Why does wine make you sleepy

Abhinav Singh. Alcohol and Sleep FAQ. How Does Alcohol Affect Sleep? Stage 1 NREM : This initial stage is essentially the transition period between wakefulness and sleep, during which the body will begin to shut down. Brain activity also begins to decrease, as well.

This phase is also known as light sleep. Their body temperature will also decrease and the eyes become still. Stage 2 is usually the longest of the four sleep cycle stages. Stages 3 NREM : Heartbeat, breathing rates, and brain activity all reach their lowest levels of the sleep cycle.

Eye movements cease and the muscles are totally relaxed. This stage is known as slow-wave sleep. Dreaming mostly takes place during REM sleep. This stage is also thought to play a role in memory consolidation.

Related Reading. Sign up below for your free gift. Your privacy is important to us. Was this article helpful? Yes No. Medical Encyclopedia. Park, S. The Effects of Alcohol on Quality of Sleep. Korean Journal of Family Medicine, 36 6 , — Centers for Disease Control. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Roehrs, T. Sleep, Sleepiness, and Alcohol Use. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Rasch, B. Physiological Reviews, 93 2 , — Schwab, R. Merck Manual Consumer Version.

American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Darien, IL. Coltrain, I. Alcohol and the Sleeping Brain. Handbook of Clinical Neurology, , — Popovici, I.

Drug and Alcohol Independence, , — Canham, S. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 30 3 , — Simou, E. Alcohol and the risk of sleep apnoea: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sleep Medicine, 42, 38— Women and Alcohol.

Sleep Health Foundation. Caffeine, Food, Alcohol, Smoking and Sleep. Stein, M. Disturbed sleep and its relationship to alcohol use. Substance abuse, 26 1 , 1— Learn more about Nutrition. According to Macello Iriti, Ph. As they told YouBeauty. Fermentation, supposedly, increases the amount of melatonin. So it stands to reason that wine—white or red—would make us all sleepy.

It also stands to reason that since red wines have more contact with the skin, the melatonin levels in red wine would ultimately be higher, and thus more soporific that means sleep-inducing, like watching a TED Talk. Or are we supposed to be into those? It is an established fact that a grape , which is the most common source of wine, has a compound called melatonin in its skin.

Melatonin, scientifically speaking of course, is the same hormone found and secreted from our pineal glands, that aid in the sleep-wake cycle.

Fermentation plays a quintessential role in the amount of melatonin produced, wherein a direct and proportional relation is observed. It is seen that the amount of melatonin increases with the increase in time for settling and fermentation.

It becomes important, however, to measure magnitude how much melatonin wine produces anyway and how much is ideally important to regulate our sleep, one may ask. It is statistically observed that sleeping pills too contain melatonin, and that might contain as high as 10, times more melatonin than a glass of wine! Therefore, it is safe to conclude that, albeit, the average glass of wine containing nanograms of melatonin is not remotely close to sufficient in terms of sleep attributes, but it is surely capable of inducing a good amount of sluggishness.

Apart from melatonin, there is another important reason for inactivation of wakefulness whilst under the influence of alcohol in general and wine in specific. In scientific terms, it is a neurotransmitter. It is truly marvelous to comprehend that wine does not take more than 20 minutes to enter our bloodstream on consumption.

Another important concept hovers around the idea of receptors. Essentially it is like a gatekeeper, wherein it understands the purpose of the entity approaching its gate in this case, an alcohol molecule , and based on that, it takes further actions as to allow the entity to pass on its own, or let it pass under supervision or binding. During regular activities, these receptors tend to bind to GABA, and these allow inward shift or influx of chloride ions inside the neurons.

Pacifying effect, if you will! It is seen that wine tends to magnify this effect. Not only does it disallow GABA molecules to bind to its GABA-A receptors by binding to the receptor itself, but also incrementally changes the suppressive activities of the brain. Sedation, sleepiness, relaxation, here it goes again!

This concept is applied, knowingly or unknowingly, by people claiming how wine makes them feel more at ease , how it helps alleviates them from worldly complexities and the pain surrounding existential crisis.