During her recent Q&A with Mammoth Dr Nicola Barclay, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist, discusses the link between our sleep quality and alcohol.
“Alcohol can make us feel sleepy, initially, and a lot of people use it to make them feel sleepy, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. So even though it helps us get off to sleep initially, the sleep that we get is disrupted, especially in the second half of the night. So we see much less rapid eye movement sleep after we’ve consumed alcohol, and we’re more likely to have fragmented sleep, and so it’s these two factors that can then contribute to how we feel the next day. If we’re poor at regulating our emotions the next day, we might be more snappy with our colleagues, we might just feel generally a little bit run down and are experiencing negative effects and that’s possibly because we haven’t had enough REM sleep because that’s seriously disrupted after having alcohol. The sleep fragmentation is possibly because we’re more likely to need to go to the bathroom, we’re more likely to have fluctuations in our heart rate, we’re more likely to have fluctuations in our respiratory rate and so all of these factors combinate to make it a very fitful night’s sleep.”