Alcohol, sleep, HRV, exercise readiness and performance

NorthCascades

I've been looking at the Garmin section on reddit to find out about a software update I'm waiting for for my watch. I've noticed a lot of posts there with a common theme: people have these different metrics on their wrists like sleep quality, stress, recovery. People see how they're affected by drinking, people sleep poorly, show more physiological stress, reduced HRV, and it affects the outdoor fun people bought the watch for in the first place. We all kind of knew that but the data is having a sobering effect on a lot of people.

I just saw an article in Outside Magazine about this.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/gear/health-gear/lcohol-hrv-resting-heart-rate-sleep/

Lietchi

I'm not a tee-totaler, but it's pretty close: probably one or two drinks every few weeks. Your post reminded me of my experience the last time I had an alcoholic drink: two small glasses of champagne when I was visiting my parents.

I went for a run in the morning and had the champagne around 1PM, and then lounged/was seated the entire afternoon: my HR would suggest a more active afternoon.


Compared to the following day: a lazy Sunday (no alcohol) with a run in the early evening:


The difference is even more striking when looking at my 'body battery' (I believe Garmin looks at HRV for this metric).
With alcohol, I'm supposedly very stressed (granted, I spent the day with my parents which might have been a stressor but certainly not enough to explain this graph):


Chilled Sunday without alcohol:


My reaction is stronger than the article would imply (especially resting HR which increased a lot more than a few beats per minute) but perhaps that's because I'm not used to alcohol? In any case, it is a sobering sight to see those graphs. I won't stop drinking entirely (it's rare enough that I don't need to worry about it affecting my running) but I can imagine that more frequent drinkers might reassess their habits (weighing pleasure of drinking against their athletic goals).

AnnPT77

Yeah, I see my resting heart rate (and the Garmin stress stats) increase if I drink alcohol, by roughly the kind of increment the article describes. Meh.

My current device doesn't explicitly score HRV beyond the silly stress score thing**, but I suspect what the article says is true for me, too, based on looking at the graphs. (** I've never been able to get any sense out of the stress score or the stress graph. It literally makes zero sense, when I look at it with knowledge of what I was doing across the graphed times. I know that's not true for everyone.)

From a sleep perspective, for me I think there's a tradeoff. I have various sleep problems, have had for 20+ years, that add up to severely interrupted sleep pretty much every night. I don't get up any more often during the night after drinking alcohol, don't seem to wake up more often after alcohol, etc. It's a different sleep cycle, but not necessarily worse. I tend to get a longer initial sleep block after alcohol, and it doesn't subjectively feel less restful.

I absolutely don't trust the Garmin sleep phase identifications, because I've had the opportunity to compare its results to a formal in-hospital overnight sleep study, and I know that it regularly thinks I'm asleep when I know I was awake, and sometimes thinks I was awake when I'm pretty sure I was asleep.

I'd say I'm reasonably athletic (certainly more than average for my demographic), but not a dedicated, focused athletic competitor. I'm more going for overall life balance, and some alcohol in the mix sometimes contributes to that balance, even at some modest cost to athletic performance, as long as I don't behave too unreasonably.

I get the balance out of whack occasionally, sometimes on the alcohol side, sometimes on the athletic-overdoing side, sometimes with slacking off athletically even in the absence of alcohol. Overall, I'm not super stressed about it. (If I were stressed about it, it wouldn't show up clearly in that graph. 😉)