Why you wake up at 4 a.m. after drinking
Alcohol gets you to sleep faster, then takes the second half of the night away. Here's what's going on, and what actually helps.
It's 4:12. You're wide awake, your heart's going a little fast, and the person next to you is sleeping like nothing happened. You went down at 1 a.m. like a rock. So what was that about?
That pattern is so common that sleep researchers have a tidy name for it. Alcohol helps you fall asleep faster and sleep heavier for the first few hours. Then, as your body clears it, the second half of the night falls apart.
What the research says
The best summary we've found is a 2013 review in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research by Irshaad Ebrahim, Colin Shapiro and colleagues, which pulled together decades of sleep-lab studies. Across doses, alcohol shortened the time it took people to fall asleep. At higher doses it also pushed REM sleep, the dreaming stage, out of the first half of the night. When the alcohol wears off, your body tries to catch up, and sleep gets lighter and more broken. That's your 4 a.m.
So you did sleep. It just wasn't the kind that leaves you feeling put back together.
Why we didn't reach for a sedative
The obvious fix would be to knock you out harder. We didn't want to do that, because knocking you out is already what the alcohol did. What we wanted was help with the second half of the night, the part that goes wrong.
That's why there's 2,000 mg of glycine in every stick. Glycine is an amino acid, and the study people usually point to is a small Japanese trial from 2007 by Wataru Yamadera and colleagues. People who took 3 g before bed reported better sleep quality and less fatigue the next day. Our dose is a bit lower than that, and we'll say so. Taurine is in there too, at 500 mg, because it has a calming effect on the nervous system.
There's no melatonin in Glug. We wrote a whole piece on why.
A few things that help regardless
- Drink water before bed. A full glass, not a sip.
- Keep the room cool. Alcohol can make you run warm overnight.
- Give yourself a gap between the last drink and lying down if you can. Even half an hour helps.
And if you're awake at 4:12 anyway, don't check your phone. You'll read one email and that's the morning gone.
- Ebrahim IO, Shapiro CM, Williams AJ, Fenwick PB. Alcohol and sleep I: effects on normal sleep. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2013.
- Yamadera W, Inagawa K, Chiba S, Bannai M, Takahashi M, Nakayama K. Glycine ingestion improves subjective sleep quality in human volunteers. Sleep and Biological Rhythms, 2007.
One stick before bed.
500 mg CyLoc® glutathione, NAC, electrolytes and glycine. Berry Lemonade.
