Alcohol's reputation as a sleep aid is almost entirely built on how it feels during the first hour after drinking, and almost entirely contradicted by what actually happens for the rest of the night afterward.
The part that feels genuinely true: alcohol is a sedative, and it does make most people fall asleep somewhat faster than they otherwise would. This effect is real, not imagined or purely psychological — which is exactly why the myth around alcohol helping sleep has proven so stubbornly persistent over time.
The part that consistently gets left out of that story: as your body metabolizes the alcohol over the following hours, it triggers a genuine rebound effect — increased wakefulness and significantly reduced REM sleep specifically during the second half of the night. This is why a night involving even a few drinks often produces noticeably broken, restless sleep in the early morning hours, even though falling asleep itself felt unusually easy at the start of the night.
Alcohol also relaxes throat muscles, which can measurably worsen snoring and airway obstruction for people already prone to either issue — meaning a substance specifically reached for to improve sleep can, for a meaningful share of people, actively make the physical act of breathing during sleep noticeably worse throughout the night.
The honest summary: alcohol shortens the time it takes to fall asleep while simultaneously degrading the quality of the sleep that follows for the rest of the night. It's a trade that looks genuinely appealing in the moment — falling asleep fast feels like a clear win — but nets out poorly across the full night when you account for what happens afterward. It's less accurate to say "alcohol helps sleep" and more accurate to say alcohol trades easy sleep onset for a measurably worse second half of the night.