Tips for Sleeping Better

In this Article (Index)

Advice on how to sleep better in both quality and quantity.

• Lack of Sleep in America today
• How much should you sleep?
• Health risks due to lack of sleep
• Health benefits from sleeping well
• Tips on how to sleep through the night
• Sleeping too little is bad for your heart
• Napping and Sleep
• Summary: Advice on Sleeping better and Faster

Sleep (or lack of sleep) in America today

Connor Wild et al. (2018) (1) used data from a health survey in the US involving around 250,000 people and found that 29.2% of them were getting less than an average of 6 hours of sleep per night. This is a very low figure.

Six hours fall short of the recommended 7 or more hours of sleep per night.

Lack of sleep affects the day-to-day performance of these sleep-deprived individuals. Sleeping less than 6 hours per day is a medical condition known as chronic partial sleep deprivation (SD) or sleep restriction.

SD causes "impaired physiological and cognitive functioning."

The role of sleep

Sleep is an important vital function and essential for survival, otherwise, why would animals pay the cost of being vulnerable and immobile, unable to escape from predators, mate, or eat?

This cost of sleeping suggests that it plays a crucial role in maintaining life and fitness. If it didn't, the pressure of evolution and natural selection would have favored animals that don't sleep.

Humans like all other animals must also sleep, but modern society in the XXIst century is very different from the wild natural environment in which our species originated.

The modern lifestyle disrupts sleep patterns.

Human beings need to sleep (you spend almost one-third of your life asleep!) and, until not so long ago, humans beings rose at dawn and went to bed at dusk, after spending their days foraging or hunting for scarce food. This involved plenty of physical activity and restricted diets, so being overweight was uncommon. Stressors were tangible things like cave bears or lions, not work deadlines.

Nowadays human beings stay up until late, illuminated with both strong and dim light at night (TVs, notebooks, smartphones), they lead sedentary lives, are overweight and chronically stressed out by intangible things that unfortunately never go away (work pressure, job-loss fears, or financial woes).

All of these factors disrupt sleep patterns.

Sleep loss -even if it only lasts five consecutive nights, can increase the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, and increased inflammation (2, 3).

But how much sleep do you need to maintain your health?

How much should you sleep?

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and Sleep Research Society (SRS) weighed the evidence and defined the recommended amount of sleep needed by a healthy adult to maintain his or her health: More than 7 hours per night regularly (4).

The AASM pointed out that "Sleeping less than 7 hours per night on a regular basis is associated with adverse health outcomes, including weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke, depression, and increased risk of death.
Sleeping less than 7 hours per night is also associated with impaired immune function, increased pain, impaired performance, increased errors, and greater risk of accidents."

As you can see, the risks and conditions involved in poor sleeping habits are overwhelming.

For young adults and people who suffer from an illness, the guidelines are to sleep more than 9 hours per night regularly. However, the AASM warned that "...it is uncertain whether sleeping more than 9 hours per night is associated with health risk."

Too little or too much sleep is very bad for you

A recent study by a team from the University of Western Ohio (Connor Wild et al. 2018) (1) found that the optimum amount of sleep to reach top brain performance is between 7 and 8 hours per night, and this value is independent of the age of the sleeper: it is valid for young, middle-aged, and older adults.

The study involved over 40,000 people from around the world, who on average slept less than 6.3 hours per night -well below the optimal value.

Sleeping more than 8 hours is, from your brain's point of view, as bad as sleeping less than 7 hours. Their key findings were:

• Reasoning, verbal, and overall ability are linked to sleep duration.
• But, short term memory was unaffected by how long people slept.
• One single night's sleep can affect cognition.

A good or a bad night's sleep impacts your brain

The study also found that a single night of "poor sleep" -that is, moving away from the optimal value, impacted cognition.

On the other hand, moving towards the optimal value improved cognition.

This means that those who sleep too little (or too much) may see an improvement in their cognitive abilities after only one night of better sleep if it falls within the optimal values.

On the other hand, for a "normal" sleeper who regularly sleeps within the optimal 7-8 hour sleep range, sleeping less or more than that will negatively impact their cognition.

Sleep and its impact on day-to-day life

Since almost 30% of Americans sleep less than 6 hours every night, you are surrounded by people who function on low sleep levels and therefore suffer from problem-solving, communication, and reasoning abilities during their daily tasks.

Lack of sleep affects the whole social fabric, from the CEO of a large corporation to the humble blue-collar laborer.

Don't sleep too much either

In line with these guidelines, Alvarez and Ayas (2004) (3) reported that those who sleep more than 8 hours a day or less than 7 hours per day "are at modestly increased risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and developing symptomatic diabetes."

