Why is alcohol harmful to sleep?

During her recent Q&A with Mammoth, Dr Nicola Barclay, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist, explains the relationship between alcohol consumption and sleep quality.

“So alcohol can make us feel sleepy, initially, and a lot of people use it to help 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. 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 generally feel a little bit run down, and be experiencing negative effect and that’s possible because we haven’t had enough REM sleep because that’s seriously disrupted after consuming alcohol. But 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, and 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.”

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