Last Updated on October 12, 2022 by theworldofsleepstaff
Let’s face it. We all have our vices. Sometimes you want to go out and have a few drinks with your friends, or maybe you want to unwind after a long day at work.
As a beer lover, you may think drinking a few beers before bed as a way to unwind and relax after a tiring day is a good idea. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Drinking beer before bed can cause problems for your sleep cycle and make it more difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep.
So, what happens when you drink too much? Or what if you drink before bed every night? Is there any way to know if your drinking habits affect your health?
Well right here we look at some of the most important reasons to avoid drinking beer before bed.
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22 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Beer Before Bed
1. Disrupts Your Normal Sleep Pattern
Alcohol works by depressing the central nervous system, meaning it slows down brain activity. But this can also affect sleep patterns.
Your body naturally produces melatonin, a hormone that helps control sleep cycles and wakefulness. Alcohol consumption can inhibit melatonin production, making it harder for you to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night.
2. Causes Vivid Dreams & Nightmares
Alcohol induces vivid dreams and nightmares as a side effect. Aside from beer, wine and other drinks can also have a similar impact.
It’s because alcohol can make your brain more active during sleep. Many people experience lucid dreams when drinking alcohol when they’re aware they’re dreaming. But lucid dreams aren’t always pleasant experiences. Often they’re terrifying, which can lead to nightmares.
3. Sleepwalking & Parasomnias
Parasomnias are a group of sleep disorders that involve abnormal movements or behaviours during sleep. Sleepwalking is one type of parasomnia that happens when people move around while sleeping.
Alcohol can cause all these conditions because it slows down your central nervous system and affects your brain’s ability to regulate itself during sleep. So if you drink too much beer before bedtime, your body won’t be able to tell you when it’s time to wake up, which could lead to dangerous situations like falling downstairs.
4. Worsens Sleep Apnea
Alcohol can cause sleep apnea, a condition where the airway closes while you sleep, preventing you from getting enough oxygen. The more alcohol you drink, the more likely your airway will close, making breathing harder at night.
If you have sleep apnea, alcohol can make your symptoms much worse. That’s because alcohol dehydrates your body, which causes your airway to narrow. Drinking alcohol and beer before bed can also lead to snoring, hypopnea or interrupted breathing during sleep, and more severe obstructive sleep apnea.
5. Blocks REM Sleep
Sleep is such a crucial part of your life. And if you’re drinking beer before bed, you might miss out on one of the most important parts of sleep, REM sleep.
REM sleep is the stage of sleep where you dream, and it’s essential for giving your brain a chance to consolidate information into long-term memory.
After drinking, your brain has trouble moving from non-REM sleep into REM sleep. That means that your brain doesn’t have an opportunity to fully process all the information from your day, which can leave you feeling groggy and unproductive when you wake up in the morning.
6. Leads To Frequent Urination At Night
The reason why alcohol leads to frequent urination at night has to do with the way your body processes it.
Frequent urination can disrupt your sleep, and if you consume too much alcohol or beer before bed, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night feeling thirsty and needing to use the bathroom.
7. Causes High Blood Sugar Level
Drinking alcohol can cause high blood sugar levels. It can lead to many health problems, including heart disease and diabetes. High blood sugar levels are caused by the liver’s inability to process the alcohol you drink quickly enough. It causes your body to produce more insulin, which lowers your blood sugar level.
When you drink alcohol before bed, it will take longer for your liver to process all the alcohol in your system. It means more sugar will be in your bloodstream when you go to sleep.
8. Leads To Dehydration
Alcohol is a diuretic and causes your body to lose water. It is one of the many reasons why people who drink too much often wake up feeling dehydrated, even though they may have drank plenty of water throughout the day.
When you drink too much alcohol, your body will start to excrete more sodium through your kidneys and sweat glands than usual. As a result, this can cause your body to become dehydrated. That is especially true if you drink alcohol on an empty stomach or at night while sleeping off the effects of it in bed.
9. Undesirable Weight Gain
There are many reasons you should avoid beer before bed, but one that shouldn’t be overlooked is its potential to cause undesired weight gain.
Alcohol contains calories that are not counted by the body in the same way as other foods. So while one beer may not seem to add up to many calories, it does add to your overall daily intake. And those extra calories can add up over time when you’re drinking several beers at night.
Alcohol also increases food cravings, so it’s not surprising that you may find yourself craving foods like french fries or pizza after drinking!
10. Poor Judgment & Decision-Making
Alcohol is a depressant that slows down the central nervous system and the brain, affecting your brain chemistry. While alcohol may help you fall asleep, it also impairs your judgment and decision-making skills, which can cause you to make bad choices. The more you drink, the worse off you are in terms of making decisions that affect your quality of life.
First, it impairs your ability to think clearly and rationally about what you are doing. It interferes with your ability to plan and anticipate future outcomes. It also decreases your ability to evaluate risks accurately. Lastly, it impairs your ability to control impulses and act responsibly.
11. Gluten Intolerance
Alcohol can make you more sensitive to gluten when you drink beer before bed. Gluten intolerance is when your body has a hard time processing gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley. It causes symptoms like bloating diarrhoea or constipation, or pain in your muscles and joints.
