Many people believe that a few drinks will help them to sleep better when in fact it will help a person fall asleep but it will not help to keep them asleep. Way too often those few nightcaps can cause a person to wake several times during the night and further lead to feeling sluggish, disorientated, and have a lack of concentration the next day. Unfortunately, this can lead to a very unhealthy pattern. Contrary to what many might think alcohol and insomnia do not mix at all. Alcohol causes the body to dehydrate which can make insomnia even worse.
Alcohol is also a contributing factor in keeping people out of the deep sleep cycle which makes them feel even worse the next day. So this is how alcohol and insomnia work, alcohol makes the body fall asleep very quickly while at the same time it is dehydrating your body too. As a result, the body will wake for water because of the dehydration and your body will never get a chance to fall into the REM cycle of sleep, which is the deep important sleep that all people need. No alcohol will ever alleviate a person's insomnia but in fact will make it worse. It is certainly no trade off to become a person with a drinking problem attempting to compensate for an insomnia condition.
There are many more effective ways to treat insomnia without tipping back a few drinks. You have to figure out what is causing the insomnia which can be attempted to be done by ones self but will likely have to be defined by a doctor. The doctor can evaluate all of the causes and get into more depth of what could be the underlying cause of the insomnia, the treating it with the appropriate measures that are not related to drinking alcohol in a failed attempt to mask the problem of insomnia. Remember that drinking will never help you get a quality nights sleep but what it will do is cause the problem to worsen and the next day in addition to feeling fatigued and lethargic, you will have additional discomfort from the alcohol.
Alcohol and its effects on insomnia might be one of the biggest misconceptions ever. Maybe that is because while a few drinks might actually induce sleep and make one fall asleep faster it is almost as if the sleep that they are getting does not count. It is not the right level of sleep and with the other factors of alcohol mixed in; technically one might as well have stayed up all night in terms of the body.
In other words the sleep did not benefit the body or mind at all. As a matter of fact, most people who have a dependency on alcohol have frequent sleep disruptions, even after the discontinuation of use. Beyond any withdrawal period a persons sleep patterns could very well never return to normal and as a result they may indeed have to battle frequent battles with insomnia for the rest of their lives.
