I am seventy-eight years old. During my seventy-three alcohol consumption years, like most people, I enjoyed wine and spirits as part of my dining experience. Cardiac and cancer ailments caused my cessation of alcohol. Almost every health related marker improved. The AMA and other health associations have finally admitted that alcohol is toxic to human cells. Docs are still reluctant to change their attitudes because, like their patients, they look forward to their wine and cocktails. We have been psychologically trained by advertising and peer pressure to consume alcohol, but we need to admit to ourselves that the stuff is toxic to good health. Think about eliminating alcohol earlier in your life. You will feel better in your later years. I guarantee it.
Getting a Garmin watch did the same thing for me: it makes the connection between “two pints” “one pint” “a half pint” and quality of sleep abundantly clear. I went from drinking a beer a day 15 years ago to five beer a week 10 years ago to two or three beer a week 5 years ago on my own, but going from that 2.5 beer to one beer every two weeks was all in the measurement and data. I really wish I’d known this 15 years ago instead of thinking one beer a day was good for me. I have looked up prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorder and I really do think it’s a LOT higher than the purported 2% – casual social drinking of at least two drinks was nigh universal, and people socialize and/or drink several times a week. The problematic behaviour, personalities, and mores (which are opinions, socially enforced) compound down the years. Even ex-alcoholics continue to embody the habits and thoughts of their younger, drunker, more willful/impulsive selves. I know too many alcoholics, and I see too much alcoholic behaviour (not to mention cascading health effects) amongst almost everyone who’s not a teetotaller.
Every former drug addict who is now sober--wants to subject non-drug addicts to their sobriety sermon! I think it's a feature of the obsessive/impulsive drug addict personality. The personality type likely to become a drug addict is the same type which becomes the raving prohibitionist.
I see you are judgmental of people who don’t drink, you don’t understand them, don’t want to be around them, and see drinking as pro-socially adaptive. I get it. That attitude was fairly normal in all my groups where drinking was the norm, and I thought similar thoughts. I don’t now. I left the bubble and see what pro-social opportunities I missed because of “whoopsie” social drinking and the faulty assumptions about the normalcy of it. Even if everyone else was making the same assumptions and the same mistakes, they were eliding these opportunity costs and frankly not ponying up sufficient “benefit.” The main benefit is just a shared outlook. It dissipates.
After monitoring my sleep using an Apple Watch, I decided to see what would happen if I stopped drinking my usual two glasses of wine between 5 pm & 8 pm. What happened is my sleep improved quite a bit, enough to convince me not to drink anymore. The improvement is in duration and fewer instances of waking during the night (Down to one event a night, thanks I suppose to my 77 year old prostate.) Time in sleep stages have not altered.
"Think about eliminating alcohol earlier in your life."
But as Derek has written elsewhere, if cessation of alcohol makes a person more neurotic, less extroverted, less conscientious, and less likely to have sex . . . then maybe the costs of alcohol elimination exceed the alleged health benefits. Lol . . . Also J.P., You're 78 (I'm 69). We shouldn't project our low-social, low sex lives onto young people!
These findings align exactly to my personal experience as someone who's always struggled with sleep. I've actually found skipping dinner all together (or having something very light like a smoothie), leads to my best sleep. Unfortunately, I also love cooking and eating and drinking so this isn't a sustainable option, but I try to do it a couple nights a week and it always leads to better mornings.
I switched to only having a cocktail (if any) at lunch, and only on the weekends. (I also don’t get as much joy from alcohol as others do so that’s useful) I also finish my last meal of the day by 7 pm. If a later meal is unavoidable, I try to take a walk afterwards, or lift some weights when I get home. Otherwise I’m guaranteed to have a terrible night, waking up with my heart rate up and terrible dreams. I’m in my early 50s and have been doing this now for about 5 years.
1. While Derek’s conclusions about alcohol’s impact on sleep seems accurate from everything I’ve read, the triggering insight, his Oura Ring’s sleep score, is probably a bad one. From what I have seen, the sleep scores on wearables are pretty useless in terms of actually judging good sleep in a scientifically sound way.
2. I wonder if the studies showing better health outcomes (mental and physical) for early risers is actually just picking up the fact that in modern society, night owls are more likely to just not be getting enough/as much sleep.
