The 3AM Racing Heart (And Why It's Gone)

# SoberlyCo Newsletter #13: The 3AM Racing Heart (And Why It's Gone)

Subtitle: What actually happens to your sleep when you stop drinking — the honest version

Send: Friday 5:30 PM UK

Type: The Useful Bit (practical)

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Let me describe a scene that used to happen at least three times a week.

2AM. Eyes snap open. Heart hammering. Not a nightmare — just my body processing the poison I'd poured into it a few hours earlier. Probably a sugar crash. Probably dehydration. Probably both.

Stumble to the toilet. Desperate for a pee. Back to bed.

Lie there. Wide awake. Brain racing through every embarrassing thing I've ever said. Heart still going. Eventually drift off again around 4AM.

6:30AM. Alarm. Head pounding. Mouth like sandpaper. Desperate for water. Drag myself out of bed feeling like I've been hit by a bus.

That was a good night. Five, maybe six hours of broken, disturbed sleep. And I called it "normal."

The Before

I want to be specific about this because I think a lot of people are living with the same thing and don't realise how bad it actually is.

Before I stopped drinking, my sleep looked like this:

Getting to sleep: Stumble to bed at whatever ungodly hour. Fall asleep fast — but that's not real sleep, that's passing out. There's a difference, and your body knows it.

The 2-3AM wake-up: Almost every night. Heart racing. Needing the toilet. Sometimes both at once. That jolt of adrenaline where you're suddenly completely alert and your body feels like it's in fight-or-flight mode.

The worst bit: Sometimes I'd wake up convinced someone was in the room with me. That half-asleep, half-awake state where your brain is doing something terrifying and you can't tell what's real. Shadows moving. Sounds that aren't there. Lying rigid, heart hammering, waiting for something that was never coming.

That's alcohol messing with your REM cycle. I didn't know that at the time. I just thought I was a bad sleeper.

The morning: Headache. Dry mouth. That bone-deep tiredness that no amount of coffee fixes. Then dragging yourself through the day at 60% capacity, counting down until you could go to bed — and repeat the whole thing again.

The After

My sleep has never been better.

I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it to show off. I say it because if someone had told me a year ago that I'd be sleeping through the night — properly, deeply, without the 3AM horror show — I wouldn't have believed them.

Here's what changed:

The racing heart is gone. Completely. I sleep through the night now. No jolting awake. No adrenaline surges. No lying in the dark with my heart pounding, wondering if something's wrong with me.

The dreams are still there, but they're quieter. I still dream — probably more than before, actually, because I'm hitting proper REM sleep now instead of alcohol-suppressed pseudo-sleep. But they're just... dreams. Not the vivid, terrifying, is-someone-in-the-room stuff. Just normal, forgettable, Tuesday-night dreams.

I actually feel rested. This sounds obvious but it genuinely shocked me. I'd forgotten what it felt like to wake up and not immediately wish I hadn't. Now I wake up and I'm just... awake. Ready. Not in survival mode.

What Actually Helped

I'm not going to pretend it was instant. The first couple of weeks were rough — your body's used to being sedated into sleep, so without alcohol you have to actually learn how to fall asleep naturally again. That took time.

But two things made a massive difference:

Stretching before bed. I started doing 5-10 minutes of proper stretching in the evening. Nothing fancy — no yoga studio, no app subscription (well, actually I do use one, but you don't need to). Just basic stretches that release the tension from the day. It signals to my body that we're winding down, and it works better than any nightcap ever did.

The gym. Getting into a regular routine of physical exercise changed everything. When your body is actually physically tired — not chemically sedated, but genuinely tired from movement — sleep comes naturally. I'm not talking about marathon training. Just consistent, regular exercise. My body wants to sleep now because it's actually done something during the day.

The combination of those two things, plus not poisoning myself every evening, means I'm getting 7-8 hours of unbroken sleep most nights.

Read that again: 7-8 hours. Unbroken.

Coming from 5-6 hours of disturbed, heart-racing, nightmare-fuelled unconsciousness.

The Bit Nobody Mentions

Here's what surprised me most: better sleep changes everything else.

Your mood improves. Your focus sharpens. Your patience with people increases. Your energy at work goes up. Your cravings for rubbish food decrease. Your motivation to exercise increases (which improves sleep further — it's a loop).

Sleep is the foundation. I didn't understand that when I was drinking. I thought sleep was just the bit between the pub and the hangover. Turns out it's the thing that makes everything else work.

Your Turn

If you're still drinking and reading this, do me a favour: pay attention to your sleep tonight. Not just how many hours — the quality. The wake-ups. The heart rate. The morning feeling.

Then imagine that all going away.

Because it does. It genuinely does.

Hit reply and tell me:

• Has your sleep changed since cutting back or stopping?
• What's your wind-down routine look like now?
• Anyone else had the "someone's in the room" thing? Please tell me it wasn't just me.

Here's to quiet nights and clear mornings,

Paddy

P.S. That "good night" of 5-6 hours disturbed sleep? I can't believe I lived like that for years and thought it was normal. The bar was literally on the floor.

📧 Questions? Just hit reply – I respond to every email.