Skip the Alcohol Before Bed to Sleep Better

It’s Monday morning. You probably feel groggy and grumpy. Sure, that’s partly because Monday sucks, but if your idea of relaxing on the weekends might include having a couple beers before bed, that alcohol could be screwing up your sleep.

As professor of psychology Richard Wiseman explains, having a drink before bed is fairly common. Drinking in general tends to happen late at night anyway (your office probably doesn’t allow you to do shots on your lunch break), but some might even try having a beer before bed to help sleep. While it’s true it can help you get to sleep a little faster, it won’t give you restful sleep:

Drinking alcohol an hour or two before you go to bed is not a good idea. You’ll fall asleep quicker, but it keeps you out of deep sleep. In the morning you wake up feeling pretty terrible.

Instead, we’ve suggested before that having a non-alcoholic beer might help. If you’re lying in bed having trouble sleeping, you Wiseman suggests getting out of bed so you don’t start to associate the bed with restlessness. Of course, you might not usually have trouble sleeping, but still find you’re tired when you wake up after a night of drinking. Well, there’s a reason for that.

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Photo by Diriye Amey.

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