One set of studies that seems a bit in tension (but by no means contradicts) is the research around starting high school later. It seems to lead to more learning, better health outcomes, and fewer car accidents. The theory being high school is too early to match high school student’s circadian rhythms, and they get more sleep if school starts later.
It’s sufficiently explained by the fact that high schoolers are particularly unlikely to actually go to bed early just because they need to get up early, and it’s pretty clear that getting enough sleep is more impactful than getting up early. But that still leaves the interesting question of to what extent adolescents’ eveningness is biologically immutable.
Resveratrol got a lot of attention as a potential therapeutic targeting the biology of aging. Unfortunately the initial study by David Sinclair and his team turned out to be confounded by the fluorescent dye, and more rigorous experiments failed to replicate activation of SIRT1. GSK invested several hundred million in resveratrol in the 2000s, and it ultimately got nothing to show for it. There are, however, plenty other avenues of research in medically intervening in aging biology, some of which have begun clinical trials or are close to beginning. I'm personally interested in Turn Bio, Altos Labs, Cyclarity Therapeutics, Retro Bio, Loyal (for dogs), and others.
I’m finding this to be so true with alcohol and sleeping. Especially the older I get. My favorite time to have a drink is around 4pm-while making dinner and getting things set for the evening. As long as I don’t have any evening plans that involve driving (have kids), now I definitely plan to keep my late afternoon drink schedule!
This really lands, the older I get, the more I see timing as strategy, not just preference. Whether it’s sleep, meals, or medicine, “earlier” feels less like discipline and more like leverage. ⚔️ #WarRoomWeekly
Ayurveda teaches the largest meal should be the midday one. It says digestion is strongest at lunchtime. France traditionally does this (less so now) but I don’t know of any other culture whose biggest meal is lunch….
Well, “dinner” in all of Western Europe was traditionally closer to what we now think of as lunchtime, and supper might not occur at all. 19th century Russian novels like Oblomov also include medical advice to skip supper. So this seems pretty well approved by the other Eurasian subcontinent!
I could have written this! That's my way of saying, "thank you ". Life gets interesting with age and our observations about how drink, diet and sleep intersect with the quality of our experiences is one wild ride.
Interesting topic, thought I think comparative magnitude is so important in these studies that without studies that look at multiple effects, Im skeptical.
Even the 2% per hour metric feels so low as to be suspect.
For example, it might be that waking up late is correlated with depression, and perhaps some temporary early morning intervention helps depressed people feel control over their lives, but compared to what other interventions?
Eg if you gave depressed people SAD lamps and a bedtime ritual without getting them up early, would you see a similar benefit?
Put another way, isnt the biggest confounding issue here that people tend not to get enough sleep, and the side effect of a morning routine is snapping out of a bad evening one?
You have probably seen this draft report, but if not, take a look. The final report will not be published by the government. The Draft January 2025 was rejected after the alcohol lobby when bat-shit crazy about allowing the public to see the negative findings about alcohol and health risks.
You would have to drink about two bottles of wine to get a theraputically viable amount of reservatol btw. Obviously, that amount of wine would negate any health benefits. Nice trick of marketing though the alcohol companies stumbled upon. I'm not lecturing. Go ahead and drink your wine if you like but just realize that there are no health benefits. You like the buzz. Nothing wrong with that.
Chronomedicine & circadian wellness may change the entire healthcare delivery landscape. Companies like Arcascope (https://arcascope.com/), which is rescuing drugs that failed in clinical trials not because they didn’t work, but because they were given at the wrong time of day, are pushing the frontier forward but the field is still quiet young. Everyone's circadian rhythm is different - sometimes slightly, sometimes widely so - and changes across days and seasons of life. Dynamic physiological monitoring to personalize interventions (behavioral, environmental, therapeutic, etc.) based on ideal circadian timing will be a huge unlock across treatment modalities and specialty areas.
I am seventy-eight years old. During my seventy-three alcohol consumption years, like most people, I enjoyed wine and spirits as part of my dining experience. Cardiac and cancer ailments caused my cessation of alcohol. Almost every health related marker improved. The AMA and other health associations have finally admitted that alcohol is toxic to human cells. Docs are still reluctant to change their attitudes because, like their patients, they look forward to their wine and cocktails. We have been psychologically trained by advertising and peer pressure to consume alcohol, but we need to admit to ourselves that the stuff is toxic to good health. Think about eliminating alcohol earlier in your life. You will feel better in your later years. I guarantee it.
