After a long, hard week at work there’s nothing more relaxing than to put your feet up and have a comforting glass of wine before bed. Alcohol helps us to relax and nod off in no time, but even just a couple of drinks can radically affect the quality of our sleep.
If you’re regularly drinking more than Govt guidelines recommend, you may find you wake up the next day feeling like you haven’t had much rest at all. Regularly drinking alcohol will disrupt sleep. For example, a heavy drinking session of more than six units in an evening, can make us spend more time in deep sleep and less time than usual in the important Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep, which is an important restorative stage of sleep our bodies need. This can leave us feeling tired the next day – no matter how long we stay in bed.
Or to put it another way, if someone claps you round the head with a cricket bat, you might be rendered unconscious but you wouldn’t be asleep!
When you drink more than usual, you may also have to get up in the night to go to the toilet. And it’s not just the liquid you’ve drunk that you’ll be getting rid of. Alcohol is a diuretic, which means it encourages the body to lose extra fluid, making you dehydrated.
So be mindful of when you are pouring yourself a glass
If you are drinking alcohol, try to avoid it too close to bedtime. Give your body time to process the alcohol you’ve drunk before you try to sleep – on average it takes an hour to process one unit, but this can vary widely from person to person.
If you would like to know more about the effects of alcohol, click here to watch an amazing video from our founder Graham Phillips all about the complications alcohol can cause to your health www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ_lEwkYGCc