How exercise affects your sleep

• Immediately after: increased energy and alertness
• Later that day: fall asleep more quickly and sleep longer

Exercise promotes sleep in several ways

• Increases body temperature which then falls afterwards.  Falling body temperature triggers falling asleep and staying in a deep, slow wave sleep.
• Modules circadian rhythm: helps you feel alert or sleepy when you need to be
• Alleviates stress and anxiety that would otherwise disrupt sleep

Optimal Eating for Sleep

• Ideally, try to have dinner 4-5 hours before bedtime, followed by a light snack (e.g. popcorn) if you’re still hungry.
• Avoid eating greasy, heavy foods just before bedtime. This helps to reduce the chance of digestive processes disturbing sleep.
• Try not to go to sleep hungry. Hunger can disturb sleep due to the release of a hormone called glucagon, which has effects that are similar to adrenaline and makes you alert.

General eating habit guidelines

• To maximize the positive impact of your diet on sleep, you may try eating foods that naturally boost your body’s melatonin and serotonin hormone levels (both important hormones for sleep).
• These include: carbohydrates, cheese, and dairy.

Source: Your Guide to Healthy Sleep, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

What is caffeine? 

• A central nervous stimulant found in coffees, teas, energy drinks, sodas, chocolate and some over-the-counter medications.
• Temporarily increases alertness, attention, energy, blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration.
• Caffeine may be helpful in the short-term to increase alertness and energy, but it can have negative effects on sleep.

How does caffeine negatively affect your sleep?

• Caffeine reaches its peak effect within about 1 hour of consumption, but it takes longer to break down in your body. The duration of action of a medication or drug is called its half-life – how long it takes for half of it to be eliminated from your body. The half-life of caffeine is long – 6 hours.
• So, this means, if you take a Five Hour Energy® at 6pm, 50% (or 100mg) of the caffeine is still in your system at midnight. This is equivalent to taking a shot of espresso at midnight.
• Caffeine in your system makes it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. Your sleep on caffeine may be more shallow and the quality of your sleep may be poor.

Your body’s caffeine crash

• A compensatory response: As your body eliminates caffeine, it needs to compensate for the effects of the drug to bring your body back into balance and return you to your baseline. Since caffeine increases alertness, your body brings you back into balance by decreasing alertness, which at some point is lower than your baseline.

So, at some point following caffeine consumption, you are LESS ALERT than before you had the caffeine.

How to keep caffeine from affecting your sleep

• Try to stop caffeine use in the evening. If you need to drink something to maintain alertness, try caffeine-free teas or ice-cold water (still or sparkling).
• If you have to use caffeine to stay awake temporarily, bear in mind that it can take an hour or more to take effect and that the effects will last for some time.
• If you have trouble sleeping possibly due to caffeine use, try any of the following:
  • Decrease your overall caffeine consumption. Use the calculator tool to experiment. “Decaf’ beverages can be a good option, although remember these still contain some caffeine.
  • Avoid caffeine after 12pm.
  • Avoid caffeine altogether.

Sources:

1. Your Guide to Healthy Sleep, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
2. External Factors that Influence Sleep, Harvard Medical School Healthy Sleep.

If you take a stimulant as part of a prescribed routine but have concerns about your sleep, consult your doctor to see if it might be playing a role.

If you take stimulants without a prescription or outside of prescribed doses, these can be counterproductive for sleep and related behaviors.

How do stimulants negatively affect your sleep?

• Although you may be able to stay awake a little longer to work, you risk having substantial difficulty falling asleep when you finish working.
• Like caffeine, they stay in your system: the half-life of Adderall, for example, is 10 hours. This is why individuals who are prescribed these medications are instructed to take it in the morning. But if you take it at 10pm, 50% is still in your system at 8am the next morning.
• If you try to use stimulants for this purpose and are sleep deprived over several days, this can take quite a toll (e.g., negative mood, paranoia).
• Sleep deprivation can hinder learning and memory. Taking stimulants to increase the number of hours you can work or study while simultaneously reducing your sleep puts you at risk for not being able to actually retain the information or perform effectively – so all of your hard work may be for nothing.
• Research studies have found that these medications are helpful for learning and/or cognitive abilities among individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (i.e., ADD, ADHD), but NOT individuals who do not have them.

Sources:

1. External Factors that Influence Sleep, Harvard Medical School Healthy Sleep.
2. Prescription Stimulants in Individuals With and Without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Misuse, Cognitive Impact, and Adverse Effects, Brain Behavior.

Contrary to popular belief, marijuana is not helpful for sleep.

Across research studies, giving people THC (i.e., active ingredient in marijuana) for sleep yields mixed results:

• THC helped some people fall asleep but was arousing and sleep disruptive for others.
• THC may increase one particular stage of sleep (i.e., N3 sleep = deep, slow wave sleep), but contradictory findings have been observed.
• One consistent research finding is that marijuana use decreases REM sleep, which stimulates the brain regions used in learning.
• Marijuana can also increase sleep fragmenting (i.e., cause increased awakenings), flatten circadian rhythms, and increase daytime sleepiness.
• Even if marijuana helps you fall asleep initially; tolerance to this effect and dependence occurs with frequent, chronic use. 

Source: Cannabis, Cannabinoids, and Sleep: a Review of the Literature. Current Psychiatry Reports.

