When Is The Best Time To Get Drunk Anyway?

When is the best time to get drunk anyway? But first, let’s talk about things that don’t mix well…

• Chocolate and dogs
• Oil and water
• Jerry Bruckheimer and Romantic Comedies
• The Olympics and legitimate steroid testing
• Alcohol and getting healthy

Although there are definitely issues with the others that need addressing, today I’m going to clean up the subtleties of the last one and clear your conscious a little bit the next time you decide to shotgun a beer at your grandmother’s 90th birthday party.

Alcohol is the one universally accepted1 drug in the world. Across the globe, it’s associated with celebrations of every type and it’s where many people choose to drown their sorrows or cope with overwhelming stress. It’s everywhere and unlike cigarettes, you can actually still advertise for it regardless of how dangerous it has proven to be and how much damage it has caused.

Alcohol….The Most Dangerous Of All?

A scientific paper which came out in 2010 listed alcohol as the most dangerous substance known to mankind. It was determined that alcohol is by far the substance that causes the most damage to others. People around the person consuming alcohol have a higher potential to experience harm in some way than even those around heroin addicts or crackheads2.

That’s pretty eye-opening but it makes sense. There are more people drunk driving, drunk holding babies, and drunk amazon shopping than doing the same things on heroin or meth.

I’d like to be explicit here: THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULDN’T DRINK ALCOHOL. It just means you shouldn’t drink like an asshole and make sure you have a plan for your activities while drinking so that you don’t do anything dumb3.

No drug is bad or dangerous in and of itself. There are some who would even argue that every drug has some type of medical/ therapeutic use. For instance, Bayer synthesized heroin in 1898 to be used in cough medicines and to help with labor pains. Eventually, someone figured out how to abuse it. This is a common thread for each and every drug ever created. A scientist makes it because he/she believes it can do some real good in the world, then someone realizes it can get you high, soon it is demonized and ends up illegal4.

What Does Alcohol Actually Do?

We know alcohol inhibits a lot of things and prevents the ability to do even more. For the purposes of this article let’s stick to how alcohol may prevent you from getting healthier and making gains.

1. You can’t drive anymore. → Can’t get to the gym.
2. It inhibits sensations. → Even if you do make it to the gym you lose the ability to tell if something is potentially physiologically dangerous.
3. It inhibits muscle protein synthesis. → If you have alcohol in your system the protein you consume isn’t making it to where it needs to go.
4. It royally effs your ability to stay on track nutritionally. → Diet adherence isn’t easy when you’re in control, imagine how it goes when the tequila takes over.
5. You aren’t going to get those quality “Z’s”. → Alcohol screws with sleep cycles, ability to stay asleep, and the general restorative processes that usually occur when asleep.

I’m now going to tell you exactly what is going on with these effects of alcohol and give you the perfect recommendation that will allow you to keep drinking and get more sexier each and every day.

Drinking and Driving Never Mix Well

This one is pretty obvious. Drinking slows down reaction time and inhibits decision-making ability. For these reasons, only an idiot would get behind the wheel of a 2-ton chunk of steel and flammable fluids.

Plan ahead, if you need to get a workout in then drink afterward. This is just general priority management. Either save your drinks for after the workout or for a day when you don’t have a workout. Getting loaded on an off-day will mess with recovery so it isn’t optimal either, you need to live your life though. If you have a party or Beer Olympics coming up then make sure that is a day when you don’t need to go to the gym.

Booze and don’t lose. Hedonic pleasures5 aren’t meant to happen every day. Choose a day or two a week that you will drink and get your work in on the other days. Welcome to adulthood.

Alcohol Numbs The Pain

When you get your heart broken by an older woman who you just aren’t mature enough for because you don’t get modern art, alcohol is a great way to blunt some of the pain. When you are in the gym going for a 1 rep max personal record on the squat you want to feel all those sensations so that you do things safely and stop if something is wrong, alcohol does not fit into this equation6.

Okay, so these first two are basically just me telling you to not workout drunk. It seems obvious, BUT go to any university gym on a Friday night and you will see why I need to say these things. For whatever reason, there is a trend of something I like to call the “Pregame and Pump”

Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS) AKA The Most Anabolic Scientific Term in The Modern Era

MPS is your body’s way of taking the protein you consume and turning it into new muscles, bones, cells, and organs. You are made of amino acids7. Carbs and Fats are not building blocks of humanity, Proteins are. This is why it is extremely dangerous to under-consume protein, it’s the same thing as not replacing old and dilapidated parts of your home. Eventually your home will fall apart and you will die, likewise, not enough protein in your diet and eventually, your body will fall apart and you will die.

