- page 246, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Walker is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.
6 months later I realised life was way better without alcohol. I was more motivated, I slept much better, I felt better, I could study and retain things much better than before.
I wasn't a super heavy drinker, I am from the UK so started to drink with friends at around 16. Over the past 15 years binge drinking has become a big problem IMHO. I feel I am lucky to have avoided that!
So here I am 15 years later and still not drinking at all. I would recommend taking a year off alcohol and see how it changes your life. Maybe it won't make as big a difference as it did for me but I would be shocked if it didn't make some noticeable differences to your brain.
The revelation of water came from having a saline drip after an accident. I felt fantastic afterwards. Full of energy, drive and able to actually process things in my brain. Turned out I'd spent the few years before this point entirely shrivelled up with dehydration caused by drinking only tea and alcohol.
Trying to shake the caffeine monkey of my back now. That's just as bad. Drinking lots of water does help however.
But I feel the gravitational pull of caffeine every time I see the road sign for one of my regular places. It almost a physical rush.
I have a similar issue with other foods, like cheesecake. I love eating cheesecake on occasion but every time I eat it the very high fat and sugar content upsets my stomach.
Almost always after a night of heavy drinking I wake from anywhere between 5am - 8am and have a rough time getting back to sleep for at least a few hours. Knowing my drinking patterns, those times would tend to correlate to about 4 hours earlier passing out.
From what I recall, alcohol binds to GABA receptors, GABA builds up in the body, eventually metabolizes to glutamate which takes a few hours depending on how much you drink, but seems to be around half a night's sleep. The glutamate wakes you up and gives you energy, hence the strange "feeling great after a night of drinking on no sleep" thing.
Every single time I had drunk - even 1-2 - there was a spike of restlessness that night, 10-20 restless periods vs the 3-4 I would have normally.
I do have a host of sleep quality issues in general, and I'm a very pronounced "night owl". Perhaps that has something to do with it, I don't know.
The thing is: alcohol is a very crude intoxicant, and we seem to have arbitrarily standardized on it as the Socially Acceptable Drug. I know this is obvious, but it really is stupid and it's worth reminding people how stupid it is.
I mean, take khat, for instance. Khat is a stimulant chewed by people in Yemen; it's their socially acceptable drug-of-choice. (It's so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes a significant portion of the country's agricultural resources.) But here? It's a controlled substance. Why? I don't know. Our drug laws are just crazy stupid.
I feel like we could do so much better in terms of recreational substances. People are finally getting smart about cannabis, but there are still so many possibilities we're not exploring. The fact that we're stuck with alcohol is ridiculous. Hell, even opioids are less harmful to the body than alcohol is (if taken at a steady, stable dose, which I guess is the hard part).
We should definitely be spending most of our scientific brainpower on curing diseases, but I feel like we could spare a few brilliant minds to work on better intoxicants. The masses deserve a safer opiate.
Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.
For example: Yemen has 35 cars per 1000 people to the US's 797. Yemen would have to leapfrog through several stages of development for drunken driving to become a blip on their public health radar.
Half of that country currently doesn't have clean water, and they're draining their acquifers dry … to grow khat. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Cholera outbreaks and a water-scarcity exacerbated civil war are simply a different class of problem.
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh25-2/101-109.htm
Hey, quit laughing - I don't think that it is necessarily unhealthy to try and smooth out some of the bumps along life's road, but there have got to be better ways. And don't say, 'exercise.'
The cognitive hits of alcohol are just looking like they're too long term. Not even over a lifetime, but over a week. With all the information coming in about how it messes with our REM cycles and potentially inhibits learning that took place over the past day or two from sticking to your brain...I dunno.
What is the point of dropping your day's problems on the floor in the evening if doing so prevents you from learning or benefiting from the experience?
Edit: By which I mean, alcohol seems to cause a lot of issues around what your brain does while it sleeps, which seems to be what this article is calling out as a problem that can be exacerbated with age. Sorry, I guess I kind of jumped between topics there...