Effects of Caffeine and Alcohol on your sleep

 Many of us like to start our day with a cup of coffee and perhaps end the day with a glass of wine or some other kind of alcoholic drinks. But it turns out that these two substances alcohol and caffeine can have surprising impacts on our sleep. 

Caffeine:

Let's start with caffeine, Caffeine is a kind of drug that we call the psycho-active stimulus and everyone knows that caffeine can make you more alert and can wake you up but there are at least two additional hidden features of caffeine that some people may not be aware of.

1. The first is the duration of action of the caffeine. Caffeine for the average adult will have an effect for about 5-6 hours, what that means is that after about 5-6 hours  50% of that caffeine that you had is still circulating in your system. Caffeine has a quarter-life of about 10-12 hours. In other words, let's assume that you had coffee at 2 pm in the evening, it could be possible that almost the quarter of that caffeine is still swirling around in your brain at midnight. As a result, it can make it harder for an individual to fall asleep or even stay asleep soundly throughout the night. 

2. The second issue with caffeine is that it can change the quality of your sleep. Now some people may say that I am one of those individuals who can have an espresso with dinner and I fall asleep fine and I can stay asleep bu even if that's true, it turns out that caffeine can actually decrease the amount of deep non-rapid eye movement sleep that we have in the stages three and four of non REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. This non REM sleep is a sort of restorative deep sleep and as a consequence, you can wake up the next morning and you do not feel refreshed, you do not feel restored by your sleep. We do not remember waking up, we do not remember struggling to fall asleep, so you don't make the connection, and nevertheless, you may then find yourself reaching for two cups of coffee in the morning to wake up rather than one.

So that was all about caffeine but now let's move on to alcohol. 

 Alcohol:

Alcohol is perhaps one of the most misunderstood sleep aids out there. In fact, it is anything but sleep aid and it can be problematic to your sleep in at least three different ways. 

1. Alcohol is an inclusive drug that we call the sedatives but sedation is not sleeping. Studies show that these two things are really quite different. Sedation is a case where we simply switch off the firings of the brain cells particularly in the cortex and that is not a natural sleep. In fact, during deep non REM sleep, the brain has this remarkable coordination of hundreds of thousands of cells that all of a sudden fire together and then they all go silent repeating this process the brain produces big powerful brain waves of deep non REM sleep. So this is the first way in which alcohol can be problematic, we are mistaking sedation with deep sleep.

2. The second problem with alcohol is that it can actually fragment your sleep. Alcohol can trigger and activate during sleep and that is called the flight wrench of the nervous system which will therefore wake you up more frequently throughout the night. Alcohol can even increase the amount of alerting chemicals in our system that are released by the brain and thus once again fragmenting your sleep.

3. The third and final issue with alcohol and sleep is that alcohol can actually destroy your REM of sleep or your dream sleep. REM sleep provides several benefits such as your mental and emotional health and creativity. 

The aim of this article is not to tell anyone how to live, but what we want is to provide you with information about the impacts of caffeine and alcohol on your sleep. So that you can make choices as to how best you want to live your life when you are trying to prioritise your sleep health.