Alcohol: How it affects your sleep

There are many factors that affect your sleep. Like what you did during the day, what foods you ate, your sleep position, even the fact that you had one (or more) drinks! According to neurologist and sleep doctor, Timothy Young, people believe that they will sleep more peacefully and deeply when they consume alcohol because it relaxes them. However, the exact opposite happens. “We tend to fall asleep faster when we drink alcohol, but we get up in the second half of the night. Eventually, we tend to sleep less”, Dr. Young says. His colleague, psychiatrist Alex Dimitriou says that our sleep is divided into three phases: deep sleep, REM sleep and light sleep. “When we consume alcohol, we spend less time in the REM phase during which we dream.” As he states, this does not mean that we will not dream at all that particular night as we also dream in the phase of light sleep. But dreams at this stage are not so “vivid”. “They are less complicated and related to what happened during the day”. Dr. Young adds that you can hear a sound when you sleep lightly and this can create an image in your brain and also a dream! The surprising thing is that alcohol has the biggest effect the night after the consumption! “The body will spend more time in the REM phase to make up for the time lost the previous night. At that stage people see much more vivid dreams”, Dr. Dimitriou says. As he explains, when we are in the REM phase then the brain creates complex stories and connections. Also, alcohol affects how well you remember the dreams you saw. Usually people remember the last dream they saw at night. But if they wake up in the middle of the night, as they do when they have drank, they tend to remember the dream that was cut in half. The two doctors conclude that alcohol disrupts sleep as we spend less time in the REM phase which is important for health and well-being. They also advise not to overdo it with drinking to test if and when we see “vivid” dreams! Giota Florou (source:www.wellandgood.com) Recent Articles