. “Staying up really late already reduces our ability to get the optimal number of sleep stages, so having that glass of wine a bit earlier means we’re not impeding our normal sleep habits.”
One small silver lining: recent research found that a daytime cup of coffee counteracts the bad sleep quality induced by alcohol, although it doesn’t mitigate it entirely, and it only really counts if you’ve had just the one coffee and one glass of wine. In other words, there are only two real solutions: don’t drink at all — or embrace a lunchtime boozing session.