Does Alcohol Affect Your Sleep? | Matt Walker & Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | [Silence]
00:00:04.140 | What happens when somebody has a glass,
00:00:07.860 | we always hear a glass or two of wine in the evening
00:00:10.860 | or a cocktail after dinner or before dinner,
00:00:15.860 | how does that impact their sleep?
00:00:18.080 | And then we'll be sure to circle back
00:00:21.160 | in terms of what is reasonable ranges of behavior
00:00:24.200 | when it comes to avoiding alcohol
00:00:27.200 | or if it's age appropriate, et cetera.
00:00:29.960 | - Enjoying alcohol.
00:00:31.160 | - Yeah.
00:00:32.000 | So alcohol, if we're thinking about classes of drugs,
00:00:35.240 | they're in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives.
00:00:38.440 | And I think one of the first problems
00:00:40.120 | that people often mistake,
00:00:41.880 | alcohol is often used as a sleep aid
00:00:46.020 | for people who are struggling with sleep
00:00:47.840 | when things like over-the-counter remedies, et cetera,
00:00:51.160 | or herbal remedies have just not worked out for them.
00:00:54.160 | And alcohol, unfortunately, is anything but a sleep aid.
00:00:57.800 | The first reason that most people use it
00:00:59.760 | is to try and help them fall asleep.
00:01:02.480 | - And this process of this event
00:01:05.200 | that we call falling asleep,
00:01:06.260 | I have to imagine is a process.
00:01:07.920 | - It is a process.
00:01:08.760 | - Like everything in biology.
00:01:09.720 | And that that process involves in some way,
00:01:13.080 | as we talked about push-pull before,
00:01:14.400 | turning off thinking, planning, et cetera,
00:01:17.820 | and turning on some sort of relaxation mechanism.
00:01:21.060 | I have to imagine that these two things
00:01:22.420 | are knobs turning in opposite directions
00:01:24.220 | that gives us this outcome we call falling asleep.
00:01:27.400 | Alcohol, it seems, is helpful for some people
00:01:30.200 | to turn off their thoughts or their planning.
00:01:33.520 | Is that right?
00:01:34.800 | - Yes, it is.
00:01:35.760 | And so I think if we look at the pattern of brain activity,
00:01:39.160 | if I were to place you inside an MRI scanner
00:01:41.520 | where we're looking at the activity of your brain
00:01:43.800 | and watch you drifting off,
00:01:45.400 | some parts of your brain will become less active,
00:01:48.400 | other parts will become more active.
00:01:50.240 | And this is the push-pull model.
00:01:52.160 | It's inhibition, excitation.
00:01:55.200 | But alcohol is quite different in that regard.
00:01:58.020 | Alcohol is, because it's a sedative,
00:02:00.640 | what it's really doing is trying to essentially
00:02:03.360 | knock out your cortex.
00:02:05.000 | It's sedating your cortex.
00:02:08.280 | And sedation is not sleep.
00:02:10.400 | But when we have a couple of drinks in the evening,
00:02:12.360 | when we have a couple of nightcaps,
00:02:14.000 | we mistake sedation for sleep, saying,
00:02:16.480 | well, I always, when I have a couple of whiskeys
00:02:19.340 | or a couple of cocktails,
00:02:20.680 | it always helps me fall asleep faster.
00:02:23.460 | In truth, what's happening is that
00:02:24.900 | you're losing consciousness quicker,
00:02:27.140 | but you're not necessarily falling naturalistically asleep
00:02:31.560 | any quicker.
00:02:32.400 | So that's one of the first sort of things
00:02:34.560 | just to keep in mind.
00:02:36.000 | The second thing with alcohol
00:02:37.480 | is that it fragments your sleep.
00:02:39.400 | And we spoke about the quality of your sleep
00:02:41.400 | being just as important as the quantity.
00:02:44.600 | And alcohol, through a variety of mechanisms,
00:02:47.320 | some of which are activation
00:02:49.560 | of that autonomic nervous system,
00:02:51.400 | that fight or flight branch of the nervous system,
00:02:53.900 | alcohol will actually have you waking up
00:02:57.420 | many more times throughout the night.
00:02:59.500 | So your sleep is far less continuous.
00:03:02.640 | Now, some of those awakenings
00:03:04.260 | will be of conscious recollection the next day.
00:03:07.300 | You'll just remember waking up.
00:03:08.940 | Many of them won't be.
00:03:10.940 | And so, but yet your sleep will be littered
00:03:14.060 | with these sort of punctured awakenings
00:03:16.980 | throughout the night.
