Why you should never use alcohol to help you fall asleep, according to science

That glass of wine right before bed may make you feel drowsy, but don'trely on it for quality sleep.Scientists have been studying the counterintuitive relationship between the drowsiness that comes from drinking alcohol and actual sleepsince at least the 1930s."If you drink alcohol before bed, it actually makes you fall asleep faster and sleep deeper, but then your body starts to metabolize that alcohol, and you'll go through withdrawal," Thomas Roth,director of the Henry Ford Sleep Research Center, told Business Insider's Christina Sterbenz. "Your sleep will be terribly disrupted."Studies that explore how sleep and alcohol mix tend to be small (generally less than 30 participants), and tend to have their participants drink 30 to 60 minutes before sending them off to bed. For example, asmall Australian study found that peoplewho drank alcohol before bed tended to have certain patterns in their brain consistent with disrupted sleep. So even if they felt like they wereexperiencing restorative sleep, their brain activity negated any positive effect.That disrupted, alcohol-fueled sleep might evenaffect howalert you arewhen you wake up:A 1991 studyof 20 adults found that those who consumed alcoholbefore bedeven just a little bit were less alert and had a harder time multi-tasking the next day than thegroup that didn't drink.So if you're trying to have a glass of wine or a beer after a long week at happy hour with friends' Great. But if you're trying to use it as a sleep aid, you might be out of luck."Alcohol is great for the purposes of going out and socializing, but it's a bad, bad medicine to use for the purposes of sleep," Patrick Fuller, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School told Business Insider in February. "If your goal is to get a good sleep, alcohol is absolutely the wrong choice."SEE ALSO:Forget what you thought you knew ' there are actually 4 species of giraffesDON'T MISS:You've been washing your hands all wrong ' here's the scientifically best way to do itJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: NASA tested a rocket engine 'and did something unusual in the process
Click here to read full news..