why does the body always wake up so early after a night of drinking?
In: Biology
Alcohol depresses your central nervous system. In an effort to combat this, your brain, seeking equilibrium, floods your body with stimulant chemicals like adrenaline. By the time the alcohol wears off, the stimulants are still running around in your body, which is why your sleep is so fitful and why you tend to wake up earlier than normal.
So lots of people have explained that it’s the stimulants that your brain produces keeping you wired to counteract the depressant of alcohol. I’ve also learned that it’s due to a blood sugar crash.
Your liver is good at multitasking, but it hates alcohol with its entire being so it focuses on processing it. It’s also responsible for breaking down glycogen to regulate blood sugar in times of fasting (sleep). Since it’s occupied with alcohol, it doesn’t do that so well. Therefore your fasting blood sugar gets super low, and your body won’t let you go to sleep because instinctually it is trying to say “you need to get up and forage or we are gonna die”.
That’s why once your hangover nausea dies down enough that you can smash a couple mcdoubles, your body crashes and you can really take a nap. It’s also why I recommend drinking orange juice when you wake up annoyingly early after drinking, for a little sugar pick-me-up. Half orange juice, half water is great, or if you’ve progressed reasonably far into alcoholism, half orange juice, half beer. That’s called a beermosa, it IS good, and you’re welcome college kids.
If nothing else, the waking up early is a combination of a lot of problems. Alcohol is super bad for your body lol.
Alcohol has a numbing dampening effect on the brain. You might have heard alcohol called a “depressant” for this reason. If your brain didn’t rapidly adapt to cope with this you would stop breathing pass out and die. It does so by increasing the activity in your brain. (less ELI5, alcohol dampens neuronal activity and to cope GABA – the major inhibitory neutrotransmitter is reduced.)
As the alcohol wears off (your body processes about 1 unit of alcohol per hour) and now your body is having to cope with the changes it had to make to deal with the alcohol. (Now the alcohol has worn off your body has to return to it’s normal state except your neurons are more “twitchy” than they ought to be as GABA is being ignored).
While on alcohol you felt relaxed, calm and subdued and sleepy – until your brain adapted now you feel the opposite. Until your brain adapts back.
In this state your body begins to produce stress hormones like Cortisol, you begin to worry and feel stressed out. One under recognised “hang over” effect of alcohol is feelings of guild and shame.
This combined produces “early morning waking” which is a symptom of psychological distress in humans.
You’re tired but your brain is wired and you can’t sleep. You’re anxious and stressed as your brain is overwhelmed with input and tuned for when you were drunk not sober. Invariably you might find yourself stressing about what you might have done.
This cycle actually worsens the more alcohol you consume. And so “alcoholic” rapidly become tolerant to alcohol feeling anxious despite drinking, and as it wears off neuronal activity can increase so much that they begin hallucinating, shaking and eventually have seizures. For this reason Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal.
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