Should I Drink Alcohol If I Have Sleep Apnea?

If undiagnosed, it can lead to serious health issues such as stroke, heart disease and hypertension (learn more about health effects of sleep apnea here). If you don’t have sleep apnea, drinking in moderation is usually fine. It’s a good idea to have your last drink at least a couple of hours before bed, so that the alcohol doesn’t affect your sleep quality. And remember that alcohol can lead to a poor night’s sleep with or without sleep apnea symptoms.

Alcohol can affect REM sleep and your breathing, both of which can contribute to daytime fatigue. REM sleep gives your mind time to rest, so even if you get plenty of sleep, if you skip a few REM cycles, you’re likely going to feel pretty https://sober-home.org/ drowsy the next day. Also, alcohol can make you stop breathing more often and for longer periods of time if you have SA. This means you’re probably waking up more often throughout the night after a couple of drinks than you normally do.

How are Alcohol and Sleep Deprivation Related?

Researchers have been studying how alcohol affects sleep for nearly a century. Because alcohol acts as a depressant on the central nervous system, its sedative effect can help you relax and fall asleep faster. But once alcohol metabolizes in the body, it disrupts your sleep and interferes with the vital processes during the deep sleep cycle.

These sleep-disrupting consequences of alcohol consumption are most often found in people who have three or more drinks before sleeping. But even light drinking close to bedtime has the potential to interfere with sleep. The relationship between alcohol and sleep apnea is most clearly established in people with obstructive sleep apnea.

Alcohol and Insomnia

So, let’s take a step back and remember that we, the healthcare professionals at Aeroflow Sleep, are dedicated to bringing a good night’s sleep to all of our patients. Alcohol is simply the villain to this story, because it affects your sleep cycle. More recent studies have shown that the “relaxing glass of wine” may be doing more harm than good. Not only could it be making it harder to get a good night’s sleep, but it could also be making you so relaxed that you sleep too deeply.

While it might be annoying for roommates and bedfellows, snoring isn’t always a symptom of an underlying problem. Often, it’s benign and simply means that a person’s throat muscles or nasal passages are very relaxed. Yes, alcohol can encourage snoring, but the effect is usually more pronounced in people that are already prone to snoring. This can include those with undiagnosed and diagnosed obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Alcohol is known to increase your chances of snoring loudly if you drink before bed. This can cause problems achieving proper REM sleep, especially in those with sleep apnea.

What Happens with Obstructive Sleep Apnea?

The more you drink, the worse effect it can have on your breathing and sleep. For people with OSA, the effects of sleep apnea can become more serious when you add alcohol. Results were extracted from the individual studies as either adjusted measures of effect, crude measures of effect, or using raw data. Effect estimates adjusted for smoking and other factors were used in preference. Binary effect measures were extracted as odds ratios (OR), hazard ratios (HR) or risk ratios, with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Where effect measures were not presented in the paper, we estimated crude RRs for cohort and cross sectional studies and ORs for case control studies.

Consuming alcohol immediately before exercise has the potential to impair athletic performance, given that alcohol negatively affects muscle coordination, balance, and reaction times. The limited research on this topic suggests that it can also compromise endurance during aerobic exercise. Your REM (rapid eye movement) stage is where you not only dream but achieve the most restorative sleep to help your brain function properly the next day. In particular, this includes boosting mental concentration as well as managing your mood. However, for chronic snorers or people that live with OSA and other sleep-related conditions, constant snoring is significant. In the US alone, over 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use – 380 deaths per day.

Baclofen-Associated Onset of Central Sleep Apnea in Alcohol Use Disorder: A Case Report

It may help to ask a bed partner or roommate about snoring and other sleep-related breathing problems, since people with sleep apnea are not always aware of these issues. If you both exercise and drink alcohol, there are a number of steps you can take to set yourself up for a good night’s sleep. One study of alcohol use and exercise found that among men who drank heavily, high levels of physical fitness decreased the likelihood of alcohol dependence. This was not the case for women in the study, and more research is needed to determine whether or not exercise might offer some protection against alcohol use disorders. Insomnia appears to have a complex relationship with heavy drinking. On the other hand, heavy drinking may contribute to insomnia symptoms.

• Studies of populations with HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses were excluded, as these represent selected populations, thus may not be generalizable to the general population.
• Studies show moderate to heavy alcohol use can cause OSA episodes in people who don’t otherwise have the condition.
• However, this might make things worse, whether you have sleep apnea or not!
• It’s important to talk to our provider about your specific situation and strategies to manage SA and alcohol.
• Not only could it be making it harder to get a good night’s sleep, but it could also be making you so relaxed that you sleep too deeply.

After the full text screening and the exclusion of non-eligible papers, 31 studies met our criteria for inclusion in the systematic review (Fig. 1). Based on your answers, we will calculate your free

Sleep Foundation Score

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and create a personalized sleep profile that includes sleep-improving products and education curated just

for you.

Therefore, you could be doing more long-term harm to your health by drinking alcohol if you have SA. For example, let’s say some symptoms you have that are caused by SA eco sober house review include feeling tired during the day, waking up with dry mouth, and irritability. Drinking alcohol may mean you’re dealing with even more severe symptoms than normal.

Before you pour yourself a drink at night, take a moment to think about the effects alcohol can have on your sleep apnea. Although it’s best to avoid a nightcap entirely, following the tips outlined above will keep your drink from hampering your shuteye. First, keep in mind that the less often you drink alcohol, the less often you’re risking worse health consequences with your SA. So, it may be a good goal to limit alcohol to just occasional drinking.

This obstructive sleep is why so many people with sleep apnea often feel so tired the next day even if it appears as though they slept through the night. After about the first hour and a half of sleep your body falls into a REM cycle, but alcohol can actually reduce the effectiveness of that sleep stage or even skip the first cycle. This is when you dream and it’s considered the most restorative sleep state. Typically there are six to seven cycles of REM sleep which is combined with deep sleep cycles (learn more about sleep basics here). Furthermore, any “positive” effects of alcohol may be mitigated by the disruption to the sleep cycle (see below) or worsening of other conditions, like sleep apnea (see above).

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