Back when I was 20 I had a drinking problem. One time I drank so much that I passed out sitting at a table. Woke up with friends having stripped my clothes and washed them. I woke up at 9AM, feeling 100% sober, just anxious about my 20 missed calls from my mom. I got a bit drunk at about 33 and next day I thought I was dying.
That's how I learnt what hangovers were.
Again, at around 25, I helped my brother in-law move bee hives all night, including some 8 hours of driving.
Went straight to work and in the evening I had dinner with my wife at a restaurant.
Now I crash in bed at 9PM and if I'm lucky, I also sleep (but quite often I wake up at 2AM).
Getting old(er) sucks, and I'm only 42 and I miss so much how nice being in my 20 something body felt all the time.
Like you, I have much less youthful buffer that shrugs off poor sleep or overindulgence, but I have much more knowledge and much better habits.
Daily habits: better nutrition (based on Bryan Johnson’s super veggie and nutty pudding), stretching, weak points warmup, proper oral hygiene, regular bedtime
Weekly habits: 4x gym, 3x run, 2x weighted walk
I have used ChatGPT to work out a program that is helping me to overcome injuries and niggles while building strength and cardio. I’m 3 months into my latest training schedule, and it’s unreasonably effective.
You don't need to be a health champion to have good sleep.
The next thing I have to back off on is sugar. It doesn't seem to mess up my sleep like booze, but I definitely notice it the day after I have that big bowl of ice cream or giant slice of cake. A big enough sugar binge feels pretty close to a hangover for me now.
Can relate.
> The most frustrating effect is that even a few drinks in the evening (maybe over 2-3 units). Unsettles my sleep that if I'm in the process of learning something feels like it sets me back several days.
I'm not noticing it unsettles my learning but can relate to a few drinks already upsetting my sleep. I wouldn't be surprised if my learning would be impaired by at least a bit.
> When I was younger I'm not sure I had many good nights sleep let alone noticed a bad one!
Being young is a blessing that way.
I'm +35 years old by the way.
> I've heard that small amounts of alcohol can actually improve learning interestingly by preventing interference from events later in the day.
Do you have a source? Would be curious to look some of it up.
Here is some research around the alcohol effect. What I found most surprising is the mean consumption was over 80g, since 8g of ethanol is a unit that's an astonishing mean of 10units.
I was of the impression that the effect was around 1 unit.
I actually hadn't realized until I went looking that the "standard drink" isn't much of an international standard unit at all. Will have to keep that in mind when reading papers/recommendations from different health authorities in the future.
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Anyway, it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure I'm going to believe the effect just on one noisy study, but even if the reality is something lesser - like it just not harming memory formation of things you'd learned earlier in the day, the implications are still a bit interesting.
It certainly adds a bit to some of the historical social biases against "day drinking", and also does a bit to explain how plenty of high-performing young people seem to use alcohol pretty heavily after they're done learning (college students partying, etc) with limited direct impacts on their educational performance.
Even better, the topic is visited on part 6.2[1] of the article you're replying to.
1 https://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm#Alcohol
>Weird responses from those two users. Ignore them
Some might say you are the one worth ignoring.
No, it just tells you there is enough demand for alcohol selling to be a profitable business, not that people in general like to drink.
I looked up numbers for the USA and 2025 54% said they consume alcohol. So it's most people but millions don't.
It's higher in my country so good to know that USA drinks less than I assumed.
Also not religious fundamentalism to point out that alcohol is a known carcinogen (: that’s just science. It’s a Group 1 carcinogen, the same group as tobacco and asbestos.
But sunlight is essential for the cutaneous conversion of 7-dehydrocholesterol to vitamin D3, whereas ethanol serves no essential purpose, irrespective of whether one enjoys it or not.
Personally I don’t consume ethanol; but I don’t care if others do or not so long as they stay off the roads and are not piloting my flight.
I will say that when I did consume ethanol even in small quantities, my sleep was much worse than it is at baseline; and that effect only worsened as I got older.
The topic is sleeping.