KEYC - How Alcohol Affects Your Sleep

There are several ways to sabotage our sleep each night. In our Thrive Segment, KEYC News 12s Lisa Cownie talks to a doctor about the consequences of an evening cocktail on our sleep patterns.

Lisa: “As we wind down our year of the Thrive campaign, we focused on three categories eat, move and sleep. Today we’re talking about the sleep category and joining me is Doctor Colin Weertz with the Mankato Clinic. Specifically today I want to talk about how alcohol may affect your sleeping throughout the night?

Doctor Weertz: “Alcohol is severely impactful on your sleep. It’s not necessary that you sleep less but it affects the quality of sleep substantially. That can be true for any psychotropic medicines as well can affect sleep quality. Alcohol is a depressant and it does suppress your brain function to the point where it does impact the way that your brain rests and settles down at night.”

Lisa: “This is the time of the year where we may be going to holiday parties and might want to have a cocktail, are there any guidelines or rules in order to still enjoy that and still get a good night’s sleep?”

Doctor Weertz: “As far as sleep goes I wouldn’t say no. Certainly there are people who are out there who can sleep just fine and drink alcohol and there are people out there who can’t. It’s kind of an individual thing if people can tolerate it or not. Regular guidelines for alcohol on a daily basis it’s recommended that women have [no more than] one alcoholic beverage daily and that’s a regular sized alcoholic beverage not a big Christmas mug. For males it’s two. There are some discrepancies there but men are allowed two alcoholic drinks per guidelines per day.”

Lisa: “And of course as we’ve been saying all year, sleep is essential to your functioning for the next day?” Doctor Weertz: “Absolutely.”

Lisa: “Thank you for joining us, for more tips on this topic you can go to KEYC.com/Thrive.”