That extra glass of wine could be hurting you: Drinking alcohol at night significantly impacts your sleep quality

( Natural News ) It is known that excessive alcohol drinking has a lot of negative consequences. However, research shows that even drinking as little as one glass of alcohol can also harm you. In fact, a study published in the journal JMIR Mental Health has found that one drink of alcohol can impair sleep quality . The study was carried out by a team of researchers at Tampere University of Technology , the University of Jyväskylä , and Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Finland who looked at the effects of alcohol consumption on the autonomic nervous system during sleep. In conducting the study, the research team analyzed data from more than 4,000 participants aged between 18 and 65. The participants’ heart rate variability (HRV) was recorded in uncontrolled, real-world conditions using a special device. HRV is a measure that tells how many variations are present between heartbeats within a specific time frame. HRV measurements made it possible for the researchers to evaluate the participants’ quality of sleep. The research team looked at the participants’ first three hours of sleep and evaluated their sleep HRV recordings from at least two nights: one where the participants had drunk alcohol and one where they had not. Alcohol consumption was classified into three: low, moderate, and high. These categories were based on the body weight of the participants. In general, a low intake of alcohol could be equivalent to one to two drinks, while moderate would equate to two to six, and high would mean over six drinks. Results revealed that even low alcohol consumption reduced sleep quality, lowering the physiological recovery that sleep normally offers by 9.3 percent. Moreover, moderate alcohol intake decreased restorative sleep quality by 24 percent, and high alcohol consumption by 39.2 percent. The outcomes were the […]

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