Sleep Problems Get in the Way of Alcohol Recovery

The first few months of recovery from an alcohol problem are hard enough. But they're often made worse by serious sleep problems, caused by the loss of alcohol's sedative effects, and the long-term sleep-disrupting impact that alcohol dependence can have on the brain.

Now, a new study gives further evidence that insomnia and other sleep woes may actually get in the way of recovery from alcohol problems. In fact, a person's perception of how bad their sleep problems are may be just as important as the actual sleep problems themselves, the study suggests.

The study is published in the new issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, by a team from the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychiatry. They report the results of a small but thorough evaluation of sleep, sleep perception and alcohol relapse among 18 men and women with insomnia who were in the early stages of alcohol recovery.

The authors say their results show how important it is for alcohol recovery patients, and those who are helping them through their recovery, to discuss sleep disturbances and seek help. Often, sleep isn’t discussed in alcohol recovery programs – but it should be, they stress.

In fact, members of the U-M team have now launched a new study that aims to help those who have just entered treatment for alcohol problems, and are having trouble sleeping. Instead of using sleep medications, which can carry their own risk of addiction, it’s based on a series of “talk therapy” sessions with a trained sleep therapist who can help patients change behaviors and patterns of thinking that contribute to sleep problems.

In the meantime, the newly published results add to the understanding of how alcohol and sleep intertwine.

“What we found is that those patients who had the biggest disconnect between their perception of how they slept and their actual sleep patterns were most likely to relapse,” says lead author Deirdre Conroy, Ph.D., who led the study as a fellow in the U-M Addiction Research Center. “This suggests that long-term drinking causes something to happen in the brain that interferes with both sleep and perception of sleep. If sleep problems aren’t addressed, the risk of relapse may be high.”

Conroy and her former mentor, U-M alcoholism researcher Kirk Brower, M.D., conducted the study in cooperation with the sleep researchers of the U-M Sleep and Chronophysiology Laboratory, the U-M Sleep Disorders Center, and U-M Addiction Treatment Services. She is now at the McLaren Sleep Diagnostic Center.

“We are now interested in what brain mechanisms are involved in the disrupted sleep of alcohol-dependent individuals,” says Brower, who has previously led studies illustrating the prevalence of sleep disorders among people with alcohol dependence and abuse issues, and their correlation with relapse back into drinking. He is the executive director of the U-M Addiction Treatment Services, which provides alcohol and drug treatment to hundreds of patients each year.