After living an entire month without consuming any alcohol, I wanted to see if my sleep would improve.
The short answer, it didn't.
Alcohol within a few hours before bedtime increases your heart rate and leads to reduced physical and mental recovery. But over the month of not consuming alcohol, other factors impacted my sleep making the story a little more nuanced.
It wasn't just a clear yes or no that a no-alcohol month improved sleep. There were, however, definite quantifiable benefits and learnings by putting habit formation methods to the test. One benefit in particular made the entire experiment eye opening.
The Case Against Alcohol
For some time now, I've been fascinated by sleep and the many health, performance, longevity and wellbeing benefits associated with even small improvements. I've written many posts on the subject and talked to top experts in the field (a list is included at the end).
Alcohol is reported to negatively impact the quantity and quality of sleep.
"Alcohol suppresses deep sleep and REM sleep,” sleep expert Dr. Alex Dimitriu said during a How to Improve Your Sleep Q&A I recently hosted. Deep sleep is the time your body is restoring itself physically and REM sleep is where your body is doing that mentally. REM sleep is when you are storing all your long-term memories, essential for rapid learning and creativity.
“[Alcohol] wears off and people are wide awake,” Dr. Dimitriu told the webinar audience and this is usually the time of night when you would be getting restorative deep and REM sleep.
Many of us know this as a hangover or a tired, sluggish day where we aren’t as sharp as we are when operating optimally. Dr. Dimitriu said a hangover is basically when you get no deep or REM sleep.
So inspired by all the dry January stories, I decided to test to see what a month without alcohol would do for my sleep. Like everyone with New Year’s Resolutions, January for me typically has been a healthy reset for the new year after a year-end celebration time. But I had never done a dry January.
So an alcohol-free February was next on the calendar.
The Sleep Experiment
The experiment was simple (probably too simple as you'll soon see). I'd drink no alcohol for the month of February, and I'd track the impact of this intervention using two pieces of technology.
These two tools are my go-to tech stack for monitoring my overall health, particularly sleep and how lifestyle interventions can scientifically prove if the intervention was successful.
The tech stack includes the Oura Ring, a wearable device that tracks your activity throughout the day and your recovery throughout the night. That means it takes into account how much effort you've expended during the day to be able to determine the amount of rest you need.
It not only tracks my sleep, but is my daily go-to tool to track how my overall wellbeing is trending. It can give me an indicator into my body’s defense mechanism before I would even feel the impact. Basically, it is a heads-up to prioritize recovery before I may be heading to sickness world. It’s worth noting, I haven’t been sick in the two years I’ve been wearing the Oura Ring, and it has been a piece of mind throughout this past COVID year being able to see key early warning data such as respiratory rate and body temperature stay normal.
The other part of that tech stack is Bioloop Sleep. This is a sleep coaching app currently in beta that connects with Oura Ring data along with other sleep trackers with a feature to allow the user to run N-1 experiments. Essentially, it's for a study of one member (N-1) being you (arguably the only result that matters). What the feature does is sort out day-to-day fluctuations in your life to determine if your sleep intervention experiment is actually having an impact on your individual sleep.
For example, I was able to definitively determine that taking a magnesium supplement helped improve my sleep. It may not help others, and I was able to confidently say it helped me.
Taking CBD before bed? No impact.
This is what's so valuable about a tech stack like this to improve your sleep and as a result your health, performance and wellbeing. Ever get to the bottom of a supplement bottle and think, is this having any benefit? It's that re-order moment. Maybe the answer to re-order all comes down to how you feel at that moment, but that's not the best way to make a financial and health decision. A controlled N-1 study is.
Finally, as an expert in habit formation and behavioral design, I had the opportunity to use the skills I teach to individuals, organizations and recommend to product developers. I was able to use several basic techniques to change how I responded to different situations when a drink is normally ordered or consumed.
These techniques included:
Accountability
Rehearsing
Building New Habits
Identifying what I want instead
The challenge for this experiment was about changing the habits around when I had a drink.
At the beginning of February, I was on the East Coast in Florida, where there were more social opportunities than in San Francisco, which had tighter lockdown restrictions. During that time, I used an accountability technique by telling people about my experiment. Not only did this keep me on track, it also offered an opportunity to discuss how alcohol impacts sleep.
There was only one dinner out in Florida when I would be asked by the waiter (the trigger/cue) if I wanted something to drink. This is where I used the technique of rehearsing, to have a plan of what I'd say. I had picked out an alternative non-alcoholic cocktail as to have something special for the celebratory ceremony of the night (a baby was on its way). The key here was to understand the trigger or cue that would normally prompt the habit. When you identify the trigger or cue, you can plan and rehearse for a different response.
Sometimes finding that cue isn’t as clear as a waiter prompting you with a question. There’s always an emotion involved. As Stanford’s BJ Fogg and author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything has said to me often, “Emotions create habits.”
After returning to San Francisco, there were much fewer social opportunities, which made the behavior change much easier. By this time, I was more than half way through the month and was able to talk about my experiment and early findings when asked if I wanted a drink. I always find when I do these types of social experiments, it prompts the most interesting discussions. This was no different with people opening up about their sleep challenges or how often they’ve been drinking during the pandemic.
