The evening glass of wine I didn't want to blame
Okay. Still in "The Evening Wind-Down," and this one I'm a little embarrassed about, because I was the last person to see it.
Here's what happened. I was waking up at 3am for weeks — not falling asleep fine, waking up fine, just this dead-of-night wide-awakeness where my brain wanted to hold a meeting about the jobsite. And I blamed everything. The mattress. Dean. Blair's TV through the wall. I was ready to blame the house.
I did not, for a long time, blame the glass of wine I had most nights around 7 or 8. Because it was one glass. Because I felt fine after it. Because I like it and didn't want it to be the problem.
But I'd started the notebook by then — same one I use for genealogy hunches, just a running log of "changed this, here's what happened" — and I was staring at two weeks of entries with nothing else consistent. Same curtains. Same bedtime. Same temperature. The only variable that moved around was whether I'd had wine that night.
So I did the annoying, responsible thing. I cut it for two weeks as a test. Actually hang on, let me be precise about that — I didn't quit wine forever, I just wanted a clean two-week stretch with none, to see what happened.
I slept through. All fourteen nights, more or less. I was genuinely annoyed to be right about myself.
Why this one's sneaky
Alcohol makes you fall asleep faster. That part's real — it's a sedative, so it knocks you out. The problem shows up a few hours later, once your body's metabolized it. Your sleep gets lighter, more fragmented, and a lot of people land wide awake in the second half of the night, which is exactly the 3am thing I was having. It's not usually a hangover-level amount that does it either. One glass, close enough to bedtime, was plenty for me.
I want to be careful here because I'm not telling anyone to stop drinking. That's not my lane and it's a personal call. What I'm telling you is: if you drink in the evening and you've got a mystery wake-up you can't pin down, it's worth putting on the list of suspects. It was at the bottom of mine and it should've been at the top.
How to actually test this
Same method as everything else in this course — one variable, one stretch of time, written down.
- Pick two weeks. Not one night. One night tells you nothing; your sleep bounces around for a hundred reasons.
- Cut evening alcohol entirely for that stretch, or at minimum push it much earlier — several hours before bed, not with dinner at 7 if you're going down at 10.
- Write down wake-ups. Time, how you felt, whether your brain was doing the jobsite-meeting thing. You don't need a tracker for this, just the notebook.
- Compare to your normal two weeks before that. Not vibes — actually look at the pattern.
If nothing changes, heck yes, you've ruled it out and you can stop feeling guilty about it. If it does change, you get to decide what you want to do with that information. I'm not the boss of your Tuesday nights.
The opinion, stated plainly
This is the one that ties back to something I say a lot in this course: you can't fix sleep by trying harder, you fix it by removing obstacles. Willpower doesn't help you sleep. But finding the actual obstacle — even an annoying one, even one you like — and moving it out of the way, that works every time I've tried it on myself.
The wine wasn't a moral failing. It was just an obstacle I hadn't looked at honestly yet.
One caution, since we're talking about alcohol: if you're regularly using it specifically to fall asleep — like you can't get to sleep without it anymore — that's a different situation than what I'm describing, and it's worth a conversation with a doctor rather than a two-week experiment. I'm not qualified to sort that out and I'd rather say so than guess.
Before next time
Look back at your notebook, if you've been keeping one, and see if there's a pattern you've been avoiding on purpose. Mine was sitting right there for two weeks before I let myself see it.