Researchers have discovered that you can wake up every morning without grogginess by paying attention to three key factors: sleep, exercise, and breakfast.
do you feel giddy until you get your morning joe, Do you struggle with sleepiness throughout the workday?
you’re not alone. Many people struggle with morning alertness, but a new study suggests that waking up refreshed every day isn’t something the lucky few are born with.
The findings came from a detailed analysis of the behavior of 833 people who were given a variety of breakfast foods over a two-week period; Worn a wristwatch to record the quantity, quality, timing and regularity of your physical activity and sleep; kept a diary of his food intake; and recorded their level of alertness from the moment they woke up and throughout the day.
The researchers included identical twins and fraternal twins in the study to separate the effects of genes from those of environment and behavior.
Researchers found that the secret to alertness is a three-part recipe that requires getting enough exercise the previous day, sleeping longer and later in the morning and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates with limited sugar.
Researchers also found that a healthy controlled blood sugar response after eating breakfast is key to waking up more effectively.
“These all have a unique and independent effect,” says Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and first author of the study. “If you sleep longer or later, you’ll see an increase in your alertness. If you do more physical activity the first day, you’ll see an increase. You can see improvements with each of these factors.”
Morning sickness is much more than just an annoyance. Its major social consequences are: Many auto accidentsOn-the-job injuries, and large scale disasters are caused by people who can’t move sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania, and the worse nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, are well-known examples.
“Many of us think that morning sleepiness is a benign annoyance. However, it costs developed countries billions of dollars each year through decreased productivity, increased health care utilization, work absenteeism. More impressive However, it costs lives—it’s fatal,” says senior author Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology and author of why do we sleep (Simon & Schuster, 2018).
“from car crashes For work-related accidents, the cost of sleepiness is fatal. As scientists, we must figure out how to help society wake up better and help reduce the mortal cost of society’s current struggle to wake up effectively each day.
do you eat
Walker and Vallatt, together with researchers in the United Kingdom, the US and Sweden, analyzed data obtained by a UK company, Zoe Ltd, which followed hundreds of people for a two-week period to learn how to predict individual metabolism. Have done Reactions to foods based on a person’s biological characteristics, lifestyle factors, and the nutritional composition of foods.
Researchers gave participants meals prepared with different ratios of the nutrients included in the muffins for two full weeks to see how they responded to the different diets upon waking. A standardized breakfast with moderate amounts of fat and carbohydrate was compared with a high protein (muffin plus milkshake), high carbohydrate or high sugar (glucose drink) breakfast. The subjects also wore continuous glucose monitors to measure blood glucose levels throughout the day.
The worst kind of breakfast has a higher average amount simple sugar, This was associated with an inability to effectively wake up and maintain alertness. When given this sugary breakfast, the participants began to have trouble sleeping.
In contrast, a high-carbohydrate breakfast – which contained large amounts of carbohydrates as opposed to simple sugar, and only a modest amount of protein – was associated with individuals revving their alertness early in the morning and maintaining that alert state.
“A carbohydrate-rich breakfast can increase alertness, as long as your body is healthy and able to efficiently dispose of glucose from that meal, preventing the constant spikes in blood sugar that would otherwise blunt your brain’s alertness,” Vallat says
“We’ve known for some time that a diet high in sugar Harmful for sleep, not to mention being toxic to the cells in your brain and body,” Walker says. “However, what we discovered is that, beyond these harmful effects on sleep, high amounts of Consuming sugar, and having a spike in blood sugar after any type of breakfast meal, markedly blunts your brain’s ability to return to waking consciousness. after sleep.”
how you sleep
However, it wasn’t all about the food. Sleep matters a lot. In particular, Vallet and Walker discovered sleep for a long time Sleeping as you usually do, and/or later than usual, can result in individuals having an increased alertness very quickly after waking from sleep.
According to Walker, seven to nine hours of sleep is ideal for ridding the body of “sleep inertia,” the inability to effectively transition to a state of functional cognitive alertness upon waking. Most people need this amount of sleep to remove a chemical called adenosine that builds up in the body throughout the day and induces sleepiness in the evening, known as sleep pressure.
Walker speculates, “Given that most individuals in society are not getting enough sleep during the week, sleeping longer on any given day may help offset some of the adenosine sleep debt.”
“Plus, sleeping later may help with alertness for another reason,” he says. “When you wake up later, you’re getting up at a higher point in your 24-hour circadian rhythm, which ramps up throughout the morning and increases alertness.”
However, it is not clear what physical activity does to improve alertness the next day.
“It is well known that physical activity, in general, improves your alertness and your mood levels as well, and we found a high correlation between the mood of the participants in this study and their alertness levels,” Vallat says. “Participants who are happier, on average, also felt more alert.”
But Vallat also noted that exercise is generally associated with better Sleep and a happy mood.
“It may be that the exercise-induced better sleep that is part of the exercise the day before, by helping to sleep that night, leads to better alertness the next day,” Vallatt says.
Walker notes that the restoration of consciousness from unconsciousness—from sleep to wakefulness—is not likely to be a simple biological process.
“If you pause to think, it is a non-trivial feat to go from being unconscious, recumbent, and immobile to being a thoughtful, conscious, attentive, and productive human being, active, awake, and mobile. This possibility Not that such a radical, fundamental change is being explained by tweaking only one thing,” he says. “However, we’ve found that there are still some basic, changeable, yet powerful elements to the awakening equation that people can focus on—a relatively simple recipe for finding the best way to wake up each day.”
it’s under our control
A comparison of the data between pairs of identical and non-identical twins showed that genetics play only a small and insignificant role in next-day alertness, explaining only 25% of the difference between individuals.
“We know there are people who always seem to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Walker says. “But if you’re not like that, you think, ‘Well, I guess it’s just my genetic luck that I’m slow to wake up. There’s really nothing I can do about it, using the stimulant chemical caffeine. Doing less than that can harm sleep.
“But our new findings provide a different and more optimistic message. How you wake up each day is within your own control, depending on how you structure your life and your sleep. No need to resign yourself to any fate, throw up your hands in despair because, ‘…it’s my genes, and I can’t change my genes.’ There are some very basic and achievable things you can start doing today, and tonight, to improve how you wake up every morning, feeling alert, and free of that jitters.
Walker, Vallat, and their colleagues continue their collaboration with the Zoe team, investigating novel scientific questions about how sleep, diet, and physical exercise change the health of people’s brain and body, protecting them from illness and disease. We do.
Additional co-authors of the paper are from King’s College London; Lund University in Malmö, Sweden; Zoe Limited; the University of Nottingham in the UK; and Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Zo Ltd and the Department of Twin Studies at King’s College London funded the study.
This article was first published in the World Economic Forum. read this Here.