Let's see what happens when you don't get enough sleep:

Lack of sleep damages your DNA and makes you put on weight

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden (Jonathan Cedernaes et al. 2018) (2) studied the tissue of sleep-deprived people to try to find out why sleep provokes weight gain and loss of muscle mass.

They found that the DNA in certain tissue was modified by methylation, a process that regulates the switching on and off of genes.

Methylation is also known as an "epigenetic modification" and can be triggered by disease, age, lifestyle, environment (chemicals, pollutants), or even exercise.

Methylation alters the way your genes function, and can even cause cancer. In this case, lack of sleep caused epigenetic changes in "clock genes" within the body's tissues.

• DNA methylation in adipose or fatty tissue affected genes that were also altered by DNA methylation due to conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
• "acute sleep loss may reprogram DNA methylation in adipose tissue to promote increased adiposity."
• "levels of structural proteins in skeletal muscle decrease in response to sleep loss."

Only five nights of poor sleep can make your gain weight

Rachel Markwald (2013) (5) reported that even five nights of insufficient sleep led to weight gain (almost 2 pounds -nearly 1 kg- in the subjects she studied).

Although sleeping less provokes a higher energy expenditure (you burn more calories when you are awake than when you sleep), the nighttime after-dinner snacking by sleepless subjects caused them to eat more energy than they burned.

The effect of sleep loss on hunger is comparable to that of alcohol intoxication (drinking too much also makes you eat more).

Better sleep quality and quantity can help you lose weight

Thomson et al. (2012) (6) evaluated weight-loss success in relation to sleep quality and quantity. They noticed that women who were dieting and slept better or slept more than 7 hours per night had a 33% increase in weight-loss success when compared to those who didn't sleep well or as much (these had a 28% lower likelihood of achieving their weight goals).

Sleeping too little is bad for your heart

Men who sleep less than 5 hours per night double the risk for heart disease

A study involving 798 fifty-year-old men in Gothenburg, Sweden, was followed over 21 years to see if there was a link between sleeping too little and heart disease.

Its author, Moa Bengtsson (2018) (7), reported that "Men with the shortest sleep duration at the age of 50 were twice as likely to have had a cardiovascular event by age 71 than those who slept a normal amount."

This is a cardiovascular risk, according to Bengtsson "is similar to that of smoking or having diabetes at age 50."

Those who slept less than 5 hours per night were more prone to suffer from obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, poor sleep quality, and were also smokers and didn't exercise when compared to those who slept 7 to 8 hours.

Napping and Sleep

Owens et al. (2010) (8) studied the daytime napping habits and the nighttime sleep quality of a group of 224 middle-aged American men and women of different ethnic origins.

Napping prevalence ranged from 10 to 65%. Those who were older or had poor health napped more and also had nighttime sleep problems.

They found the following traits in those who napped more:

• They slept for shorter periods at night.
• Were more sleepy during the daytime.
• Suffered more fatigue.
• Were fatter (higher body mass index, abdominal fat, and waistline).
• Had a less efficient night's sleep.

This created a vicious circle: poor nighttime sleep led to a nap on the following day, and this in turn disrupted that day's nighttime sleep.

Napping can affect health in older adults

Mantua and Spencer (2017) (9) looked into napping and its negative effects in older adults: they reported that "frequent napping is associated with negative health outcomes in older adults".

They suggested that this may be due to inflammation through the following mechanism:

• Lack of sleep provokes inflammation, so the body then tries to induce daytime sleep to fight it.
• With chronic inflammation (due to disease) napping may not be enough to normalize it, yet the sick person will nevertheless take a nap.

Sleep acts as a natural "Antioxidant"

A team from New York's University of Columbia (Hill et al. 2018) (10) asked what is the purpose of sleep, from a functional point of view.

To find out, studied a mutant strain of fruit fly that sleeps for a very short period of time. Drosophila flies are very useful laboratory subjects, they reproduce quickly and are cheap to handle and feed.

Surprisingly these short-sleeping flies had normal lifespans: at least in fruit flies, chronic short sleep does not by itself shorten lifespan.

They subjected the mutant flies and "normal" flies (which served as a control group) to oxidative stress by exposing them to chemicals and agrochemicals.

The short-sleeping flies died off faster than the normal-sleeping ones. This shows that the sleepless flies could not neutralize the high level of "free radicals" caused by this environmental oxidative stress.

Hill's team concluded that sleep plays an antioxidant role (less sleep means fewer antioxidants available).

Then they acted upon normal-sleeping flies to make them sleep longer and found that this increased their resistance to free radicals. This suggested once again that sleep plays a crucial antioxidant role.

In a final test, they fiddled with normal flies to reduce oxidative stress in their brains, and this reduced their sleeping time, which means that the presence or absence of free radicals somehow regulates sleep. This is a two-way relationship between sleep and oxidative stress:

1. An increase in free radicals triggers sleep.
2. Sleep acts as an antioxidant eliminating free radicals.
3. Lower levels of free radicals reduce the length of sleeping time.

