Surf Journalist shocked to discover that alcohol consumption is not the pathway to healthy sleep, recovery!

Over-served.

New Year’s Eve is a time for many activities that would, on any other day, be frowned upon. There is the wearing of strange cardboard glasses and/or hats, the lighting of explosives, the public singing and, of course, the consumption of alcohol.

Now, any other New Year’s Eve I would have enjoyed a glass, or two, of champagne without thought. This New Year’s Eve, though, I was in Italy with my personal digital fitness and health coach, my WHOOP strap, and drinking one, or two glasses of Prosecco without thought.

That night, after wandering past many Italians lighting explosives, publicly singing with the number 2022 covering their eyes, I made it to bed and proceeded to have a fitful night’s sleep.

Consulting my WHOOP, the following morning, I realized that my measurables were all over the place. Wacky heart rate variability and resting heart rate numbers. Lousy recovery.

Intrigued, I immediately dove into the research. According to WHOOP’s many scientists:

Heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate are two of the most useful metrics for quantifying your fitness on a daily basis. Consuming alcohol causes your HRV to drop (bad) and your resting heart to rise (also bad).

With the WHOOP Journal feature, our members are given the option of noting whether or not they have any alcoholic drinks each day. From a Performance Assessment analysis representing everyone on WHOOP, when they report consuming alcohol (even just a single drink) their HRV drops by an average of 7 milliseconds, and their resting heart rate increases by an average of 3 beats per minute.

It should come as no surprise that of all the behaviors available to record in the WHOOP Journal, drinking alcohol is the one with the single greatest negative impact on next-day recovery. On average, WHOOP members’ recovery is 8% lower when they log consuming alcohol the day before (again, this includes everything ranging from one drink to several).

Well who would have ever guessed? Speaking of, did you read about CNN’s New Year’s Eve program co-host Andy Cohen continually say he was “over-served” after delivering many snarky remarks on air?

“I was a bit over-served…”

What a dumb turn to phrase.

2022, anyhow, already seeing a better me.

Buy a better you here.