How Does My Daily Diet Affect My Sleep Schedule?
Race cars, sports cars, and luxury cars all require premium gasoline — which contain special ingredients that allow the car to reach its potential.
Your body works the same way. It needs the best possible fuel — a healthy diet — to operate in the best possible way. A nutritious diet gives your body the energy it needs for each new day. The right diet also helps improve many of the physical processes your body handles each day, from digestion to respiration.
The connection between your diet and your sleep is often complicated, but it’s always important. The food you eat doesn’t just power your body during the day; it also helps your body rest and recharge at night. Certain food items promote rest; others inhibit it. If you’ve ever experienced digestion discomfort while you’re trying to sleep, you’ve likely discovered a few of these food items by accident.
Let’s explore how some common food items you consume can affect the quality of your sleep.
Artificial stimulation: a double-edged sword
Everyone knows that caffeine — commonly found in beverages like coffee, tea, and many sodas — is a stimulant. Some food items like chocolate also contain caffeine. For many people, a cup of coffee and the caffeine that comes with it is the only suitable ebay to start the day.
Consuming this or any stimulant can increase your alertness and decrease fatigue for a certain period of time during the day. However, drinking caffeine in the afternoon or evening, or consuming too much caffeine, can interfere with your body’s ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Instead, it can lead to symptoms of caffeine withdrawal that might include tremors, joint pain, and high blood pressure.
High amounts of sugar in your diet can have a similar effect. Especially before bedtime, sugar consumption can temporarily spike your energy. This can make it harder to wind down and embrace sleep. These same food items can lead to blood sugar fluctuations throughout the evening into the morning.
Alcohol: not a sleep aid
Some people believe that an alcohol beverage at the end of the day can help them sleep better. While alcohol might be able to help you fall asleep faster, it also adversely affects the quality of that sleep. Alcohol will reduce rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is the most important phase of sleep for rest and recovery. This often leaves you feeling groggy or unrested in the morning.
That’s not to say that you should never consume alcohol. Instead, just make sure that you consume all alcohol in moderation and try not to drink close to bedtime.
Tryptophan and melatonin-rich foods
Some food items naturally help your body get to sleep. Food items like nuts, turkey, milk, and seeds all contain tryptophan — an amino acid that your body uses to make melatonin and serotonin. Both of these hormones aid in regulating your sleep-wake cycle.
For best results in the evening, incorporate foods like cherries that naturally contain melatonin. Mushrooms and tomatoes also contain healthy amounts of melatonin. Even adding these food items as a late-night snack can help you drift more comfortably into sleep.
Spicy and acidic foods
Many people prefer spicy foods to plain alternatives. In many cultures, spice is also an absolute staple during mealtime. Depending on the strength of your gut and your natural sleep schedule, however, spice can also make bedtime more difficult. Certain spicy foods can also create heartburn or indigestion, interrupting your sleep or preventing you from falling asleep entirely.
If you’re going to consume spicy foods, try to do it earlier in the day. This gives your body enough time in the day to properly digest your food, including any spices which would disrupt sleep closer to bedtime.
Fluid intake is everything
Hydration is essential. However, drinking too much water before bed can also lead to frequent restroom trips when you’re trying to sleep. This prevents your body from sinking into the deeper, more restorative phases of sleep. Ultimately, you might wake up cranky even though you slept most of the night, simply because you never reached REM sleep.
Limiting your pre-sleep water intake doesn’t mean you need to limit the amount of water you drink for the entire day. The goal is to make sure you’re adequately hydrated during your waking hours. This allows you to comfortably reduce the amount of water you drink during the late afternoon and evening hours as you prepare for rest.
Balanced macronutrients
Macronutrients are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that serve as the primary dietary elements for energy in the body. They play an important role in keeping your body energized throughout the day, and also have a role to play in sleep quality and longevity.
Macronutrients help stabilize your blood sugar while you sleep. An elevation of blood sugar during a meal can lead to a drop in blood sugar after a meal. This might cause you to wake up during the night. Consuming a balanced meal with healthy ingredients and macronutrients helps prevent these fluctuations and the wake episodes that can follow.
Consuming a meal of macronutrients can also make you feel full at the end of the day. This feeling is valuable, as it keeps you away from late-night snacking and the weight gain that can follow.
What else do I need for a good night’s sleep?
Your diet is hardly the only ingredient that contributes to a good night of rest. Your bedroom environment, your daily exercise routine, your stress levels, and other factors all come together to determine your overall quality of sleep.
Whether you’re a new parent caring for a newborn infant, an overnight worker, a student, or an employee on a traditional schedule, there’s another constant that helps you achieve the healthiest possible sleep pattern:
The right mattress.
The right mattress makes a huge difference when it comes to receiving the sleep you deserve. A high-quality mattress will comfortably support your heads, limbs, neck, and back in all the right ways while you sleep. It will allow your body to sink into and out of REM sleep with minimal movement or disruption, even if you sleep alongside a partner.
Just as easily, a poor-quality mattress can make sleep a nightmare.
That’s exactly why we created and patented our free bedMATCH sleep diagnostic process. The bedMATCH system analyzes your height, weight, body type, and preferred sleep position before identifying mattress options that are best suited for the way you sleep. No matter your budget or mattress purchasing timeline, bedMATCH pairs you with mattresses that best support your best definition of sleep.
Visit your local Mattress Warehouse to take bedMATCH for a spin today, or take the five-minute online bedMATCH sleep quiz to browse personalized mattress recommendations right now.