This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr F. Perry Wilson from the Yale School of Medicine.
You may not have realized it yet, but we are full-on in the era of biofeedback. I remember a few years ago when my smartwatch started reporting on my heart rate variability during sleep.
To be honest, I didn’t even know what this metric really meant. But I did notice something fairly early on. On nights when I drank alcohol, my heart rate variability went down.
Human brains are really good at linking pieces of data like that, and I kept an eye on it, with additional nights of drinking or not drinking and more reports of heart rate variability only strengthening the association. This is not unique to me, of course — multiple