Alcohol as a sleep aid

it is a sleep aid, do you suffer from anxiety?try hot tea instead of booze if that dosent work could be a sign of sleep apnea

gibberish

I am surprised no one has mentioned pot as it may help the sleep apnia to. I am
not recommending it just mentioning the possibility.

If one should choose to try Cannabis, I would suggest you not tell the Sheriff.
Even though he is retired, I suspect he still has "connections', and a calling to protect and serve.

I don't have a lot to add to the discussion but if someone is turning to alcohol as a sleep solution, then things have devolved to a very ineffective and dangerous level. It's time to ask for help from your medical support team as soon as possible.

I am not trying to be argumentative with this post but last night, due to extreme desperation, I took a Temazepam to get to sleep. In spite of sleeping a little over 5 hours and drinking more coffee than usual, brain feels like it is in a fog and complete haze. How is that any better than drinking a glass of wine before bed as long as you don't abuse it which I realize is a whole other discussion?

Also, I realize that this side effect can be temporary and if I were to take it every day which I don't intend to for now, it could disappear. But this gets back to my question about whether sleep meds essentially being no better than alcohol.

Anyway, hopefully, I can eventually sleep without taking anything but for now, I realize that isn't realistic.

I've had apnea for about 10-12 years, and just got diagnosed recently.
I self-medicated myself with alcohol so I could sleep for a while until I realized that I could develop a problem - I wasn't dependent but I could feel it starting. I didn't know I had apnea (though I suspected), all I knew is I had sleeping problem and I didn't want to patch it with a new problem. So I quit drinking for a short time and focused on life style changes to fix my sleep. That didn't work, so it was to the sleep lab and the CPAP.

Alcohol as a sleep aid - I really wouldn't recommend it. You need to sleep every night, so any sleep aid you get you're going to be using nearly every day. That can get really dangerous, and the effects of dependency are subtle. I'm not of the belief that somehow prescription pharms are "different" than other drugs - prescription addictions are a major problem in the US right now. But if you NEED a drug to sleep, there are much safer options for the long term.

If I drink alcohol near bedtime I have a miserable night-seldom sleep soundly. My wife and I usually have a drink around 5 p.m. because a little alcohol is supposed to be good for you according to some doctors. But we take it earlier so that it should be pretty much out of our systems by bedtime.

There have been several comments regarding the problems with using alcohol as a sleep aid, and it is also worth noting that alcohol is bad for sleep apnea itself (in addition to being bad for sleep) because alcohol can raise one's AHI. See, e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11153591. Just think about the people you may have heard who don't ordinarily snore start doing so loudly if they have been drinking a lot of alcohol. Just about any article by a physician on OSA will repeat that OSA patients should avoid alcohol close to their bedtimes.