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's diseases are linked with oxidative stress, maybe lack of sleep sensitizes individuals to oxidative stress and makes them more prone to disease or, the opposite, the disease disrupts the antioxidant balance and causes loss of sleep.

Four Natural Tips to help you sleep better

Having seen the damage that disrupted sleep causes, let's see what you can do to sleep through the night with quality sleep. These are our tips:

Four things you can do to sleep better at night naturally

1. Eat food that promotes sleep.
2. Avoid Dim Light at Night.
3. Exercise for better sleep.
4. Take a warm bath.

"Food" for Good Sleep

Some food seems to have a sleep-promoting effect:

Eat Prebiotics to Sleep better

Prebiotics are non-digestible food such as fiber and some short-chain fatty acids which promote the growth and activity of the "good" microbes in your colon and contribute to your overall health.

A paper by Robert S. Thompson et al. (2017) (11) found that a diet rich in prebiotics improved NREM sleep and enhanced REM sleep by promoting the growth of Lactobacillus ramnosus bacteria. The exact mechanism is not known, but it also has stress-protective effects during the daytime.

Food containing γ-aminobutyric acid or GABA

Yawen Zeng (2014) (12) revealed that food rich in γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) helped improve sleep.

However, synthetic GABA should be avoided because it has side effects such as dizziness, drowsiness, and even may cause addiction. Natural GABA is virtually harmless.

Microbes of the lactobacillus variety produce it by fermentation, so it can be found in certain fermented food such as kimchi, kefir, miso, sauerkraut, tempeh, and yogurt.

Health Benefits of Yogurt

Probiotics like yogurt have many health benefits: weight loss, anti-inflammatory action, control of diabetes type 2, and also, improve the quality of your sleep.

Learn how Yogurt promotes a healthy gut.

Sleep-Promoting Foods and Sleep Quality

St-Onge, Mikic, and Pietrolungo, (2016) (13) reviewed scientific papers to identify the effect of different types of food on sleeping. They highlighted the following:

• Fatty fish is a good replacement for meat, not because it improves sleepiness but because meat worsens sleep quality and should be replaced.
• Kiwi fruit. Eating two kiwis one hour before bedtime "enhances the sleep of individuals with self-reported sleep disorders and may also promote sleep in healthy individuals."
• Tart cherry juice (drinking 8 oz. in the morning) improve sleep quality and increase urinary melatonin concentrations (melatonin is a hormone that regulates wakefulness, more of it in the urine means more is available in the body).
• Malted milk "promotes less restless sleep in both young and old populations, although the mechanisms remain unclear."
• Natural melatonin-enriched milk, obtained by milking cows at nighttime (nighttime milk) "improved sleep efficiency and reduced the number of awakenings in middle-aged adults diagnosed with insomnia." In mice, it has a sedative effect.
• Women should reduce carbs and fat intake. It has a negative association with REM sleep.
• Diet quality close to bedtime affects sleep quality (eat healthy meals before going to sleep).
• Eating 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime harms sleep quality (and it is worse in women than in men).
• Eating sugary or starchy foods (food with a high glycemic index - or High GI food) 4 hours before bedtime may make you fall asleep faster but sleep quality is worse (more awakening, shorter deep sleep), especially if you eat simple sugars.
• "Higher saturated fat and lower fiber intakes may produce less [deep sleep periods], more nighttime arousals, and a reduction in overall sleep quality."

In line with this, Jansen et al. (2020) (14) studied 4,467 middle-aged Mexican women, and found that those that ate fruit and vegetable-based diet experienced "higher sleep quality" compared to those with an "unhealthier diet pattern... associated with worse sleep quality the "unhealthy" food included tortillas, soda and was low in fiber and dairy products.

Avoid Blue or Dim Light at Night

Chul-Hyun Cho, et al. (2018) (15) studied the impact of "dim light at night" or dLAN (also known as blue light) on sleep in a group of women and found that exposure to dim light at night had a negative impact in the quality and total sleep time, sleep efficiency, increased wake time after sleep onset, and an increase in REM sleep.

They added that "based on previous studies, an increase in REM sleep due to dLAN exposure could be considered to have a somewhat negative impact on humans. Depression is known to be associated with altered REM sleep parameters."

Dim blue-tinted light is produced by smartphones, ebooks, ipads, notebooks, PC screens, television, and street lights shining through windows.

Animal and human studies show that nighttime exposure to dLAN negatively impacts metabolism, immune function, and the sleep-wake cycle of the circadian system.

Another study (June 2018) published by Science Daily (16) looked into the health risk effects of sleeping in an illuminated setting.