The more protein you eat the better your body will be at repairing damaged tissue and helping you recover from strenuous activity. Of course, there is a point of diminishing return, that’s somewhere above 2 grams of protein per pound of lean body weight8.

I think we can now agree that muscle protein synthesis is a critical function, especially for those of us trying to get stronger and more sexier.

Science to the rescue!

In this study participants were instructed to workout and then get loaded. This is an interesting read if you are curious as to how truly weird science can get. Lucky for us there are scientists out there who are willing to answer the burning questions, like how much alcohol is too much when you are trying to get jacked9.

What was found is that even if everything else is perfect in your diet, meaning you are consuming enough protein, carbs, and fat in the proper proportions and at appropriate times, you still run the risk of lowering MPS by about 24%.

In a world where some lifters are trying to get a 1–2% increase in strength or size a 24% decrease in MPS seems insurmountable.

Silver Lining: The above study got its participants drunk as Mr. Lahey on a Tuesday morning. Like I said 16 drinks for an 85 kg man, that is not a casual night out. What happens if you drink much more reasonably? I haven’t seen science on that but it is reasonable to assume that the less you drink the less MPS will be impacted. 1 or 2 after a workout might hardly impact you at all. If you’re like a certain someone in his early 20s you may even consider those beers as your carbs for the day and calculate them into your daily macro intake. In summation: getting highly inebriated will crush your ability to repair and build larger muscles, BUT a couple drinks occasionally probably won’t do much.

Diet Adherence AKA Not Eating Like An Asshole

Lower inhibitions directly correlate to being worse at making decisions. Without a plan, I guarantee that you will veer off course. Maybe that’s not a big deal to you. If you only drink 1 night a month, the other 30 days being 90% on point with both diet and exercise then you really shouldn’t think twice about what you are consuming. Life is meant to be enjoyed after all.

If you find yourself casually drinking multiple nights a week it is important to recognize the fact that even one drink will lower your inhibitions and make you vulnerable to the allure of disgusting and delicious foods that you usually try to limit.

This brings me to another point on why late night drinking is a bad idea. Usually, people start drinking after they have already consumed all of their allotted calories for the day. They then drink a bunch of extra calories which cause them to want to eat practically another whole day’s worth of calories. There are a couple ways around this typical trend. Drink earlier in the day so that when you get the munchies you can just eat food you would have already eaten. OR start eating later by skipping breakfast and eating a late lunch. This basically Intermittent Fasting to support your social life10.

Simple Fix: Plan ahead and have your food already picked out before you start drinking. Seems simple enough, of course, you need to actually eat the food you have chosen and stop stealing fries from my plate.

Sleep better, Skip The Nightcap.

I can’t even begin to explain how important sleep is or how much is actually going on in your body and mind when you are sleeping. Books upon books have been written on this topic, my most recent favorite Why We Sleep spends close to 400 pages elucidating all the benefits and physiological mechanisms involved in sleep.

Put simply, we have a few distinct phases of sleep most notably light Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (light NREM), deep Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (deep NREM), and Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM). Each one of these phases has many distinct jobs and are interdependent on each other. If you lack one stage of sleep on a given night it has the potential to negate or disrupt the work of another stage.

That being the case, the scientific literature on the effects of alcohol on sleep is alarming. There is no overwhelming consensus on exactly what parts of sleep are disturbed by alcohol, various studies show different findings. What is universally agreed is that chronic or high dose acute alcohol consumption11 will mess with your sleep and recovery. Let’s take a look at some of the findings to see why we need to keep alcohol far from our bedtime.

• This study dosed males and females with liquid courage 12 at various times of the day to see its impact on sleep. The scientists found that if you consume a nightcap13 it has the potential to make you miss your prime sleep window and then force you to try to fall asleep when your wakefulness hormones are more elevated and adenosine14 starts to wane. Takeaway: Alcohol right before bed may make you miss your optimal sleep time and cause overall sleep loss.
• A review of alcohol related sleep disturbance studies showed that alcohol may be helpful initially in promoting sleep15 but chronic use will ultimately fug with sleep and promote any tendencies towards anxiety or depression16. Takeaway: Daily alcohol consumption will degrade your sleep quality over time and prevent those various stages from repairing your muscles and emotions each night.
• This review of studies on sleep and alcohol showed that High doses of alcohol lower REM sleep. REM sleep is the stage of sleep that makes you creative, empathetic, cause you to dream, helps you work through trauma, and helps you make connections between things you knew and new things you have learned. A look at the below image shows what typical sleep cycles look like.You get the majority of NREM sleep at the beginning of the night and the majority of your REM sleep towards the end of the evening. After a night of drinking people usually report waking up much earlier than normal or restlessness early in the morning, that’s where your REM sleep is. Takeaway: REM sleep seems to be the stage of sleep that makes us the most human and the most ourselves by accentuating creativity, mental connections, and potentially motivation. Without it, your drive to continue getting better, bigger, stronger, and faster will cease to be all but a distant memory.

