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Is alcohol a useful sleep aid?

Paradox74

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I have two questions for anyone who can shed light on this topic:

First, is there any evidence that shows the effects of alcohol on sleep?

Second, I've heard that you are warmed up by consuming alcohol because your heart has to pump out more blood due to the level of alcohol in the blood. Because of this, some people can sweat and perspire alot when they have drank a bottle of beer. Is there any truth to this?

I'm a little confused about the latter since I always thought that alcohol was supposed to be some kind of a depressant.

Posts and comments are appreciated.
 
A beer or two makes many people feel sleepy, including me.

Doctors don't recommend alcohol as sleep medicine because it might easily lead to a cycle of increasing tolerance and increasing doses.
 
Paradox74 said:
Second, I've heard that you are warmed up by consuming alcohol because your heart has to pump out more blood due to the level of alcohol in the blood. Because of this, some people can sweat and perspire alot when they have drank a bottle of beer. Is there any truth to this?

I'm a little confused about the latter since I always thought that alcohol was supposed to be some kind of a depressant.

Posts and comments are appreciated.
Click to expand...

Alcohol dilutes blood vessels which allows blood to flow more easily to your extremities, making you feel warmer. But this decreases the amount of blood in your torso, causing your core body temperature to drop. Not something you want if you're in a freezing cold environment.

The Mythbusters demonstrated this when Adam and Jamie swallowed pills containing thermometers and stayed in a large freezer. They used IR cameras to see that their extremities warmed up, but the pills showed their core temps dropped.

Steve S
 
Re. question two: Alcohol is a vasodilator, i.e. expands blood vessels, in particular the capillaries underneath the skin. Expanding vessels means more blood volume, that means lowering blood pressure. It also throws off the heat regulatory mechanism, as more heat is transported by the increased blood flow. Skin feels warmer, sweat production is increased. The body actually looses more heat this way despite the fact that one feels warmer. That's why drinking alcohol to warm up is a bad idea.
 
Anecdotal-

I've heard people say that they drink to help them sleep. They claim it works wonders and gets them groggy and zoned out very quickly.

I've had the exact reverse experience. Drinking makes me want to dance, jump, listen to pounding music, scream, shout, do something wild, make out with someone, etc. It makes me louder, a bit more reckless and more energetic.

And, oddly enough, I've seen a ton of people trying to do push ups or other physical exercises (including yoga poses!) when drunk.

(Anyone else ever see that? For some reason, a lot of people do that when they've had a lot of booze. :confused: Why? Why does drinking make you want to try to do the push ups you can't do when you are sober? Does anyone have any theories?)

Sidenote: the same paradox exists with marijuana.

Some people say that it makes them very sleepy and helps them sleep- but in my (admittedly very limited) experience, it makes me more alert and "buzzed".
 
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Since I've stopped drinking it's been harder for me to get to sleep at night, but the benefits outweigh the costs in my case.
 
Drink enough and you'll pass out without even wanting to.

Late at night a number of drinks certainly helps me get to sleep but - purely anecdotally - I'd say I wake feeling dehydrated and groggy. There's no spring in my step first thing ;) In short, I doubt that alcohol does your quality of sleep much good.
 
But having a shot of alcohol once you come in from the cold will help warm you up. More blood to the skin picks up heat in the warm room.

But hmmm, would there be a positive effect on a hot dry day? More blood flow to surface would mean better cooling? Good on hot dry days, bad on hot, humid days when sweat is in-effective?

So there may be benefits of consciously aiding your homeostasis? What say the scientific minded participants here?
 
Overall, the effects are detrimental. http://cme.medscape.com/viewarticle/497982
"...although alcohol may be effective in sleep induction, it impairs sleep during the second half of the night and can lead to a reduction in overall sleep time. As a result, it can also be associated with daytime somnolence. It is of interest that alcohol's negative effects on sleep are even observed when it is ingested in the late afternoon.

Insomnia is often a chronic condition, and chronic reliance on alcohol increases the risk of development of alcohol dependence and alcoholism."

ETA, google "Alcohol effects on sleep" to get the Medscape article, if the link doesn't work.
 