Yep, it was an arithmetic typo. I began consuming alcohol as an undergraduate, so I was drinking for about fifty-five years.
So you started drinking alcohol sometime before 5 years old? Wild.
Had the same thought… it would make a lot of sense if it’s a typo for *sixty*-three years, with them starting to drink at 15
Getting a Garmin watch did the same thing for me: it makes the connection between “two pints” “one pint” “a half pint” and quality of sleep abundantly clear. I went from drinking a beer a day 15 years ago to five beer a week 10 years ago to two or three beer a week 5 years ago on my own, but going from that 2.5 beer to one beer every two weeks was all in the measurement and data. I really wish I’d known this 15 years ago instead of thinking one beer a day was good for me. I have looked up prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorder and I really do think it’s a LOT higher than the purported 2% – casual social drinking of at least two drinks was nigh universal, and people socialize and/or drink several times a week. The problematic behaviour, personalities, and mores (which are opinions, socially enforced) compound down the years. Even ex-alcoholics continue to embody the habits and thoughts of their younger, drunker, more willful/impulsive selves. I know too many alcoholics, and I see too much alcoholic behaviour (not to mention cascading health effects) amongst almost everyone who’s not a teetotaller.
Every former drug addict who is now sober--wants to subject non-drug addicts to their sobriety sermon! I think it's a feature of the obsessive/impulsive drug addict personality. The personality type likely to become a drug addict is the same type which becomes the raving prohibitionist.
I see you are judgmental of people who don’t drink, you don’t understand them, don’t want to be around them, and see drinking as pro-socially adaptive. I get it. That attitude was fairly normal in all my groups where drinking was the norm, and I thought similar thoughts. I don’t now. I left the bubble and see what pro-social opportunities I missed because of “whoopsie” social drinking and the faulty assumptions about the normalcy of it. Even if everyone else was making the same assumptions and the same mistakes, they were eliding these opportunity costs and frankly not ponying up sufficient “benefit.” The main benefit is just a shared outlook. It dissipates.
As always, everything in moderation.
After monitoring my sleep using an Apple Watch, I decided to see what would happen if I stopped drinking my usual two glasses of wine between 5 pm & 8 pm. What happened is my sleep improved quite a bit, enough to convince me not to drink anymore. The improvement is in duration and fewer instances of waking during the night (Down to one event a night, thanks I suppose to my 77 year old prostate.) Time in sleep stages have not altered.
"Think about eliminating alcohol earlier in your life."
But as Derek has written elsewhere, if cessation of alcohol makes a person more neurotic, less extroverted, less conscientious, and less likely to have sex . . . then maybe the costs of alcohol elimination exceed the alleged health benefits. Lol . . . Also J.P., You're 78 (I'm 69). We shouldn't project our low-social, low sex lives onto young people!
These findings align exactly to my personal experience as someone who's always struggled with sleep. I've actually found skipping dinner all together (or having something very light like a smoothie), leads to my best sleep. Unfortunately, I also love cooking and eating and drinking so this isn't a sustainable option, but I try to do it a couple nights a week and it always leads to better mornings.
I switched to only having a cocktail (if any) at lunch, and only on the weekends. (I also don’t get as much joy from alcohol as others do so that’s useful) I also finish my last meal of the day by 7 pm. If a later meal is unavoidable, I try to take a walk afterwards, or lift some weights when I get home. Otherwise I’m guaranteed to have a terrible night, waking up with my heart rate up and terrible dreams. I’m in my early 50s and have been doing this now for about 5 years.
Two things:
1. While Derek’s conclusions about alcohol’s impact on sleep seems accurate from everything I’ve read, the triggering insight, his Oura Ring’s sleep score, is probably a bad one. From what I have seen, the sleep scores on wearables are pretty useless in terms of actually judging good sleep in a scientifically sound way.
2. I wonder if the studies showing better health outcomes (mental and physical) for early risers is actually just picking up the fact that in modern society, night owls are more likely to just not be getting enough/as much sleep.