It’s okay. This has been a tough year with no judgment on how any of us have been coping individually. Your healthy habits are still there. The neural pathways for those healthy habits are sitting there waiting to be strengthened each time you do them, no matter how small of an effort you make or how long they haven’t been used.
One key technique of changing habits is to determine what you want or can do instead. I used flavored soda water to help spice up my water option, or I used a flavored water solution like Mio, which had the added benefit of putting hydrating electrolytes into my body.
The most fun part of the experiment for me was using the behavior design methods to work with existing habits and to build new ones. Learning these methods to continue to optimize performance and enhance wellbeing makes me feel much more the programmer than the program. (You can learn some of these habit formation techniques during my free 5-day email based workshop here.)
Did no alcohol for a month help my sleep?
While data on my sleep quality showed a flat to slight decline in the Oura Ring sleep score, qualitatively I felt like I had more energy and focus, I but wasn't able to quantify it. My workouts and activity overall didn't increase during the month, but again this is probably more related to the experiment design.
When I spoke with Bioloop co-founder Jason Jin, he said it was hard to isolate this type of experience. It would be better to have alcohol on some nights and not others to compare the data for a better experiment design.
I started the month on the East Coast in an AirBnB rental, which wasn’t my optimized bedroom for sleep. Then I did a cross-country trip back to my home in San Francisco mid-month with 3-5 day of accompanying jet lag. Travel and jet lag seems to have as much of an impact as alcohol had on my sleep.
Finally, toward the end of the month and into March, my sleep was improving. If I had continued the experiment with a more controlled sleep setting at my home, I could have isolated the impact of alcohol better.
What did go well (the most important metric)?
After looking at my Oura Ring data and the Bioloop N-1 experiment data, I did have several positive improvements:
Resting Heart Rate reduced significantly, between 11-13% in February from my baseline. A lower resting heart rate is better when it comes to your health. It's a sign your heart is working well. When it's lower, your heart pumps more blood with each contraction and easily keeps a regular beat. A slower than normal pulse is common in people who are physically fit.
Respiratory Rate saw a steady decline week-over-week. One of the potential causes for a rise in respiratory rate is your body fighting off infection. With COVID, this is something I watch closely each day.
The biggest improvement was arguably to the most valuable metric tracked by the Oura Ring, Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
I saw a large impact in my HRV which increased 38% to among my highest levels of the past two years. Oura registered it at 57ms for the month of February.
HRV is currently one of the best, biometrically quantifiable indicators of wellbeing. The higher the HRV the better.
HRV is measuring the activity of the vagus nerve, neuroscientist Dr. Michael Mannino said during an online talk I attended through the Flow Research Collective last month.
"Baseline vagal tone can be used either as a potential predictor of behavior or as a signal of mental health."
The higher HRV the higher the vagal tone. Measuring HRV, or actually the trend of HRV, is a data point on the trend of your wellbeing.
Higher Vagal tone (high HRV) has many physiological benefits:
Increased resilience / behavioral flexibility
Significantly reduced inflammation
Lower risk of cardiovascular disease
Better digestion
Increased recovery
Lower stress / anxiety
Increased immune system
HRV also has many cognitive / neurobiological benefits:
Increased cognitive & athletic performance
More-active facial expressions
Increased mood / calm
Increased working memory
Increased social functioning & emotional regulation
People with higher HRV levels demonstrate a better ability to control memory and a better ability to suppress unwanted memories, according to Dr. Mannino. Better ability to suppress unwanted memories! That's incredible to be able to control.
HRV can also index attention. For example, a group of researchers found that groups with high anxiety and low HRV have poor attention. Decision making is negatively affected by lower HRV and positively affected by higher levels of HRV.
Experiment Takeaways
So while I didn't see an initial impact on my sleep from eliminating alcohol for a month. I did see a significant increase in my HRV, which is the best indicator of overall wellbeing. That ultimately is a better data point for this experiment.
Dr. Mannino said the number one way to improve HRV is through recovery methods, including sleep.
When I set out to improve my sleep, implicit in that I was also saying I wanted to improve my performance and wellbeing. Tracking sleep is then more of a data point on your way to improving your HRV.
Plus, the effort had the added benefit of changing some key behaviors to help with my wind-down sleep ritual. Once those are in place, it's a nice habit routine to continue to return to, even when you sway away. Those new habit neural pathways are always sitting there waiting to be picked up and strengthened any time.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Watch the Ask Me Anything Q&A with Dr. Alex Dimitriu on demand and download the Tiny Habits for Sleep Action Guide.
Interested in a program to help you improve your sleep coached by sleep experts and leading doctors in the field of sleep and performance? Register for more information here.
Want to learn the Tiny Habits behavior design method? Sign up for a free 5-Day training here.
Listen to my interview with Dr. Alex Dimitriu, dual board certification in psychiatry and sleep medicine, on sleep as a vital sign for the mind.
Read: Improve Performance with Heart Rate Variability and the Oura Ring