It happens because drinking alcohol increases the production of a gastrin hormone, which makes your stomach produce more acid. More acid in your gut can make it harder for your body to digest food properly and absorb nutrients from it.
12. Alcohol Dependence & Addiction
Alcohol causes alcohol dependence and addiction because it’s a depressant. When you drink alcohol, it slows down your brain’s activity and makes you feel relaxed. It can be very nice after a long day, but you can also develop an addiction if you do it too often.
The danger in drinking alcohol at night is that when your body gets used to being sedated every night, it will crave that feeling of relaxation, which means you’ll need more and more alcohol every night to get the same effect. Eventually, this will lead to physical dependence on alcohol, and you’ll need two or three drinks to fall asleep at night.
13. Mental Health Problems
Alcohol causes many kinds of mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, and alcohol and mental health issues are a dangerous combination.
Alcohol also releases endorphins in the brain, which can make you feel happy for a few minutes but then leave you feeling more stressed later. If you drink enough alcohol, it can even cause panic attacks or hallucinations.
14. Acne & Inflammation
Alcohol is one of the worst things you can do to your skin. It causes acne, inflammation, and redness. It dries out your skin, making it look dull and tired. If you drink too much alcohol regularly, you may notice that your skin starts to age faster than it should.
Alcohol like beer also increases your body’s insulin-like growth factor (IGF) levels, which is linked to ageing. If you drink heavily enough, this can lead to premature ageing of the skin by disrupting collagen production in the body. It can cause wrinkles and fine lines to appear sooner than they should have.
15. Alcohol Poisoning
Alcohol poisoning is fatal when you consume too much alcohol before bed or at anytime during the day. When you drink alcohol, it gets absorbed into your bloodstream through your stomach lining. From there, it travels throughout your body including to your brain.
When this happens, your brain starts to become less sensitive to the effects of alcohol and begins to metabolize it more slowly. It leads to intoxication and impaired judgment, coordination, and vision, which can cause risky behaviour or accidents that can lead to injury or death in extreme cases.
16. Headaches
When you drink before going to sleep, you can experience headaches because alcohol affects your sleep cycle, making it harder for you to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night.
And even if you fall asleep, when your body processes all of that alcohol in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping, it can lead to hangovers and headaches when you wake up in the morning.
Alcohol can also make headaches worse by causing dehydration.
17. Alcohol Causes Insomnia
Alcohol has been shown to cause insomnia. That’s because alcohol disrupts the stage of sleep known as slow-wave sleep. Slow-wave sleep is when your body repairs and recharges itself, so if you’re not getting enough of it, you can wake up feeling tired.
In addition, alcohol also makes it more difficult for your body to produce melatonin, the chemical that regulates your circadian rhythm and helps you fall asleep. You might have trouble falling asleep at night or staying asleep once you hit the sheets without the right natural dose of melatonin.
18. Weakens The Immune System
The immune system is incredibly complex and powerful and protects your body from disease, infection, and illness. It’s made up of different cells and tissues that work together to recognize foreign invaders and destroy them before they can cause damage to your body.
Drinking alcohol interferes with the body’s ability to fight off infections. Alcohol weakens the immune system by disrupting its ability to fight off germs, viruses, and bacteria that cause illnesses such as colds or other respiratory ailments. Alcohol also prevents the body from producing antibodies, proteins in blood plasma that help fight off infections, which can lead to illnesses like pneumonia or tuberculosis.
19. Learning & Memory Problems
Alcohol is a depressant that affects how you think, feel, learn, and remember things by messing with the balance of chemicals in your brain. It can increase dopamine levels while decreasing levels of GABA, two neurotransmitters that affect how we feel pleasure or pain.
Alcohol can also affect the hippocampus, an area of the brain that helps us form memories. It’s no surprise then that heavy drinkers have been found to have smaller hippocampal volumes than those who don’t drink as much.
20. Worsen Your Heart Health
One of the reasons why you should avoid drinking beer before bed is that it can worsen your heart health. The reason why alcohol causes worse heart health is because it increases blood pressure and damages your blood vessels, which increases the risk of having a stroke or heart attack by lowering blood flow through the arteries in our bodies.
Alcohol consumption can also cause an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia), which increases the risk of heart attack or death from cardiac arrest. It also raises cholesterol levels in our bloodstream by interfering with how our bodies process fats from food sources like red meat and dairy products, which are already high in cholesterol.
21. Have Night Sweats
Alcohol causes night sweats because it interferes with the regular rise and fall of body temperature that usually happens during sleep.
When we sleep, the body’s temperature naturally drops. If we don’t get enough sleep, this drop in temperature isn’t as deep, which can cause us to wake up feeling very cold in the middle of the night.
When we drink alcohol before bedtime, our bodies don’t experience this deep drop in temperature. That means we wake up feeling warm and sweaty at night instead of cool and comfortable like we should be.
22. Frequent Awakenings
Alcohol disrupts the normal sleep cycle and can contribute to an inability to fall asleep at night and impaired sleep quality during the night. The result is that you wake up more often than usual and feel groggy when you do wake up. You may also feel like you’re not getting enough sleep even though you are.
To avoid this problem, try to avoid drinking beer at least four hours before bed. If you must drink, consider having only one drink per two hours, and avoid drinking any alcohol after 8 p.m., when your body begins its natural process of producing melatonin.