20 healthy adults were divided into two groups (i) Dark-Dark and (ii) Dark-Light; the first group slept 2 nights in a dark room, while the other group (Dark-Light) slept the first night in a dark room and the second one in a room with an overhead 100 lux light.

The effect of one single night exposure to light while sleeping increased the Dark-Light group's subjects' insulin resistance (higher insulin resistance is a symptom that precedes the onset of type 2 diabetes).

The science behind a warm bath and sleeping better

Taking a warm bath or a shower is said to help you sleep better, but is it true?

According to a study (Horne and Reid, 1985) (17), it is:

A cool 90-minute-long bath didn't affect sleep parameters, but taking a warm bath provoked " significant increases in: sleepiness at bed-time, slow wave sleep, and stage 4 sleep."

The baths were taken at 2:30 or 5:30 PM, so their impact on sleep was not necessarily immediate.

Sleep and Exercise: the healthy link

There is an association between sleeping better and exercise, but it is a two-way street: poor sleep can contribute to lower levels of physical activity.

Cristopher Kline reviewed the data (18) and concluded that:

1. Exercise improves sleep quality

• Exercise training reduced the severity of SDB or Sleep-disordered Breathing (obstructive sleep apnea or OSA is the most common type of SDB) by up to 32% even in people who were overweight.
• OSA severity decreased by 25% in people who engaged in 12 weeks of moderate-intensity aerobic training.
• Exercise training "also led to better subjective and objective sleep and improvements in daytime functioning (e.g., quality of life, depressive symptoms, vigor, fatigue)."

2. Poor Sleep impacts Physical Activity

Bu, adults suffering from insomnia were less active and had "lower cardiorespiratory fitness than adults without insomnia, possibly due to daytime sleepiness and⁄or fatigue."

However, sleeping more won't make you change your habits and exercise more: "improving sleep is insufficient to spontaneously change physical activity behavior," so if you sleep more you will feel better, but getting up and exercising depends on you, and your lifestyle choices.

3. Early birds and night owls

Kline pointed out that individuals' preferences (that is, being an early riser or a night owl), and the time that they went to sleep, was closely linked to physical activity.

• Early risers or Larks (those who wake up earlier) tended to have greater levels of physical activity than "night time" people (slower to rise and prone to keep awake late into the night).

But what makes you an early bird or a night owl?

Morningness and eveningness are determined by many factors: some specific genes (circadian gene), age, sex, seasonal and geographic changes of light and dark, and also work or school schedules, shift work, jet lag, and lifestyle.

In general, you become a Lark as you age.

Sunlight exposure can promote better sleep

An article published in 2024 (21) reports that "Sunlight exposure may improve sleep by regulating circadian rhythms, increasing vitamin D, and influencing melatonin production." It studied 103 adults for up to 70 days and found that morning sunlight exposure improved sleep when compared to no exposure to sunlight. They suggest that the sunlight regulates the body's circadian rhythms.
Consider taking a stroll in the morning, in the sun.

Some more Advice on Sleeping better and Faster

Simple routines that are sleep-reinforcing habits can go a long way in helping you improve the quality of your sleep: (19, 20):

• A healthy diet, body weight, and lifestyle will improve your sleep.
• Keep a regular sleep schedule. Go to bed at the same time every day. This helps your body's sleep-wake cycle (or circadian rhythm keep in step).
• Sleep at the same time each day, don't sleep in on weekends, you will be wide awake late at night.
• Avoid naps, they may help you recover energy but may keep you up later in the day.
• Be in the sun during daylight hours it will regulate your melatonin production.
• Relax and unwind for one or two hours before bedtime without TV, smart device screens, or computers (avoid dim blue light).
• Relax in a warm bath.
• Don't eat large meals before bedtime.
• Caffeine is a no-no (don't drink tea, coffee, or caffeinated cola beverages) after 4 PM.
• Exercise, but do so at least 3 or more hours before bedtime.
• Alcohol disrupts sleep even though it may make you drowsy at first.
• Don't smoke before going to bed, or in bed (it is also a fire risk).
• Sleep in a dark room if you don't fall asleep after 20 minutes, get out of bed. Return once you feel sleepy.
• Quiet and cool rooms also help improve sleep quality,
• Keep hydrated but don't overdo it, you will be getting up during the night to get rid of the extra fluids.
• Are you stressed? or worried? there are Relaxation & Meditation techniques that can help you calm down and relax.

Closing Comments

Sleeping well is a matter of following some simple healthy rules: exercise, eat a balanced diet, keep a bedtime routine that unwinds you both mentally and physically by reducing stimuli such as the TV or your smartphone screen.

Regular habits (going to bed at the same time each day and sleeping the same amount of hours) reinforce your circadian rhythm and will improve both the quality and quantity of your sleep.