Friday Night NA: A Friday night without beer

It’s Friday night, but I’m not drinking any beer.

Why? Because I want to sleep well tonight, and I don’t sleep well after drinking alcohol.

Drinking beer has been a consistent part of my weekend nights for a long time. Whether I’m out with friends (which is becoming an increasingly rare occurrence as we’ve aged) or staying in, drinking beer is what I do on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s what I plan for and look forward to. Drinking and reviewing beer is so much a part of my weekend nights that it has likely been detrimental to my health and social life: Beer no doubt contributes to the excess of stored energy around my midsection, and I am sure I’ve missed many opportunities because I chose to drink beer instead of other things.

I enjoy drinking beer. It’s a tasty treat that I let myself indulge in after every work week. But its effect on me has changed as I’ve gotten older. While 12-ounce curls did not affect my sleep during my twenties (or so I think), and a glass of water could cure almost any hangover (except for a few doozies), things have changed a lot—and not for the better. Though I have always been able to fall asleep quickly after drinking, I’m never rested in the morning now. I’m hungover more often, even after just one or two beers, and a glass of water can no longer cure the aching in my head; it stays with me throughout the day, painkillers unable to stop the pounding completely. The only remedy is a long, restive sleep, sans alcohol, the next night.

I like to stay up late Friday and Saturday nights and sleep in Saturday and Sunday mornings, usually past 9 a.m. (I can sleep much later, but doing so makes me feel lazy. Long gone are the days when I slept shamelessly past 11 o’clock.) Therein lies the crux of my problem with drinking and sleep: Though weekend mornings are the only mornings I get to sleep in, they follow the only two nights I allow myself to drink three, four, or five beers. Despite the fact I sleep later than normal on Saturdays and Sundays, I’m never rested or recharged. That carries over into the work week, meaning I don’t ever get enough productive sleep.

That’s why I’m not drinking any beer tonight. (Beer, by the way, is the only alcohol I drink. I was never into hard liquor or mixed drinks, and wine makes me sick [literally].) My desire to have a good night’s sleep outweighs any inclination to drink beer.

So what’s the deal? Why can’t I sleep well after I enjoy a few brewskis? I learned that it’s not just me: Nobody sleeps well after drinking alcohol. According to this WebMD article:

alcohol does allow healthy people to fall asleep quicker and sleep more deeply for a while, but it reduces rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

And the more you drink before bed, the more pronounced these effects. REM sleep happens about 90 minutes after we fall asleep. It's the stage of sleep when people dream, and it's thought to be restorative. Disruptions in REM sleep may cause daytime drowsiness, poor concentration, and rob you of needed ZZZs.

REM sleep is the good stuff—the stuff I don’t get because I drink too much on weekend nights.

This is not the first time I’ve abstained from beer to sleep better. I’ve done it here and there over the last year. Most notably, I did not drink a single drop of beer for two weeks in April 2017 to see what happened. The result: I slept a lot better. I dreamed on a nightly basis. (Dreams became very rare for me during my twenties—when I started drinking more.) I thought I would shed a couple pounds, but that did not happen. (I have no clue how many calories from beer I intake. If I could calculate it accurately, I would probably be shocked.) It was incredible; I felt much better physically and mentally. But I returned to drinking beer on the weekend after the two weeks were over.

I’m well aware that I sleep better and feel better when I don’t drink beer, but I still drink beer, so the struggle will continue. However, I feel like I’m reaching a tipping point, a time when I’ll need to change my longtime drinking habit and/or decrease the number of beers I drink. Perhaps I need to cut out the one or two “palate-cleansing” PBRs I drink before trying the beer of the weekend. Maybe I need to reinstate my strict weekend-only drinking policy. (But what good will that do if the weekend is the only time I get to sleep in?) Maybe I should drink less and earlier in the evening, so I don’t go to bed after finishing my last beer. (I read somewhere that it is best to stop drinking two or three hours before hitting the hay.) No matter what, I need to do something at some point because what I’m doing now is not healthy.

What it boils down to is a question of what do I like better: beer or sleep?

Sleep.