Dr. MICHAEL MOSLEY: Do you want to sleep like a baby? Then stop drinking alcohol – it will give you nightmares!

How do you sleep at the moment? The odds are not very good. A National Sleep Survey earlier this year found that three-quarters of people surveyed were sleeping poorly, with women appearing to be the worst.

And that is all important, because a good night’s sleep is very important not only for our mental well-being, but also for our physical health and especially for our immune system. It’s while you sleep that your body makes antibodies and deadly T cells that fight infections.

Inevitably, increased stress plays a role in the current national sleep problem, but so does alcohol.

According to the latest figures from Public Health England, the number of people drinking at levels considered to be at higher risk has increased from one in nine before lockdown to one in six.

Now many people drink a drink late at night because they believe that alcohol helps them sleep better. But recent research shows very clearly that this is a myth.

While a drink with friends can boost your mood, alcohol is a cognitive depressant, meaning it slows down your brain activity.

That’s why drinking makes you drowsy, especially if you drink late at night, when your biological clock is triggering other changes to get you ready for sleep.

Depending on your age and gender, it takes your body two to three hours to break down a pint of beer or a tall glass of wine – during that time the alcohol will disrupt your deep sleep, and that’s when a lot of vital recovery takes place.

One theory is that alcohol decreases the ‘rest and digest’ side of the nervous system, dominating the ‘fight or flight’ side, keeping you in a state of higher alertness.

So after drinking you can fall asleep quickly, but you will also likely have more fragmented sleep, with regular short awakenings that you may not even notice. This also explains why people often report more troubling and disruptive dreams after a drink.

Although we dream all night, we don’t normally remember most of those dreams – we don’t really remember the dreams until we wake up.

But because alcohol means you wake up more often at night, you are more likely to remember dreams. And if the reason you drank alcohol was in the first place because you were stressed, those dreams are probably more vivid and stressful too.

How Much Difference Does Drinking Late at Night Really Make? This was the subject of an American study published last year in the journal Sleep, in which scientists looked at how three different substances, caffeine, alcohol and nicotine, affect sleep.

The participants – 785 healthy men and women – wore pulse actigraphs, monitors that measure how much sleep you get over a week. They also recorded if and when they had caffeine, alcohol, or a cigarette within four hours of going to bed.

The researchers found that smoking had the worst impact, reducing sleep by an average of 45 minutes (probably because nicotine is a stimulant). The effects of alcohol were more subtle.

On the evenings they drank, the volunteers did not sleep less, but their sleep was less refreshing and more disturbed, which would then affect their long-term health and immunity.

Perhaps surprisingly, caffeine made no difference to how long or how well they slept.

If you are a regular drinker and suffer from insomnia, it may be worth giving up. A few weeks ago, I decided to stop drinking alcohol for a month as part of Sober October. I wear a sleep monitor every night and it has been shown that the quality of my sleep has indeed improved.

I also have less stress dreams, the kind where I constantly chase someone or something, and never really catch them.

If you’re not much of a drinker, but still wake up in the middle of the night, what else can you do?

While I was researching my book Fast Asleep, leading sleep scientists gave me many helpful tips for this. (I wrote the book because I struggled with sleep for years, woke up in the middle of the night, and then was in bed worrying.) One is that if you sleep badly, you should spend less time in bed.

That’s because it’s really important to retrain your brain to associate ‘bed’ with ‘sleep’ and ‘sex’, nothing else.

That means no TV in the bedroom or lying in bed with your phone. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t worry – find a warm place to sit and listen to music, or read a book until you feel tired, then go back to bed .

Speaking from personal experience, this technique really works. I still wake up most nights, but I don’t worry anymore. After a short while downstairs with a boring book, I go back to bed and quickly fall asleep.

An advantage of lockdown is that I spent more time in my garden. Green spaces have been proven to be good for mood, but not all of us have access to them, so it was great to discover a study from the Royal Horticultural Society that found even a few plants can help.

The researchers gave people on economically disadvantaged streets in Manchester ornamental plants for their bare front yards: most said they felt happier and after a year their cortisol levels, the stress hormone, had more than halved.

If you’re pressed for time, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a legit shortcut to keeping fit – I’m a huge fan and have been doing it for over eight years.

Essentially, you alternate between brisk exercise and something gentle, getting the benefits of a longer workout in a fraction of the time. The exercise itself can be as simple as a walk. This is what my wife and I do most days, going out with our dog, walking briskly for a few minutes, then slowing down, before picking up the pace again, about 25 minutes in total.

There were concerns that HIIT is dangerous for older people, so I was delighted to see a recent study showing that HIIT not only helped older hospital patients build strength and recover faster, but it was also safe.

So feel free to pick up the pace when you’re on the go.

When a cat is as good as a husband

I’m not a particularly touchy person, but like most of us, I found it strange and disturbing that I can’t shake hands or hug anyone but close family.

As accidental physical contact is no longer possible, I read with interest this week the results of the Touch Test, a study conducted by the BBC in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust to examine attitudes to touch and its role in our well-being. to investigate.

One of the findings that stood out to me were the three most commonly used words to describe touch: “comforting,” “warm,” and “love.” Of course, it depends on who does the touch – apparently 79 percent of us like to be touched by a friend, but 63 percent don’t like to be touched by a stranger.

If your circle of people to cuddle has narrowed, try to catch up with the amount with frequency. A study from the University of North Carolina found that women who got more hugs from their partners produced higher levels of oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ responsible for reducing stress and helping us bond with others . Best results are achieved with a 20 second hug.

Petting your dog or cat can have a similar calming effect on both you and your pet – you may also be pleased to hear that even rats enjoy being touched, with studies showing oxytocin levels rising and blood pressure rises by stroking the abdomen.