How Your Diet Impacts Your Sleep Quality

Few things are as frustrating as waking up in the morning feeling tired. A study performed in 2020 found that 42% of Americans start feeling tired by noon and 65% of Americans acknowledged that they rarely wake up feeling well-rested and energized.

As researchers dove deeper into those numbers, they found that 74% of people acknowledged that feeling unrested when they wake up leaves them struggling to be productive throughout their day.

The reasons that people gave for their poor sleep quality varied. Most people (64%), say that their sleep quality usually suffers when their daily routine gets thrown off.

Others pointed to the importance of a nighttime routine while other respondents said that their sleep quality suffers if they change what time they go to bed and what time they wake up.

While all of these are certainly factors that impact sleep quality, many people don’t understand the relationship between their diet and how well they sleep.

Are you a late-night snacker? Do you consume a lot of fast food or other unhealthy items?

Maybe you’re like 75% of Americans who suffer from dehydration and don’t even realize it. All of these factors can directly affect your sleep quality.

Today, learn more about how your food and beverage intake dictates how tired you feel when you wake up each morning. Making some seemingly minor changes may help you become a more productive, healthier version of yourself.

Timing Matters

Plenty of people enjoy a good late-night snack. In fact, millions of people prefer eating their meals later in the evening due to their work schedules, family obligations, or other factors, many of which are beyond their control.

Unfortunately, eating late in the evening, especially large, heavy meals can worsen your sleep quality because of the digestion process that takes place after you eat.

When you eat, your stomach stretches to fit the food that you’re taking in. When you feel “stuffed,” it’s because your stomach has distended to the point of discomfort.

Overeating, which most people do at least occasionally, causes the stomach to stretch to a point of discomfort. When there’s too much food in your stomach, you can expect it to take longer for your food to digest.

If you're going to bed shortly after eating a big meal, you’re less likely to get good, quality sleep because your body is going through the digestion process.

Even if you manage to fall asleep, you’ll likely deal with decreased sleep quality. This is because the muscle activity that moves food through your digestive tract during the day slows down when you’re sleeping.

This is why people are more likely to have bowel movements during the day but experience acid reflux at night. The digestive tract naturally slows down while you’re asleep, leaving food with nowhere to go.

Additionally, your metabolism slows down when you’re asleep, which means the body isn’t breaking down the food that you eat just before bedtime.

However, your metabolic rate usually does increase during REM sleep, which usually occurs during the second half of the night.

One of the best ways to avoid the problems discussed here is to simply avoid eating late at night. If you do want a late-night snack, try to choose something that doesn’t have a lot of sugar, caffeine, or other stimulants.

Foods that are rich in simple carbohydrates, a substance that your body converts to sugar, may help you fall asleep faster, but when they turn to sugar, you’re likely to be more restless. If you must eat late in the evening, choose your food wisely.

The Role of Hydration in Sleep

Water is one of the most basic building blocks of a healthy lifestyle. A normal human can go over a week without food, but if you go without water for a period of three days, the results may be fatal. This is because water plays such a pivotal role in several bodily functions.

For instance, your body’s temperature plays a major role in your sleep quality. If you find yourself overheating at night, you’ll probably experience a restless night as you toss the covers off.

Conversely, if you get too cold, it’s difficult to get quality sleep. Water consumption plays a major role in regulating your body temperature. Adequate hydration also plays a major role in cellular processes which include digestion.

Some of the ways that hydration affects your sleep quality are more practical.

For instance, the discomfort caused by having a dry mouth is likely to wake you up at night and send you stumbling into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Dehydration can also result in headaches that get so severe that they wake you up. These are just some of the ways that your body tells you that it needs more water.

However, it’s important to note that drinking too much water close to bedtime may have an adverse reaction on your sleep quality.

Instead of stumbling to the kitchen in the middle of the night, drinking too much water close to bedtime can leave you stumbling to the bathroom frequently, which disrupts your sleep continuity, resulting in you feeling unrested when you wake up.

Choosing water as your primary source of hydration is one of the best ways to combat this type of sleep problem. Many people think that an alcoholic beverage before bed helps them unwind, but scientists now believe that the opposite may be true.

While alcohol can help you fall asleep faster, the way your body breaks it down can result in poor sleep quality later in the night.

Additionally, avoid beverages like soda, coffee, and some teas that have a lot of caffeine.

Finally, don’t try to get all your daily water intake completed just before bed. Instead, consistently drink water throughout the day.

The Importance of a Well-Balanced Diet

When many people think of the importance of a well-balanced diet, they think of managing blood pressure, blood sugar, and other health factors.

What they may not realize is that the food they eat affects neurotransmitters, hormone activity, and more.

Consider the way that you feel sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner. This is because turkey has a chemical in it called tryptophan that promotes the release of melatonin and serotonin, two chemicals that promote a normal sleep schedule. You can also find tryptophan in many types of nuts, dairy products, and more.

By incorporating these tryptophan-rich foods into your diet, you can help fuel your body's natural sleep-wake cycles. It’s a good idea to implement them throughout the day instead of trying to pile them all up in your last meal or final snack of the day.

Taking this balanced approach helps ensure that your body is getting the nutrients that it needs.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to try to implement some foods that are rich in macronutrients, a term that refers to proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

Earlier, we discussed the importance of avoiding simple carbohydrates, especially late in the evening. However, your body needs carbs, proteins, and fats to perform all of its daily functions.

Perhaps the most important part of maintaining a well-balanced diet, at least when it comes to sleep, is found in not overindulging in sugars and stimulants.

Not only do these foods leave you feeling overstimulated at night, but when your body breaks them down too quickly, you may notice that your sleep gets disturbed when you wake up feeling hungry.

Those foods, while tasty, simply don’t leave you feeling full for long, which means that you will naturally crave something to fill you up.

Eat Better, Sleep Better

Both your food intake and your sleep quality play pivotal roles in your daily functions.

If you’ve noticed that you’re not sleeping as well as you would like to, spend some time evaluating your diet and making any changes that you deem necessary.

By making a few changes to what you eat and when you eat it, you can improve your sleep quality and be a healthier, happier, more productive version of yourself.