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by floppydisc 1326 days ago
The most disturbing part of drinking to your mental faculties is how it effects your sleep. It leaves you in a haze and that accumulates. Once you stop, sleep will help you get back on track again. You still have time to recover.

My father did the same thing as you are doing. He's recently stopped. He's sharp as a knife again after a very short amount of time after years of being, which I can best describe as, out-of-sync with everything.
2 comments
throwaway987642 1326 days ago
A lot of people don't think of it from this angle. There was a period where I pulled a few days to catch up on work with very little sleep and no drinking. And the end of this period, I noticed that I felt the same being sleep deprived as I did after a heavy night of drinking. At that point, I realized that much of the feeling of hangover was likely sleep deprivation.
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floppydisc 1325 days ago
Goddamn, what an amazing insight you gained.

I was under the illusion, for most of my life, that alcohol helped with sleep, until I did some research and found out it practically does the opposite. Or honestly, listened to the book "Why do we sleep" by Matthew Walker https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep. It is absolutely fascinating and worth a read/listen for anyone wondering what we know about sleep so far.

An interesting point from the book: For people that drink regularly for long stretches, they can end up with dreams literally spilling into reality because their brains never reaches deep REM due to the alcohol. It's fascinating. I've never reached that level personally. However I've heard anecdotes of people getting insanely vivid dreams after stretches of drinking.

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throwaway987642 1325 days ago
Right, if alcohol did nothing more than disrupt sleep, then I imagine it would still be highly damaging as a daily thing.
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thebigspacefuck 1325 days ago
I got a Garmin watch and it has a feature called “body battery”. I noticed this doesn’t recharge at all after drinking, even if I felt I slept okay. I always suspected pot affected my sleep quality too. If something isn’t working out in your life, sleep is one of the best things to work on to try to fix it.
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floppydisc 1325 days ago
Sleep truly is a miracle cure for most things. We really, seriously, take it for granted. Which is probably because it's difficult to sell sleep, since it's free of charge to get sleep.

Did you discover if pot had any effect on your "body battery" or not? I'm curious if it increases or decreases the quality.

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