One set of studies that seems a bit in tension (but by no means contradicts) is the research around starting high school later. It seems to lead to more learning, better health outcomes, and fewer car accidents. The theory being high school is too early to match high school student’s circadian rhythms, and they get more sleep if school starts later.
It’s sufficiently explained by the fact that high schoolers are particularly unlikely to actually go to bed early just because they need to get up early, and it’s pretty clear that getting enough sleep is more impactful than getting up early. But that still leaves the interesting question of to what extent adolescents’ eveningness is biologically immutable.
Resveratrol got a lot of attention as a potential therapeutic targeting the biology of aging. Unfortunately the initial study by David Sinclair and his team turned out to be confounded by the fluorescent dye, and more rigorous experiments failed to replicate activation of SIRT1. GSK invested several hundred million in resveratrol in the 2000s, and it ultimately got nothing to show for it. There are, however, plenty other avenues of research in medically intervening in aging biology, some of which have begun clinical trials or are close to beginning. I'm personally interested in Turn Bio, Altos Labs, Cyclarity Therapeutics, Retro Bio, Loyal (for dogs), and others.
As someone who struggles to wake by 8 a.m., I am highly confident that regularly waking at 4:30 would *induce* major depressive disorder in me.
Yep. To conquer the world, one must conquer the morning. https://open.substack.com/pub/joedonatelli/p/coffee-in-the-morning?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I’m finding this to be so true with alcohol and sleeping. Especially the older I get. My favorite time to have a drink is around 4pm-while making dinner and getting things set for the evening. As long as I don’t have any evening plans that involve driving (have kids), now I definitely plan to keep my late afternoon drink schedule!
This really lands, the older I get, the more I see timing as strategy, not just preference. Whether it’s sleep, meals, or medicine, “earlier” feels less like discipline and more like leverage. ⚔️ #WarRoomWeekly
Ayurveda teaches the largest meal should be the midday one. It says digestion is strongest at lunchtime. France traditionally does this (less so now) but I don’t know of any other culture whose biggest meal is lunch….
Spain is also very much a midday meal focused culture
Well, “dinner” in all of Western Europe was traditionally closer to what we now think of as lunchtime, and supper might not occur at all. 19th century Russian novels like Oblomov also include medical advice to skip supper. So this seems pretty well approved by the other Eurasian subcontinent!
I could have written this! That's my way of saying, "thank you ". Life gets interesting with age and our observations about how drink, diet and sleep intersect with the quality of our experiences is one wild ride.
Interesting topic, thought I think comparative magnitude is so important in these studies that without studies that look at multiple effects, Im skeptical.
Even the 2% per hour metric feels so low as to be suspect.
For example, it might be that waking up late is correlated with depression, and perhaps some temporary early morning intervention helps depressed people feel control over their lives, but compared to what other interventions?
Eg if you gave depressed people SAD lamps and a bedtime ritual without getting them up early, would you see a similar benefit?
Put another way, isnt the biggest confounding issue here that people tend not to get enough sleep, and the side effect of a morning routine is snapping out of a bad evening one?
Hi Derek,
You have probably seen this draft report, but if not, take a look. The final report will not be published by the government. The Draft January 2025 was rejected after the alcohol lobby when bat-shit crazy about allowing the public to see the negative findings about alcohol and health risks.
draft-public-comment-alcohol-intake-health-study 2025.pdf
You would have to drink about two bottles of wine to get a theraputically viable amount of reservatol btw. Obviously, that amount of wine would negate any health benefits. Nice trick of marketing though the alcohol companies stumbled upon. I'm not lecturing. Go ahead and drink your wine if you like but just realize that there are no health benefits. You like the buzz. Nothing wrong with that.
Chronomedicine & circadian wellness may change the entire healthcare delivery landscape. Companies like Arcascope (https://arcascope.com/), which is rescuing drugs that failed in clinical trials not because they didn’t work, but because they were given at the wrong time of day, are pushing the frontier forward but the field is still quiet young. Everyone's circadian rhythm is different - sometimes slightly, sometimes widely so - and changes across days and seasons of life. Dynamic physiological monitoring to personalize interventions (behavioral, environmental, therapeutic, etc.) based on ideal circadian timing will be a huge unlock across treatment modalities and specialty areas.