Why do the first sober nights feel loud?

Most people who stop drinking will admit, if you ask, that the first few evenings were noisier than they had braced for. They mean the plain, ordinary kind of noise, not the noise in their heads: the fridge, the pipes, a neighbour’s door clicking shut two floors down.

What follows is an illustration, not anyone’s real account. Picture a composite person, nobody in particular, partway through that first week.

Tuesday, ten to eleven

They are three evenings past their last glass of wine and haven’t started counting the days out loud. Around nine they wash the one glass that used to come out at that hour and put it back in the cupboard. Then they sit down on the sofa with a book they aren’t really reading.

The fridge starts its cycle. They have owned this fridge for six years and could not have told you it made a sound. Tonight it has a low, wobbling note that ends in a click, and they catch themselves waiting for the click.

The radiator ticks. A car goes by slowly, its tyres hissing on the wet road, and the sound seems to take a long time to leave.

Half joking, they think the flat has got louder. Then, more honestly, they wonder whether they have.

Nothing about the walls is different. The shape of the hours is. For a long time this part of the evening was softened and then cut short: the drink, a heavier head, bed earlier than planned, sleep coming quickly. Now the hours are just there, awake and uncovered, at the very time the building goes quiet and small noises have nothing to compete with.

That is one person’s observation and nothing more. It is worth being careful about what gets attached to it.

Lab notes: what was actually counted

The softened, shortened feeling has a rough counterpart in the lab. Irshaad Ebrahim, Colin Shapiro, Adrian Williams and Peter Fenwick reviewed controlled studies in which healthy people drank before bed. Across the doses studied, people fell asleep sooner, the first half of the night held together more firmly, and the second half was more broken. The first REM period came later at every dose. The share of REM across the whole night fell at moderate and high doses, which was the most consistent result in the review, while low doses showed no clear direction. Most of the studies also found extra slow-wave sleep early in the night, and at high doses there was more of it over the night as a whole.

Bernd Feige and colleagues used polysomnography to look at two specific levels. A bedtime blood-alcohol level of 0.03% made no clear difference to the sleep measures they tracked. At 0.10%, kept up over three nights, people fell asleep sooner. In the first half of the night they woke less, had less stage-1 sleep, had more slow-wave sleep and showed lower REM density. In the second half they had more stage-1 sleep. On the two nights after the alcohol stopped, REM went up, but sleep continuity did not change significantly. The authors pointed to their small sample and said the results should be read with caution.

Neither study measured a fridge. Nobody was asked how loud anything seemed, in a bedroom or anywhere else. Every night recorded was a night when alcohol had actually been drunk, never a night without it. The papers describe sleep stages, while the person on the sofa is describing what they hear. The two point in roughly the same direction, and that is as far as the connection goes.

Thursday, the same fridge

Two evenings later it is ten to eleven again and they are still awake. That no longer surprises them.

They put on some brown noise from moonMind, quietly enough that the fridge is still audible underneath. They aren’t trying to drown anything out. They just want to hear what the evening sounds like with one steady layer added.

On the back of an envelope they write one line: Fridge loud again. Or I am. They don’t turn it into a chart or a plan, and they don’t promise themselves to do it again tomorrow.

The fridge finishes its cycle with the same click as on Tuesday. They hear it, set the pen down on the envelope, and turn the page.

Outside the story

Both studies recorded sleep after measured doses of alcohol under controlled conditions. They describe groups, not your Thursday. Nothing here is medical advice, and it is not a plan for stopping drinking or getting through withdrawal. If stopping brings on symptoms that frighten you, see a doctor. The same goes if restless nights keep coming back and start crowding out work and the rest of your days. You can also tell someone close to you. If you are ever in danger, call the emergency number where you live.

Sources

1. Ebrahim IO, Shapiro CM, Williams AJ, Fenwick PB. Alcohol and Sleep I: Effects on Normal Sleep. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2013, 37(4), 539–549. doi.org/10.1111/acer.12006
2. Feige B, Gann H, Brueck R, Hornyak M, Litsch S, Hohagen F, Riemann D. Effects of Alcohol on Polysomnographically Recorded Sleep in Healthy Subjects. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2006, 30(9), 1527–1537. doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2006.00184.x