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Sleep, alcohol, and caffeine in financial traders - PubMed

️Sun Jan 01 2023

Sleep, alcohol, and caffeine in financial traders

Frank Song et al. PLoS One. 2023.

Abstract

Alcohol and caffeine are two of the most commonly used substances for altering human consciousness. While their adverse effects on sleep have been separately examined in the laboratory and epidemiological levels, how they impact real-world night-to-night sleep, in isolation or together, remains unclear. This is especially true in occupations wherein the use of alcohol and caffeine is high (e.g., financial services sector). Using a six-week micro-longitudinal study, here we examined the real-world impact of alcohol, caffeine, and their combined consumption in a cohort of financial traders. We demonstrate that alcohol consumption significantly degrades the subjective quality of sleep (p < 0.001). Caffeine consumption led to a different phenotype of sleep impairment, resulting in a detrimental reduction in sleep quantity (p = 0.019), rather than a marked alteration in sleep quality. Contrary to our hypothesis, when consumed in combination, evening alcohol consumption interacted with ongoing caffeine consumption such that alcohol partially mitigated the impairments in sleep quantity associated with caffeine (p = 0.032). This finding suggests the sedating effects of alcohol and the psychoactive stimulant effects of caffeine obscure each other's impact on sleep quantity and sleep quality, respectively-potentially explaining their interdependent use in this cohort (i.e., "self-medication" of evening sedation with alcohol to combat the prior daytime ingestion of caffeine and vice versa). More generally, these results contribute to a unique understanding of the singular and combinatory impacts of two of the most commonly used substances for augmenting human consciousness under free-living, real-world conditions, the performance-impairing (and thus economic-cost) consequences of which may be important to the business sector and the society.

Copyright: © 2023 Song, Walker. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

**Fig 1. Effect of caffeine on sleep duration.**
Caffeine consumption was linearly associated with shorter sleep duration in the mixed effects model.

**Fig 2. Effect of alcohol on subjective sleep quality.**
Alcohol consumption was negatively correlated with subjective sleep quality in the mixed effects model.

**Fig 3. Effects of independent variables on subjective sleep quality.**
Alcohol consumption was linked to a reduction in subjective sleep quality by over 3 points per glass (on a 100-point scale), while the alcohol-caffeine interaction predicted a small improvement.

**Fig 4. Effects of independent variables on sleep duration.**
Caffeine consumption predicted a decrease in sleep duration by over ten minutes per cup, while caffeine-alcohol interaction was associated with a small increase.

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Sleep, alcohol, and caffeine in financial traders - PubMed