Dr. Matt Walker

One of the things that I probably didn't mention enough with alcohol, not only does it seem to compromise your rapid eye movement sleep, but it will fragment your sleep.

It will make your sleep more unstable.

And an indirect consequence of that is alcohol is going to be in highest concentrations in your system after drinking in the evening with sleep in the first four to five hours.

Now that depends on how quickly you metabolize it and how much you've had, but let's assume some degree of standardization.

In other words, I said that alcohol will not just block your REM sleep, it will fragment your sleep.

It makes your sleep more vulnerable to you waking up.

Well, you're especially vulnerable in the first four or so hours because that's when alcohol concentration is highest in your system.

And therefore the first four hours can also fall prey to the greatest culling

of your sleep quality.

And if you're removing or restricting some of that quality in the first four hours, what type of sleep are you principally restricting?

You're restricting deep sleep because we've said deep sleep comes in the first half, dream sleep, REM sleep in the second half.

So don'ts would be try to stay away from excessive alcohol in the evening.

We also know that alcohol is associated with

longer term chronic anxiety.

And the tragedy is that it's often used as a way to blunt the anxiety because alcohol is a sedative and it can help just alleviate, take the edge off.

But it's a short term

quote unquote, win for a long-term loss because overall it will increase anxiety levels.

So I would say those are some do's and perhaps a don't if you want to try to optimize your sleep quality, including the integrity of your sleep and also the electrical quality of your sleep.

own scientist of self and be in your own corner when it comes to sleep and another low-cost method that we mentioned was not just temperature in terms of keeping your room cool but warm bath or shower before bed i mentioned improved sleep but one of the things that improves most is deep non-rem sleep so there's another technique

get your room cool to go into, but warm up to cool down to fall asleep, which then keeps you cool so that you stay asleep and you'll get more deep sleep.