Frank Song, clinical PhD candidate, co-authored paper in PLOS One on the effects of caffeine and alcohol on sleep
Clinical psychology doctoral candidate Frank Song recently co-authored a paper on the effects of caffeine and alcohol on sleep, published by PLOS One.
Song and co-author Matthew P. Walker (University of California, Berkeley) tracked Wall Street traders for 6 weeks and found that, among participants who used caffeine during the day and alcohol at night, the negative effects on sleep seemed to offset -- for a while.
“It's a very, very nice thought, I think, in many people's minds that you could just use caffeine to wipe off the hangover,” Song said. “But what we find is that while there may be greater alertness in the short term, it creates a sleep-state misperception contributing to continued use despite negative effects on sleep.”
Essentially, the two substances are masking the negative effects on each other, making you believe that after a night of drinking, something that already negatively impacts your sleep quality by itself is offset with the illusion that you slept better because caffeine in the morning makes you feel more alert and coherent.
Read the full paper here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291675
Song's research is featured on several local news sites: