Health authorities say you shouldn’t drink alcohol during the hour before you go to bed because it will disrupt your sleep pattern. True, a drink before bedtime may help you nod off quicker, but you will wake up earlier than you should and won’t get the deep REM sleep you should have had, thus making you feel tired throughout the day.
I know this to be true from experience.
As my late b/f once said to me, I burn the candle at both ends. I’ve been doing it for years. I work late hours, then come home and often write/blog for an hour or two before I hit the sack. Last week I did just that each night, troubled by some of the incidents that had happened in Montreal. And I did it each night with a small cup of red wine, about four ounces — which I chased down before I hit the sack with about 8 ounces of water.
No matter. Even though I got my 7 hours of sleep, each morning I felt like I had barely slept at all. So when Saturday rolled around, I woke up feeling exhausted with a headache and nausea, and ended up staying in bed most of the day and night — with a couple of trips to the toilet to throw up.
Needless to say, Saturday night I didn’t drink any wine at all, nor do I plan to for the foreseeable future because I have come to fully understand that even the smallest amounts of wine disrupt my sleep patterns. Perhaps I’ll have a few ounces with dinner on my next day off, but nothing afterward — though, I suspect that drinking wine at any time of the day will cause adverse effects for me. If I find that to be the case, then I will stop drinking it all together.
How about you? Does wine have an adverse effect on you at all?
— Jillian
Jillian Page 
I’ve never noticed any adverse effects for myself, and certainly nowhere near what you’ve described here. But then, I don’t remember having any right before bedtime. I’ll usually have one cold beer at the end of a busy, productive workday, and sometimes a glass of wine with dinner. I always sleep very well. And I always sleep naked.
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I think the problem arises when alcohol is drunk too close too bedtime.
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I don’t usually drink wine that late – just a glass at dinner, infrequently since a heart attack and a stroke. A little scotch later, maybe … however my wife has developed an intolerance to red wine (she used to prefer it) and now chooses white more often; again, not at bedtime.
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