Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast so today we're going to be

talking about nightcabs and not the not the physical kind by the

way which I've never had the pleasure of wearing I probably should try it but

instead the liquid kind because this episode and the episode that will

come after are all about alcohol.

So we're going to talk a little bit about what alcohol is as a chemical.

Then we'll speak about how alcohol impacts your sleep and then we'll explain why it is that

alcohol has these harmful impacts on your sleep.

And alcohol is perhaps one of the most misunderstood sleep aids that there is out there. As we're going to learn in these next two episodes it is anything but a

sleep aid and even though people may feel as though a we drink in the evening or several drinks in the evening

may be helping their sleep, in fact it's harming your sleep.

And alcohol will impact your sleep in three specific ways.

First, alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives.

And sedation is not sleep, but when we've had a

drink in the evening we mistake the former for the latter. We mistake sedation for sleep and I should probably explain in a little more detail what the difference is between those two because sedatives such as alcohol will effectively switch off brain cell firing,

particularly in your cortex.

Sleep on the other hand is very different.

As we learned about in the first episode of this podcast,

it's during sleep and especially during deep sleep

when hundreds of thousands of brain cells all of a sudden

decide to sing together in this amazing feat of coordination and they all fire together and then they all go silent

together and then they fire together and then they all go silent together and that's

...