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Paradox74 said:
First, is there any evidence that shows the effects of alcohol on sleep?
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Alcohol is basically a poison that interferes with the normal operation of your body and requires resources to remove from your system. Since one of the normal operations of your body is staying conscious, a drink or seven will disrupt your brain functioning enough to make that activity impossible. The energy expended ridding your body of the alcohol will also tire you out and help you sleep.

Overall, it's a bad sleep aid.
 
Hops (one of the ingredients of beer) have been traditionally considered to have a soporific effect. I don´t know how much evidence there is for this though.
 
I just realized I wrote 'dilutes' instead of 'dilates.' D'oh.

It usually takes me a while to fall asleep. I toss and turn quite a bit. I find that a shot of alcohol usually helps me get to sleep faster. The problem is that I usually don't have any around the house.

Steve S
 
I know people who don't snore normally, but do snore when they fall asleep after a snootful. (Hmm, perhaps that's one reason why it's called a "snootful"?) Snoring is a symptom of (and apparently, both a cause and an effect of) poor quality unrestful sleep.

Alcohol might help make you sleepy and fall asleep, but the quality of your sleep will likely be reduced. By quality I mean the progression through the different stages of sleep in their correct proportions and durations to make you feel rested afterward. Sleep has a fairly complex structure and timing; perhaps not surprisingly, an alcohol impaired brain won't do it as well.

That, at least, was the general consensus in the field of sleep medicine in the 80s and early 90s when I was working as a data acquisition technologist in a sleep research lab. (However, that lab was not testing alcohol effects.)

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Paradox74 said:
I have two questions for anyone who can shed light on this topic:

First, is there any evidence that shows the effects of alcohol on sleep?

Second, I've heard that you are warmed up by consuming alcohol because your heart has to pump out more blood due to the level of alcohol in the blood. Because of this, some people can sweat and perspire alot when they have drank a bottle of beer. Is there any truth to this?

I'm a little confused about the latter since I always thought that alcohol was supposed to be some kind of a depressant.

Posts and comments are appreciated.
Click to expand...
It puts me to sleep but a few hours later it wakes me up and I feel like hell the next day.
 
As someone who fairly frequently uses alcohol to get to sleep, I have some experience here.

Alcohol definitely works as a sleep aid, but for me, it has to be something like whiskey, otherwise I'll just need to pee a lot if I'm downing large amounts of something weaker like beer. It does cause a bad quality of sleep though, and it also causes me to wake up in the night.

It's only a good solution if you were not going to get any sleep at all otherwise. It will gradually make it harder to get to sleep in future nights, too.

I use it if it becomes clear to me that without drinking, I'm not going to get any sleep at all. For instance, if it's 2 in the morning, I've been trying to get to sleep for hours, and I'm getting all worked up and cannot relax any more because I have to work in 5 hours, then I'll down a few shots of whiskey and be sleeping within 30 minutes. As a long term solution it's terrible, but used in isolation it actually works great as opposed to having a totally sleepless and stressful night.

It does make you feel crappy the next day, but so do most doctor approved sleep-aids, and the same goes for dependance etc. I can't see that it's greatly inferior to other sleep aids.
 
If you're having trouble sleeping because your back hurts or something, try wanking. It works surprisingly well; you get strongly diminished pain for about 5 minutes, during which you can drift off to sleep.
 
Not sure about alchohol, but when I was a teenager I used the B vitamin Niacin as a sleep aid. I don't know if that was a good idea or not, and eventually decided to stop doing so, but it seemed pretty effective.

I'd take half a tablet, which, about half an hour (or so, I don't remember exactly), after taking it would induce a "niacin flush", where your whole body turns pink as the blood moves to the skin. You feel really hot and maybe a little itchy.

About fifteen minutes before the flush, though, you get really sleepy. So, you just have to fall asleep during that drowsy period, and then it's all good, you sleep right through the flush.

The first time I took a niacin tablet I freaked out and had to go sit outside in minus 20 degree weather until it wore off (about 20 minutes).

These days I just have a piece of toast or two before bed, and if I have any trouble sleeping I get up and read a book until I start to feel sleepy. For naps I prefer listening to an audio book until I drift off.
 
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