Coffee, Booze and Sleep

Both coffee and alcohol have negative effects on your sleep patterns. Psychiatrists and sleep scientists at Seattle’s University of Washington now report this conclusion following their study of 17 financial traders with a mean age of 30.
These driven individuals tend to chain drink coffee during their days using caffeine to turbocharge their performance. They drink alcoholic beverages in the evening to bring themselves down and, they think, promote better sleep.

The study data reveals some support for this self-medication paradigm. As conventional wisdom holds, caffeine improves performance. It keeps you up and overall reduces your sleep duration. Every cup of coffee robs you of 10.4 minutes of sleep. Coffee does not significantly affect sleep quality. Alcohol makes you drowsy, but it does impact sleep quality with each glass responsible for a 3% decrease in quality. It has no impact on overall sleep duration.

While evening alcohol cuts quality, preceding it with coffee neutralizes that negative effect. Furthermore, the evening alcohol erases the caffeine-driven sleep shortening.

So it seems many in the financial services sector have empirically discovered a self-medication regimen that finds a sweet spot with respect to sleep.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291675

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