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9 June 2010 Sleepless from South Africa?

The World Cup is serious business. For football fans, the sense of anticipation, heady excitement and nervousness before each game makes for a stressful few weeks. Throw in sweating about the fitness of your match winning players and the devastating previous performance by your next opponents and you might be looking at six weeks of sleepless nights.

It might not just be football worries, however, that are keeping you up at night. Ever wondered why you feel so tired the morning after the night before?
A common misconception about alcohol is that it will help you have a good night’s sleep. Alcohol might help you nod off (as anyone who’s ever passed out after one too many will tell you...), but even just a few drinks can affect the quality of your sleep.

A recent government poll of 2,000 people found that almost half felt tired the day after drinking more than the recommended guidelines. However, more than half of those questioned didn’t know that sleep problems could be caused by alcohol.

“A lot of people don’t make the connection between feeling tired and drinking too much,” says Jessica Alexander from the Sleep Council  “Alcohol is one of the ‘three evils’ when it comes to disrupting sleep – the other two being caffeine and smoking.”

So why exactly do you feel tired after drinking? And why do you wake up so early after a heavy night?

Put simply, alcohol interferes with the normal sleep process. Dr John Shneerson is head of the largest sleep centre in the UK at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. He explains: “When you drink a lot of alcohol close to bedtime, you can go straight into deep sleep, missing out on the usual first stage of sleep, called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

“Your deep sleep is when body restores itself, and alcohol can interfere with this. As the alcohol starts to wear off, your body can come out of deep sleep and back into REM sleep, which is much easier to wake from. That’s why you often wake up after just a few hours sleep when you’ve been drinking.”

In the course of a night you usually have six to seven cycles of REM sleep, which leaves you feeling refreshed. However, if you’ve been drinking you’ll typically have only one to two, meaning you can wake feeling exhausted.

Tips for a restful World Cup

Here are some more tips from the Sleep Council to make sure the form of your team is not keeping you awake at night:

•    Keep alcohol to a minimum and you will get better sleep and wake up feeling fresher. Not regularly exceeding the daily guidelines of 2 – 3 units for women and 3 – 4 units for men is a simple way to keep the amount you drink in check. Use our online unit calculator to see how many units are in your favourite drinks.

•    Create a soothing environment in your bedroom. Make sure it’s cool and uncluttered, and your bed is comfortable.

•    Keep regular hours. Going to bed and getting up at roughly the same time, all the time, will programme your body to sleep better.

•    Stay away from caffeine in the evening. Try a hot milky or herbal drink instead. Other ways you can relax before bed include having a warm bath or listening to some quiet music.

•    Take exercise to relieve the day’s stresses and strains. But not too close to bedtime or it may keep you awake.

•    Deal with worries or a heavy workload by making lists of things to be tackled the next day, so they’re not swimming around in your head.

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Drinkaware advises men not to regularly drink more than 3–4 units of alcohol a day.