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Late Night Eating

Eric D. on 9th Sep 2019

Hey guys. This is Eric and welcome to another episode of Sleep Hacks. Today, I want to talk to you about eating before bed.

Now this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart because I tend to get hungry late at night. This is a habit I've been kind of trying to shake for the past few years because I know personally how much it affects me. If I have a big meal before bed, my body is just trying to digest that meal while I'm sleeping and it causes my blood sugar to just go on a ride and it really messes up my sleep. A lot of times, what happens to people is they'll wake up in the middle of the night fully awake and sometimes that happens because your blood sugar is on the fritz. So one way to avoid this is to stop eating many hours before bed. Ideally, a lot of sources say to stop eating around 6pm or 7pm. Don't eat anything for the next four hours and go to sleep on an empty stomach.

That is sometimes a little hard for me. Fortunately, I discovered a sleep hack that I really like. Again, compliments of Tim Ferriss. This hack is to eat a spoonful of peanut butter and almond butter before bed. I love this hack because I wake up feeling great. So what you do is you eat one or two tablespoons of nut butter before bed. Sometimes it was a little bit of honey, it tastes a lot better and you go to sleep. What that nut butter does is it helps regulate your blood sugar so that you don't wake up with low blood sugar.

Now, I don't know about you, but it's pretty common for me to wake up feeling a little bit groggy, a little bit out of it and sometimes that's because I wake up with low blood sugar. On mornings when I wake up after eating a tablespoon of nut butter, I tend to feel a lot less groggy, a lot just overall better. I'm not like super hungry when I wake up as well. Also, our brains run off of glucose so if you have a little bit of honey with your nut butter, that kind of feeds your brain because our brains are still running throughout the night. They don't just completely shut off while we're sleeping. Parts of our brain sleep and parts of our brain continue to obviously work and that's why we have dreams throughout the night and will sometimes wake up thinking about work and what not. It's a tough habit but in today's modern age, we just have so much information bombarding us from every angle that it's hard to stop thinking, it's hard to turn your mind off.

I'll talk about meditation and another video that's also a sleep hack that I highly recommend and overall just a great life hack. And overall, like when you hack your sleep, it makes your daytime that much better. It really does affect all aspects of your life in a positive way. So I believe sleep, it definitely affects your stress levels. That's a big one. We've all had bad night's sleep. It's hard to have good sleep hygiene, but it's something that it's really really worth working on. So keep working at it.

Thank you for watching this video. If you liked it, please subscribe, tell your friends and I'll see you soon. Thanks.