Owen’s phone buzzed at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and he answered it. Nobody expected him to. But in his world, a fast reply had become a kind of currency. By the time the thread went quiet, his mind was still running. So he poured a drink to slow it down, then a second. It felt like a fair trade: two glasses in exchange for a few hours of sleep. Months later, he was sleeping worse than ever, and the drinks had crept earlier into the evening.
He never thought of it as a drinking problem. He thought of it as a sleep problem, and he was right about that. What he hadn’t noticed was that the two had started feeding each other.
The Workday No Longer Has an End
For many high earners, work doesn’t live in an office anymore. It lives in a pocket. Messages arrive at all hours, time zones overlap, and answering quickly gets read as commitment. The people who do well in that setting are usually capable and driven, which means they rarely stop to ask what constant availability is costing them.
Sleep is often the first thing to go. When sleep gets shaky, people reach for whatever makes the night feel more manageable, and for plenty of professionals that means a drink. It doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like a ritual, a way of telling the brain the day is finally over.
Alcohol is also easy to justify in this world. It’s legal, it’s social, and it shows up at client dinners and team celebrations. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a glass of wine after a hard day. That makes the pattern hard to see, even for the person living inside it.
The logic builds slowly. A drink after a long day becomes a drink after any long day, then a drink before bed on nights when sleep looks unlikely. Each step is small and easy to explain. Because it’s tied to work stress, people often see it as a solution to the pressure, not as a habit that’s taking shape.
What the Research Actually Shows
None of the studies below measured smartphones or workplaces. What they show is what happens when sleep goes wrong, and that’s the piece worth understanding.
A 2024 study in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research followed 78 healthy adults, ages 21 to 42, for a full year. Participants wore wrist monitors for a week at the start and reported their drinking every three months. People with more insomnia symptoms at the outset went on to drink more each week and binge drink more often over the following year. That held true even when the symptoms were mild. Insomnia symptoms also appeared to matter more than the body-clock measures the researchers tracked, and the authors suggested they may be a target worth addressing to reduce the risk of alcohol misuse. They were open about the limits, too. The sample was small, mostly White, and had very low rates of depression and anxiety. Longer measured sleep time also predicted more drinking, a surprise they urged readers to interpret with caution.
An earlier study in the American Journal of Psychiatry looked at people already in treatment. Researchers followed 74 patients treated for alcohol dependence for about five months afterward. Among those who had insomnia when treatment began, 60% went back to drinking. Among those who didn’t, 30% did. The gap held up after the researchers accounted for other factors. One detail stands out: having used alcohol in the past to treat their own sleep problems did not predict relapse. The sleep problem itself did.
Linking these findings to always-on work culture is an inference, not a measured result. It’s a reasonable one, though. If a culture wears down sleep, it’s wearing down something research keeps connecting to drinking.
Signs the Nightcap Has Become a System
None of these prove anything on their own. Together, they’re worth an honest look:
- A drink that has become the required signal to end the workday
- Needing alcohol to fall asleep, then waking at 3 a.m. anyway
- Checking messages in bed, then reaching for something to settle down afterward
- Drinking more during the weeks with the heaviest deadlines
- Feeling fine about all of it because work performance hasn’t slipped
That last one matters most. High performance can hide a growing habit for years, because the usual warning signs never show up at the office.
Where This Fits If It Sounds Familiar
If this pattern sounds like your own, a closer look at affluent addiction can help explain why success and easy access so often hide a problem for so long. Nobody has to wait for a crisis to take a rough stretch of bad sleep and heavy drinking seriously. Sleep trouble is one of the earlier signals, and it’s worth raising with a doctor before anything else starts to slip. Being specific helps. Saying “I’m not sleeping, and I’ve been drinking to cope with it” gives a doctor something real to work with, in a way that “I’ve been stressed” rarely does.
Owen eventually mentioned the sleep to his doctor, and the drinking a few minutes later, almost as an afterthought. It turned out the second part was the one that mattered most, and he’d been avoiding saying it out loud for months.
Sources
- Burgess, H. J., Troost, J. P., Rizvydeen, M., Kikyo, F., Kebbeh, N., Tan, M., Roecklein, K. A., King, A. C., & Hasler, B. P. (2024). Do sleep and circadian characteristics predict alcohol use in adult drinkers? Alcohol, Clinical & Experimental Research, 48(4), 680-691. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.15280
- Brower, K. J., et al. (2001). Insomnia, self-medication, and relapse to alcoholism. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(3). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.3.399
