Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, family physician and

former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!

I'm here today with Dr. Mike Stone, who is an emergency medicine physician, and we're

going to be talking about how alcohol impacts our sleep. So first of all, how does alcohol

impact our sleep? Poorly. So people may have noticed that you can sometimes fall asleep

a little bit more easily with some alcohol onboard, but alcohol is notoriously bad for sleep

for two main reasons. One, it disrupts the normal sleep architecture. So you'll have numerous

nighttime awakenings, many more than you would have without alcohol. And even though you

may have fallen asleep easily, you're not going to get that restorative, important, high

quality sleep. And then second, alcohol is a powerful suppressor of REM sleep. So we

need REM sleep to form new connections in our brain to learn new things, to encourage

creativity, and alcohol suppresses all of that. So you're ultimately getting fragmented

sleep and poorer quality sleep with less critical REM sleep involved in that sleep cycle.

That's pretty scary. How can I actually measure this and determine the impact that alcohol

is having on my own sleep? So a really useful and fun, although sometimes a little bit scary

exercise, is use a sleep tracker. So if you're measuring your heart rate variability, your

resting heart rate overnight, and your sleep architecture with a wearable device that gives

you REM, deep light, et cetera, you're going to see very easily as an end of one experiment,

what alcohol does to your own sleep. And I highly encourage people to do that to get a sense

of how they're affected. It is definitely eye opening. I've done that one before. Oh yes.

But let's say, you know, I still want to have alcohol from time to time. I'm in a social

...