A nightcap helps you sleep, right?

Well, yes...but not in the way you think it does.  In fact, it often makes things worse.

During my initial explorations with the flow-meter, I thought that I'd test my set-up by trying to INCREASE my AHI using a well known substance that makes sleep apnea worse:  Alcohol.

A sleep experiment where I get to have a drink or three... it's tough, but I'll do it for science. 

Alcohol Increases Your Risk of Sleep Apnea

Pretty much as it does with people, alcohol relaxes the muscles in the airways making them more prone to flopping around all over the place and causing an obstruction.
 
When it comes to the rest of the practices, gadgets, fads and ideas that I'll be exploring I'll be testing them for 5 days in a row each. To be honest I'm not going to do that with alcohol as I can't afford a week of waking up sluggish and groggy. 

So, what I did was to take 5 non-consecutive days instead. I consumed alcohol and recorded my AHI on those nights along with my 5 day no-alcohol mean AHI for comparison.

Pretty conclusive.

Alcohol increased the number of times that I either stopped breathing or breathed so little that it was ineffective.  Not only that, but it did it in quite a startling way.

It took my 5 day mean AHI from 6.95 to 12.2.(max 15.3) To get that into perspective, that's nearly double the number of times PER HOUR that I had breathing problems. As discussed in this post, I went from just scraping in with a diagnosis of "Mild Obstructive Sleep Apnea" to being firmly in the category!
 
Surely there was something positive to salvage from this bad news?

Yes.

In my mind alcohol helped me to get to sleep and I found that the Zeo data backed that up.

Again, using a 5 day mean value, my time to sleep onset (or Zeo's "Time to Z") went from 28 minutes without alcohol down to 9 with alcohol. That seemed to be the only significant difference in the data, so I haven't bothered to clutter the page with other measurements.

It may help you to get to sleep, but the chances are that the sleep will not be good sleep. The chances are that it will be disturbed sleep, the chances of having to go to the bathroom will increase, as will the likelihood of dehydration-related headaches and fragmented sleep towards the morning.

Not only would I wake up feeling slow and mildly hungover, but I'd be tired from being woken up up to 15 times an hour through apneas.

Don't misunderstand me, this isn't one of those damning posts about alcohol, but it is something to bear in mind if you already suffer with sleep apnea, and it may even cause mild apnoea in people who don't have it. 

Will I continue to drink alcohol? Of course, and that's the dilemma. So I guess the answer is "everything in moderation."

Christine Peterson's poster of her Zeo research (download poster) was one of the highlights of the QS conference for me, as I said in an earlier post:

She measured her sleep with a Zeo for three months. Her poster showed how various things, such as caffeine consumption, correlated with sleep measurements, such as REM time. I believe the most important Zeo measurement is how long you are awake during the night. ... Christine's data showed a strong correlation between her score on Zeo's Sleep Stealer's index (...) and how long she was awake at night. With a high score, she was awake twice as long (about 1.5 hours) as with a low score.

Here's why.

The correlation between Sleep Stealer score and time awake.

When her Sleep Stealer score was 5 or less, she was awake about an hour during the night.

When her score was more than 5, she was awake about two hours - a big difference. There should be a big difference, but you could fail to see it for a thousand reasons. The large difference is a validation of the whole thing - above all, an indication that her Zeo is working correctly.

                                                          C Peterson - Total Z v Sleep Stealers                        

Even when her Sleep Stealer score is low, she is awake a long time.

This means there are major determinants of sleep depth not captured by the Sleep Stealer score. With the right Sleep Stealer score - assuming the correlation reflects cause and effect - she can improve from two hours to one hour (one hour difference) but that leaves one hour. This implies that the determinants of time awake not in the Sleep Stealer score are just as important as those that it contains.

Even when she is at the best level of important factors, she is awake a long time.

When she had no drinks, she was awake 56 minutes/night.  When other people didn't disrupt her sleep at all, she was awake 54 minutes/night. C Peterson -Time in Wake v Alcohol

C Peterson - Time in Wake v Disruption

The average wake time for women 50-59 is half an hour.

That's a lot of lost time, day after day, night after night. Note however that the data is from Zeo users, who may have worse sleep than average.  (Editor's note: see What's Your ZQ for more information about Zeo users' sleep quality)                                                                                              

It only took three months to collect the data.

This isn't on the poster. Yet this is a solid contribution, in the sense that I learned from it. With perhaps nine months of data and better data analysis, it might be publishable.

The main point such a paper would presumably make is that even when you do everything right (Sleep Stealer score = 0) you're still awake a lot. This point is nowhere in the sleep literature.

Seth's advice for better sleep

Christine, if you would like to sleep better I suggest:

1. Don't eat breakfast until at least three hours after you wake up.
2. Get at least one hour of sunlight early in the morning - e.g., 6 to 7 am. You can do this by working outside.  (I work outside several hours every morning.)
3. Stand on one leg to exhaustion four or more times per day. (I do it six times/day.) You can do this while reading - it should not reduce your free time.