There are over the counter sleep aids, prescription drugs, and techniques you may use to train yourself to have better sleep habits. But one area you may not have considered is controlling your sleep success is through your diet and food choices! We like to joke about having to snooze after a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, but there’s some truth behind that teasing. There truly are foods that help you sleep and some that keep you awake, so if find yourself struggling to sleep and or have a sleep disorder, you will want to think about your food decisions carefully.

Particular foods have a calming effect on your brain, while others rev it up for more activity. Turkey is a sleep inducing food, as it contains tryptophan, an amino acid that your body uses to provide serotonin, which calms your brain, helping you to sleep. It is a bit like stitching a peice of clothing - you can not make a shirt without a needle, thread, and fabric. Your body desires tryptophan to help it create neurotransmitters like serotonin and melatonin, which result in a peaceful sleep.

When you mix tryptophan containing foods with carbs, it helps the body absorb it so you sleep sounder. Regular high protein diets can keep you awake if they are not coupled with carbohydrates because proteins contain tyrosine, which wakes you up! To leverage your food decisions, try and pair proteins and carbohydrates the way you need your body to work through the day. Select higher protein meals in the morning and afternoon, and eat more carbohydrates in the evenings closer to bedtime. You can not exclude the tryptophan because an all-carb meal will defeat the purpose, keeping you awake even more. If you can sneak some calcium into your evening meal, you can harvest even larger rewards, since calcium helps the brain use the tryptophan.

Foods that are high in tryptophan include beans, chicken, dairy, eggs, hazelnuts, hummus, lentils, beef, peanuts, rice, soy, seafood, sesame and sunflower seeds, and whole grains. So an ideal evening snack could be multi grain cereal with milk or maybe oatmeal cookies with milk. Full meals include vegetables with beef or chicken, chili and beans, or pasta with cheese. Just remember that when you overindulge on a meal, it may lead you to not sleep as well since your digestive system will be working harder. When you eat tryptophan, the sleep-inducing effects will not happen straight away. It takes roughly forty five minutes to an hour for you to start feeling sleepy, so eat early in the evening.

Apart from tryptophan, there are more foods you should be mindful of in how it has effects on your slumber, such as caffeine. Caffeine can be discovered in several products even your OTC cold medicine! It excites your nervous system, keeping you awake even when you do not want to be.

Keep a food book to see how your night meals have effects on your slumber. If you find that particular foods keep you up at night, attempt to move those to the early menus of your day and reserve the evening for foods that are sleep friendly.

Filed under: Insomnia

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