00:03:17.940 | And again, when you wake up the next morning,
00:03:20.220 | you don't feel restored by your sleep.
00:03:23.540 | Fragmented sleep or non-continuous sleep
00:03:26.360 | in this alcohol-induced way
00:03:28.760 | is usually not good quality sleep
00:03:30.780 | that you feel great on the next day.
00:03:33.420 | The third part of alcohol in terms of an equation
00:03:37.240 | is that it's quite potent at blocking your REM sleep,
00:03:40.320 | your rapid eye movement sleep.
00:03:42.280 | And REM sleep is critical
00:03:43.800 | for a variety of cognitive functions,
00:03:46.200 | some aspects of learning and memory.
00:03:48.080 | It seems to be critical for aspects
00:03:49.620 | of emotional and mental health.
00:03:51.420 | - You've described it before
00:03:52.500 | as a sort of self-generated therapy
00:03:55.100 | that occurs while we sleep.
00:03:56.500 | - Yeah, it's overnight therapy.
00:03:58.140 | You know, it's emotional first aid.
00:04:00.820 | - Certainly people that don't get enough sleep
00:04:03.020 | are very easy to derail emotionally.
00:04:05.720 | Not that one would wanna do that to people,
00:04:07.340 | but we all sort of fall apart emotionally.
00:04:11.460 | I always think of it as almost like our skin sensitivity
00:04:14.260 | can be heightened when we are sleep deprived.
00:04:18.260 | Our emotional sensitivity is such
00:04:21.500 | that when we're sleep deprived,
00:04:23.140 | such that it takes a much finer grain of sandpaper
00:04:27.540 | to create that kind of friction.
00:04:29.580 | Things bother us.
00:04:31.020 | - Threshold to trigger. - Even online comments
00:04:33.540 | bother us when we're sleep deprived.
00:04:35.580 | And never when we're well-rested.
00:04:36.820 | - I would love to say that I never look at them
00:04:39.380 | except I look at maybe every one of them.
00:04:42.860 | - Here I will editorialize
00:04:44.260 | because the notion of not looking at comments
00:04:46.540 | is unreasonable to ask of any academic.
00:04:51.040 | Because academics, we are all trained
00:04:53.720 | to look at our teaching evaluations.
00:04:56.000 | And just like with online comments,
00:04:57.760 | to ignore 20% of them.
00:04:59.640 | No, I'm kidding.
00:05:00.600 | We look at them all in any event.
00:05:03.200 | So in terms of translating this to behavior,
00:05:05.480 | I don't particularly enjoy alcohol.
00:05:07.600 | I guess I might be fortunate in that sense,
00:05:09.680 | but I also have never really experienced
00:05:11.680 | the pleasure of drinking alcohol.
00:05:14.160 | I sometimes like the taste of a drink,
00:05:16.160 | but I never liked the sensation.
00:05:17.680 | So that's, I don't have a lot of familiarity with this,
00:05:20.600 | but many people do.
00:05:21.640 | And I understand that.
00:05:22.840 | So let's say somebody enjoys a glass of wine or two
00:05:27.840 | with dinner and they eat dinner at 7 p.m.
00:05:31.520 | Is that likely to disrupt their sleep at all?
00:05:35.040 | Let's just sort of,
00:05:35.880 | let's make this a series of gradations.
00:05:38.360 | - And the answer is yes.
00:05:40.880 | I think once they just looked at a single glass of wine
00:05:44.560 | in the evening with dinner,
00:05:46.160 | and I would be untruthful if I didn't just simply say
00:05:50.880 | it has an effect and we can measure that
00:05:54.600 | in terms of the actual- - Less REM sleep.
00:05:56.000 | - Less REM sleep.
00:05:57.200 | And one of the fascinating studies,
00:05:58.920 | I can't remember what dose,
00:06:00.280 | I think they got them close
00:06:01.600 | to a standard illegal blood alcohol level.
00:06:05.840 | So maybe they were a little bit tipsy.
00:06:08.280 | And yes, you see all of the changes that we just described.
00:06:12.320 | They sort of lose consciousness more quickly.
00:06:14.440 | They have fragmented sleep
00:06:15.800 | and they have a significant reduction in REM sleep.
00:06:18.240 | But what was also interesting
00:06:19.400 | because REM sleep, as we spoke about before,
00:06:21.600 | is a time when some hormonal systems
00:06:24.520 | are essentially recharged and refreshed,
00:06:27.000 | growth hormone being one of them.
00:06:28.840 | There was well over a 50%, five zero drop
00:06:32.800 | in their growth hormone release
00:06:34.840 | during alcohol-laced sleep at night.
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