At Little Saints, we believe that everyone deserves evening rituals that elevate you, not diminish you. That's why we created N/A cocktails worthy of your finest glassware—so you can savor your evening cocktail hour without the compromise.
But we didn’t stop there.
Beyond collaborating with master mixologists and food scientists to craft our complex flavor profiles, we brought in actual neuroscientists (yes, really!) to ensure our functional ingredients work as nature's dopamine for your evening nervous system—delivering the ultimate wind-down ritual.
Enter Dr. Drew Pierson, a neuroscientist who's been fine-tuning brains for over 25 years. He's developed some of the world's most cutting-edge neurofeedback training and, as an early consciousness pioneer, has studied every modern tool and method for achieving altered states and peak performance. Translation: this guy knows his stuff.
As we perfected our formulations, one element kept us up at night (see what we did there?): creating drinks that actually help you get deep, refreshing, nourishing sleep.
How alcohol sabotages your sleep:
Buzzkill time: alcohol can slash your “deep sleep” by up to 25% — which explains that groggy, sluggish morning-after feeling. “Alcohol disrupts sleep architecture,” Dr. Drew told us, “reducing REM time which is critical for emotional regulation, memory consolidation, and cognitive recovery. It also fragments delta sleep—the deep, slow-wave sleep linked to physical recovery and growth hormone release.”
Translation? That nightcap is quietly undermining tomorrow's you.
Why deep sleep is your secret weapon:
REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is where the magic happens—characterized by increased brain activity and sometimes vivid dreaming. “REM is essential for emotional regulation and memory consolidation,” Dr. Drew notes. “During REM, your brain takes the day’s experiences, processes them, and organizes them. Without it, you don’t properly consolidate learning or process emotions, which impacts both mood and cognition.”
Think of it as your brain's nightly filing system—and alcohol keeps throwing documents everywhere.
Nature’s sleep “dream team”:
Working closely with our neuroscientist advisors, we developed cocktails and spirits featuring functional powerhouses like Reishi and Lion’s Mane. And here’s where we get a little extra: our mushroom extracts have a 70% beta-glucan concentration, making them far more potent than your standard ground mushrooms.
“Lion’s Mane reduces anxiety and sympathetic arousal, which helps ease the mind into sleep,” says Dr. Drew. “A good dose before bed can increase REM sleep significantly, sometimes doubling it.”
Then the Reishi swoops in with the calm: “[It] enhances GABA receptors, calming the brain and shifting activity from high-alert beta waves into alpha and theta waves,” Dr. Drew explains. “Reishi also lowers evening cortisol spikes, which allows proper melatonin production.”
And it gets better: According to Dr. Drew, these powerful mushrooms can actually soften some of alcohol’s harsher effects, particularly inflammation and cortisol spikes. “They won’t erase the damage entirely,” cautions Dr. Drew. “But they help.”
So you’re not just cutting back on alcohol, you’re also giving your body an evening boost from “nature’s dopamine.” A magical evening and five-star sleep. We’ll drink to that.
Cheers!
Team Little Saints