What are some common sleep aids, and what are the potential problems using them?

• Antihistamines. alleviate allergies, and also cause drowsiness. Common brands include Sominex®, Nyquil® or Zyquil®, Unisom®, Sleep-Eez®. Diphenhydramine (i.e., Benadryl®) is the key ingredient in most of these medications.
• Problems:
  • Helpful for occasional difficulty falling and/or staying asleep, but their sedating effect can persist into the next day (i.e., “hangover” effect).
  • Long-term use can cause forgetfulness, headaches, and dizziness.

• Pain relievers. like Tylenol® or Advil® may stop pain from interfering with sleep. They do not cause drowsiness unless combined with an antihistamine. They should not be used on a regular, daily basis.
• Problems:
  • Overuse of Tylenol® and medications containing acetaminophen can injure the liver and cause liver failure or even death. The combination of alcohol and Tylenol® is even worse.
  • Overuse of Advil and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) can cause kidney damage, gastrointestinal problems, auditory or visual changes.

• Sedative-hypnotic prescription medications. These can temporarily solve insomnia if carefully prescribed by a doctor.
• Problems:
  • These medications have serious side effects, including causing people to engage in dangerous or strange behaviors, as well as daytime drowsiness that can increase risk of falls and driving accidents.
  • Other risks:
    • Dangerous to mix with alcohol.
    • Highly addictive.
    • Cause withdrawal symptoms if stopped prematurely.
    • Can cause tolerance with long-term use.

Source: External Factors that Influence Sleep, Harvard Medical School Healthy Sleep.

What is the connection between alcohol and sleep? A common myth is that alcohol is helpful for sleep because it can make you feel sleepy. Research does not support this widely held belief. In fact, alcohol can disrupt the deep sleep that your body needs, leaving you tired the next day. Alcohol depresses or “turns off” brain regions it encounters.

Falling asleep and initial sleep:

• Short term, occasional alcohol use depresses wakefulness, which may promote falling asleep more quickly and staying in a deeper sleep during the first half of sleep.
• But, regular and heavier alcohol use (women: 4 or more per occasion; men: 5 or more per occasion) can bring tolerance to this effect in as little as 3 days, after which alcohol no longer quickly induces sleep.

Staying asleep:

• Though short-term, moderate alcohol use may have some sleep-promoting effects during the first half of sleep, any alcohol use within 6 hours of sleep can negatively impact the second half of sleep.
• Just like alcohol consumption depresses the brain, alcohol elimination stimulates the brain. Remember, your body produces a compensatory response to bring you back to your baseline. Since alcohol increases sleepiness, your body brings you back into balance by increasing alertness. This effect causes more awakenings and reduces your total N3 sleep time (i.e. the deep, slow wave sleep, that may be the most restorative).
• If one of these awakenings occurs in the morning at the time you usually get up, it can be difficult to go back to sleep despite being tired.
• Alcohol’s effects on the second half of sleep worsen with heavier alcohol use.

Over a couple of nights, alcohol can greatly decrease your total sleep quantity and result in increased tiredness and sleep deprivation.

Sources:

1. Alcohol and Sleep I: Effects on Normal Sleep, Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research
2. Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol on Sleep Using Actigraphy, Alcohol Alcohol
3. The Within-Person Association Between Alcohol Use and Sleep Duration and Quality in situ: An Experience Sampling Study, Addictive Behaviors
4. Sleep, Sleepiness, and Alcohol Use, NIAAA
5. Effects of Alcohol on Sleep and the Sleep Electroencephalogram in Healthy Young Women, Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research

No. Alcohol takes time to metabolize.

When you drink, alcohol enters your bloodstream. The amount of alcohol in your blood is your blood alcohol content (BAC). A BAC of 0.10 means that .1 of 1% of your blood contains alcohol. The level this reaches when you drink is mostly determined by the number and timing of drinks you consume, and to a lesser extent by your gender and body size.

Your liver then eliminates alcohol from your bloodstream at a slow, predictable rate (approximately 0.015 per hour, slower if you are ill or sleep-deprived).  Nothing you do will alter this rate, even eating or drinking non-alcoholic fluids.

The higher your BAC, the longer it takes to return to 0.00. Depending on how much you drink and how late, you might still have alcohol in your system through the night until morning.

Think about an occasion in the last month when you drank the most amount of alcohol. Enter on the right the number of drinks you consumed and over how many hours. Then look at the results. What was your BAC 8 hours later (when you might be waking up)? What about 10 hours later, when you were driving to work or class? How about 12 hours later, when you were meeting with your boss or professor?

If your breath smells like alcohol, it’s still in your blood and brain too.

The amount of liquid in your cup or glass does not tell you how many drinks you are having. Different types of beverages have very different alcohol contents. A standard drink contains 14 grams of alcohol. This is equivalent to:

• 12 oz of regular beer (i.e. 5% alcohol content or less)
• 8-9 oz of malt liquor
• 5 oz of wine
• 1.5 oz of 80-proof spirits/hard alcohol
• 1 oz of 100-proof spirits/hard alcohol

Especially in a college and/or party environment, you might find yourself drinking out of non-standard glassware, or pouring alcohol into other bottles to take to parties. So how much alcohol are you actually drinking?

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