Better Sleep Habits Linked With Reduced Hazardous Drinking

Better sleep habits indirectly reduced hazardous drinking among adults between the ages of 21 and 29 in a study conducted by researchers at Penn State University. Findings were presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies annual meeting earlier this month.

For the study, 222 regular drinking adults ages 21 to 29, 63% of whom were women, wore an alcohol monitoring device to continuously measure transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) for 6 days. Study participants also completed daily surveys reporting their previous night’s number of drinks consumed and sleep. Researchers used sleep variables to predict next-day alcohol use and alcohol consumption variables to predict subsequent sleep.

Researchers found that study participants who tended to go to bed later consumed 24% more drinks on average and recorded a 26% higher TAC the following day. Each additional hour of sleep the prior night was associated with a 14% decrease in next-day alcohol consumption. Further, on nights in which participants consumed more alcohol, they went to bed on average 8 to 13 minutes later than usual and had worse sleep quality.

“Taken together,” the Penn State researchers wrote in their conclusion, “these results suggest that better sleep health may improve drinking behaviors and intoxication dynamics, which may have implications for interventions targeting sleep as a mechanism to reduce heavy drinking.

Reference

Richenberger D, Chang AM, Russell M. Bidirectional associations of sleep and alcohol use within and between regularly drinking young adults. Sleep. Vol 45, Issue Supplement_1. 2022.