Why Alcohol Is Bad Prior to Sleep | Dr. Gina Poe & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | If I go to sleep religiously every night at 10 p.m., are there things that I perhaps do

00:00:08.160 | in the preceding hours of the preceding day, like ingest caffeine or alcohol, that can

00:00:13.320 | make that first stage of sleep less effective even if I'm going to sleep at the same time?

00:00:18.000 | Alcohol definitely will do that because alcohol is a REM sleep suppressant and it even suppresses

00:00:22.520 | some of that stage two transition to REM with those sleep spindles.

00:00:25.800 | And those sleep spindles, we didn't talk about their function yet, but they're really important

00:00:29.720 | for moving memories to our cortex.

00:00:33.120 | It's a unique time when our hippocampus, sort of like the REM of our brains, writes it to

00:00:39.920 | a hard disk, which is the cortex.

00:00:43.320 | It's a unique time when they're connected.

00:00:45.560 | So if you don't want to miss that, you don't want to miss REM sleep, which is also a part

00:00:49.640 | of a consolidation process and schema-changing process.

00:00:54.960 | And alcohol, before we go to sleep, will do that.

00:00:58.720 | Until we've metabolized alcohol and put it out of our bodies, it will affect our sleep

00:01:04.760 | So probably fair to say no ingestion of alcohol within the four to six hours preceding sleep,

00:01:12.720 | given the half-life.

00:01:13.720 | Given the half-life.

00:01:14.720 | Or it all would be better, but I know some people refuse to go that way.

00:01:18.240 | Maybe a little bit is okay.

00:01:19.920 | I don't know what the dose response is, but there are studies out there you can look at.

00:01:27.080 | So we're still in the first stage of sleep, and I apologize for slowing us down, but it

00:01:30.360 | sounds like it's an incredibly important first phase of sleep.

00:01:35.060 | What about the second and third 90-minute blocks of sleep?

00:01:38.000 | Is there anything that makes those unique?

00:01:41.280 | What is their signature, besides the fact that they come second and third in the night?

00:01:45.560 | There's more and more REM sleep the later, the night we get.

00:01:49.560 | There's also a change in hormones, the growth hormone and melatonin levels are starting

00:01:56.160 | to decline, but other hormones are picking up.

00:01:59.360 | So it is a really different stage that you also don't want to shortchange yourself on.

00:02:05.180 | And I think that's the stage many studies are showing that those are the times in sleep

00:02:10.080 | when the most creativity can happen.

00:02:12.840 | That's when our dreams can incorporate and put together old and new things together into

00:02:17.880 | a new way, and our schema are built during that time.

00:02:23.040 | So yeah, we can change our minds best during those phases of sleep.