Can Alcohol Cause Nightmares?

Can Alcohol Cause Nightmares? (Revealed!)

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Alcohol can certainly disrupt your sleep in a way that affects your overall sleep cycle. REM sleep is where you have your most vivid dreams, and can be affected by alcohol, causing unpleasant dreams or nightmares. But it is not guaranteed to do so, and will affect people differently.

 

So, the simple answer is yes, alcohol can cause nightmares.

However, a lot of other factors will go into it—such as how well hydrated you are, how soundly you were able to sleep and, of course, how much you drank to begin with.

Let’s look further into this.

Can Alcohol Cause Nightmares?

 

Why do I have nightmares after drinking alcohol?

There are a couple of reasons.

First of all, there is really nothing, chemically speaking, which somehow induces nightmares in alcohol.

There aren’t many known substances that can do that, reliably!

That said, alcohol does a couple of things that can, indirectly, cause at the very least restless sleep.

For one, it will dehydrate you if you aren’t drinking water to counteract the alcohol.

It will also disrupt your sleep cycle on its own, by overstimulating your brain.

Being dehydrated and overstimulated will disrupt your sleep cycle.

REM sleep, or rapid eye movement, is the deepest part of your sleep cycle where you tend to have your most vivid dreams.

As the blood alcohol level drops over the night, sleep becomes shallower and you’re more likely to wake up more often.

When you wake up more often, you recall your dreams more clearly.

Often, having “nightmares” is a simple case of the fact that you were awoken in the night, and thus remembered your dream.

Alcohol mainly causes nightmares by disrupting your sound sleeping pattern.

Being dehydrated, as well as the blood alcohol level, causes this.

So, how long do they last?

 

How long do alcohol nightmares last?

In the case of long-term drinking, you could see long term results in your sleep, too.

In extreme cases, you could see bad dreams or nightmares for up to 2-3 weeks.

This can be increasingly stressful, and can often become a cycle—with alcohol causing nightmares, and then using alcohol to try to get a deeper sleep and skip the dreams.

In general, though, they should stop with 48-72 hours after you’ve stopped drinking, at most.

If you are drinking daily for long periods of time, you may well find it harder to sleep for longer periods of time.

If you’ve had a drink one night and had some bad dreams, don’t worry—they shouldn’t persist for long if you stop drinking.

 

How to stop having nightmares with alcohol

So, as I mentioned, there is nothing about alcohol that guarantees nightmares—it’s just the way most of us tend to act when drinking which causes it indirectly.

The first thing you can do to avoid nightmares when drinking alcohol is to do your best to stay hydrated while drinking—especially if you’re drinking a lot.

Ideally, you should have a glass of water between every drink.

Staying hydrated will keep many of the worst effects of alcohol at bay.

It’s generally better if you can get to bed earlier, too.

The later you sleep, the more restless your body will be, and the more likely you are to be frequently waking up during sleep.

The best thing, though, is to just limit the amount that you drink.

It’s a simple formula: the more you drink, the more restless your sleep will be.

The more restless your sleep, the more likely you are to have unpleasant dreams.

So, just do your best to limit the amount you drink, and if you do drink, be sure to drink plenty of water, too.

 

What alcohol is best to avoid nightmares?

The first thing to say is that, in large enough quantities, pretty much any alcohol has the chance to do this.

No alcohol will hydrate you, and no alcohol will make your sleep cycle calmer.

That said, there are some drinks that are certainly worse than others—when drunk in the same quantity.

Hard liquor, containing a higher alcohol content, will dehydrate you a lot more than the same amount of beer.

Naturally, though, we tend to drink more beer than we do of liquor.

Beer, then, and drinks with similar alcohol content like cider, will be the best—if you stick to only a few drinks.

If you have too much, you’re at just as much risk.

As long as the alcohol content is lower, you’ll be fine.

 

So, though alcohol does have a variety of effects which can cause nightmares, you can also do a few small things to counteract these effects.

Alcohol does not inherently cause nightmares in any chemical sense, but it does cause them indirectly, whether through dehydration, restless sleep, or overstimulation of the brain.

In any case, if you want to drink alcohol and avoid the restless sleep, all you need to do is follow the advice I’ve laid out here.

 

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