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Alcohol and Sleep

Regular drinking can affect the quality of your sleep making you feel tired and sluggish. This is because drinking disrupts your sleep cycle. Several sleepless nights have an impact on our day-to-day mental health, for example, on our mood, concentration and decision-making. And while alcohol might help some people nod off, even a couple of drinks can affect the quality of our sleep. If you’re regularly drinking more than the low risk drinking guidelines, you may find you wake up the next day feeling like you haven’t had much rest at all. Regularly drinking alcohol can 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. But having alcohol-free days can help. You should be sleeping better and find it easier to wake up in the morning. Download our PDF to learn more about alcohol and sleep.