• A study looking at the effects of sleep on men in Korea showed that men who consume alcohol before sleep have overall poorer sleep quality, experience difficulty in maintaining sleep rather than falling asleep17, suffer from shorter overall sleep duration, and therefore have worse subjective sleep quality. They also linked an increased incidence in snoring to increased alcohol consumption due to alcohol’s ability to relax upper airway muscles. Takeaway: The best way to make other people hate you is to be a loud snorer. Limit alcohol intake before sleep and you won’t get a boot thrown at you.

How Sleep Makes You Better

So now you know how alcohol messes with sleep. How does that correlate to you becoming better at what you do, getting bigger, stronger, and, yep, more sexier18. Lack of sleep:

• Changes your eating behavior → Ruining diet adherence.
• Disrupts blood sugar regulation → Messing with your fat storage/ burning capability.
• Heightens blood pressure → Wreaking havoc on your cardiovascular system.
• Screws with hormones → Hormones literally make you work the way you do, if they get thrown out of whack you could lose your hair, or become schizophrenic.
• Raises catabolic hormones → These are the ones that break down muscle and prevent the growth of bigger muscles.
• Lowers anabolic hormones → These are the opposite of catabolic hormones, they make you bigger and stronger.

All of these things add up to favoring a loss of muscle mass and thus hindering muscle recovery after damage induced by exercise, and injuries.

Bottom line: Sleep is important and alcohol messes with it. What this all points to is that you should keep alcohol as far away from your bedtime as possible.

So…When Is The Best Time To Get Drunk Anyway?

There is a lot of information here pointing to alcohol being detrimental to your progress as a happy and healthy individual. The easiest recommendation is to just stay away from the stuff. Shit, check out the below list of dangerous substances and choose one that is less destructive to indulge in19.

The reality is that you are probably going to consume alcohol anyway. I know I do occasionally. Start day drinking. Seriously. By drinking in the early to mid-afternoon you keep the deleterious effects of alcohol far away from your precious sleep and that vulnerable period of time after dinner when you are most likely to gorge on foods you don’t need.

Here are some other reasons I’m a huge fan of day drinking.

• It automatically gives you an excuse to stay in on a Saturday night. → “Sorry, dude I can’t go to Dave and Buster’s. I’m already drunk”
• It will force you to get your workout done early in the morning. Alternatively, you could just abstain from a workout or plan for drinking on a non-workout day.
• It allows you to recover from the buzz and kick a hangover before it even starts. If you start drinking at noon you should have had your fill by 4 PM. That gives you a solid 6 hours before bedtime to sober up, hydrate, and eat a healthy dinner. When Sunday morning rolls around you’ll be sitting on a public bench making fun of the hungover people doing the walk of shame back to their homes’ with your friends after a rousing game of Red Rover.
• There is a much lower chance of getting mugged during the daylight hours than at 2 AM.
• A lot of activities you normally do during the day are much more fun with a drink in your hand like cooking, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and doing your taxes.
• It allows you to tell that ridiculous social norm of not drinking before 5 to go walk into the ocean. Bucking standard social conventions is a hobby of mine.
• Lastly, It helps you maintain your sleep schedule. Consistency is potentially the most important factor to ensure a quality night of rest. The weekends usually throw people out of their rhythm. Day drinking allows you to have a fun weekend while still waking up and going to sleep at the same time.

Day Drinking To The Rescue

This is officially the most research and effort I’ve ever put into justifying my 11 AM whiskey and soda.

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30 Days To Peak Performance goes into even more detail on how to drink and maintain your gains. If you’re interested in making a foolproof lifestyle that will not only make you healthier and happier but allow you to enjoy a few drinks here and there you can check it out here.

Originally published at www.composurefitness.com on July 18, 2018.