My resting heart rate while sleeping is typically 64-68 without alcohol and 65-85 after drinking several glasses of wine. There is such a marked difference in RHR in the two scenarios that you could tell if I drank simply by looking at my heart rate chart during the night.
Interestingly, I attempted to start running for one month about a year ago. My endurance is poor, but I would run/walk for several kilometers. Within the first week and continuing through that month, my RHR while sleeping was 52-62. Not only was it significantly lower, it took a long time after stopping exercise for the rate to return to what it usually is.
I don't know what this all really means, but it is fascinating. Studies or not, I imagine that not drinking + regular cardio exercise is better for long life than the alternative combinations.
That was the biggest effect I saw by far, more than all the sleep apnea variables I was trying to measure!
Granted I don't drink often, and metabolize alcohol poorly, but still that's a huge difference.
FWIW I'm not out of shape; I commuted 1h / day by bike for over a decade, and was a medically normal weight, which is maybe 20-30th percentile in the population.
An RHR that gets into the 85 range could indicate a cardiac problem. Might want to get that checked.
but contrary to the article, an evening whiskey ~3 times a week (in my experience) seems to be optimal for delivering antiseptic benefits with few/no downsides.
When I went back to the article to check this, however, I saw that, while the text says that alchohol has "a negative effect on HRV", and their model explains this, the diagram shows alcohol increasing the HRV. As the text's version of the observed results and its explanation for them are consistent, I assume the diagram is incorrectly labelled.
Update: Thanks to everyone for correcting me on what HRV means here.
It is believed to occur as the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system "fight" over raising and lowering the heartrate. The symbiosis between them lands on a steady rate per minute with fluctuations on a per beat basis.
I could try cutting it out, but I've had trouble falling asleep my entire life, and my average annual caffeine intake was very low until my mid-teens. I'm actually much better about sleep now than I used to be, even without meds. Worth a shot, though, I guess. I'd been thinking about dropping my intake to one cup per day, alternating coffee and green tea (which would represent a large increase in my consumption of green tea) anyway. Hell, at lower volume I could justify buying the expensive, low-package-weight, really, really good beans, so the flavor of the coffee I'm drinking would improve, though I might have to group coffee-days rather than alternate them, to avoid issues with beans going stale. Seems like ~halving my caffeine would be an OK start.
Sigh. Guess I'm going to be spending a lot of money on sparkling water, just like when I kicked my soda habit :-)
It surprised me a lot.