(SOURCE: The Conversation)

Sleeping is normally when our body sticks itself back together. Your breathing and your heart rate slow down, and gradually your body repairs itself, undoing all the damage you’ve done to yourself during the day.

Sometimes we do more damage to our bodies than usual – have a few drinks, come home from the pub, forget how to get the key in the door, and fall into bed. And this, as it turns out, is damage of a different magnitude altogether.

A paper recently published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research confirms what we’d previously only suspected: that when you sleep after drinking, the functions of your body designed to repair all the damage you did to it while you were awake aren’t anywhere near as active.

What’s more, the more you drink, the worse the problem gets.

Participants in this study received either no drinks at all, a few drinks, or what might be described as a “heroic” dose – around an entire bottle of wine. (I’m sure they had no difficulties getting people to sign up for their research.)

There was a clear pattern at the end – read the rest of the article here.