Drinking Moderately Disrupts Sleep, Moderation Officially Overrated Now
12 years ago

There’s a new study out that suggests that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol may disrupt your sleep. Of course to me the main drawback to being only moderately drunk is that you’re still sober enough to feel feelings, but seeing as this isn’t a study on my emotional suppression techniques, I digress.

The study sought to dispel the notion that alcohol is an effective sleep aid. According to the data compiled the moderate drinkers lost about 47 minutes of sleep while heavy drinkers did not see a significant loss in sleep time.

Those who drank high doses of alcohol did not experience a reduction in sleep time, but did feel tired the next day.

The mysterious lack of energy experienced by heavy drinkers the morning after a binge has now been dubbed a “hangover” by scientists. Groundbreaking stuff, really.

The thing I was most amused about in the story is how the scientists collected their sleep data. The article explains:

Geoghegan and colleagues asked 47 college students to wear wristbands called actigraphs for one week. These bands measure movements in the wrist joints, and can tell when the wearer is asleep. Participants also kept sleep diaries, and filled out questionnaires each day to record how much alcohol they drank.

Wrist bands that record movements in the wrist joints? Everyone surveyed was a college student. That means there’s like a 40% chance the scientists recorded a sloppy, drunken, 28-minute hand job that that became increasingly frantic until everyone involved just gave up and went to sleep, right?

Either way, the facts are in, consuming moderate amounts of alcohol will keep you up at night. So if you want to try to fall asleep by abusing your body then just do what I do: sip on some NyQuil and watch a regular season WNBA game.