Alcohol and Sleep

Many people use alcohol to help them sleep, believing it helps them fall asleep faster and stay asleep through the night.

However, while it might make you feel sleepy at first, alcohol often makes sleep worse overall.

Drinking too much alcohol, especially later in the evening, can seriously disturb your sleep. It can stop you from getting the deep, restful sleep your body and brain need. You may wake up feeling tired, groggy and low on energy – often without realising that alcohol is the reason.

Poor sleep night after night can build up and start to affect your health, mood and wellbeing.

Alcohol can be a headache in various ways, including its impact on sleep:

Alcohol can interfere with your body’s natural sleep rhythm. This can make it harder to fall asleep, cause restless sleep, and lead to waking up during the night.

Alcohol isn’t the only thing that can disrupt sleep. Light plays a big role too. In the evening, blue light from screens such as TVs, phones, and tablets reduces the amount of melatonin your body makes. Melatonin is the hormone that helps you feel sleepy. Less melatonin means it’s harder to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Combining alcohol with late‑night screen time can make sleep problems even worse.

Losing quality sleep

While alcohol may help you fall asleep at first, it often disrupts your sleep later in the night. It causes many short awakenings that you won’t remember, which is why you wake up feeling like you haven’t slept well. Alcohol also reduces dream sleep, one of the most refreshing and important stages of sleep.

Snoring

Drinking large amounts of alcohol can make breathing more difficult during sleep and increase snoring. Alcohol relaxes the muscles in your jaw and throat more than usual, allowing them to droop and narrow your airway. This makes it harder for air to flow freely, causing vibrations that lead to snoring.

Too many loo breaks

Alcohol stops the brain from releasing a hormone called vasopressin, which normally helps your body hold on to water overnight. Without it, your body loses more fluid, leaving you dehydrated and making your kidneys produce more urine. This is why yu wake several times in the night to use the toilet, further disrupting your sleep.

Dehydration

Alcohol causes your body to lose too much water, which can leave you dehydrated. This puts extra strain on your body and often leads to headaches, a dry mouth, and feeling unwell. These effects can make it harder to relax and fall asleep, keeping you awake even when you feel tired.

Headache

A hangover headache can feel like your brain is hurting, but your brain can’t actually feel pain. That’s because it has no pain receptors. The pain you feel comes from the blood vessels and the sensitive lining inside your skull. Alcohol can irritate these areas and cause them to swell, creating that throbbing headache feeling that can make it hard to sleep or rest comfortably.

Dependencies

Try not to replace alcohol with other substances, such as sleeping tablets, to help you fall asleep. Many sleep medicines and other chemicals can be habit‑forming if used regularly and may cause unwanted side effects. Some of these side effects can be serious and may harm your health over time.

If you use alcohol as a way of unwinding from a stressful day try alternative methods such as taking a warm bath, reading a book, meditating or performing relaxation exercises.