Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that by focusing on three key factors: sleep, exercise, and breakfast, you can wake up feeling refreshed every morning.
Tips researchers have identified: sleep longer and sleep later, get some physical activity the night before, and have a low-sugar, high-carb breakfast.
Are you sleepy until you have your morning coffee? Do you suffer from daytime sleepiness?
If you’re having trouble waking up in the morning, you’re not alone.However, new research from University of California, Berkeley, indicating that waking up refreshed is not just luck. Scientists have found that by paying attention to three things: sleep, exercise and breakfast, he can start the day feeling better.
The findings are the result of a detailed analysis of the behavior of 833 people fed different breakfasts over a period of two weeks. A wristwatch was worn to record the quantity, quality, timing and regularity of physical activity and sleep. I kept a diary of their food intake. From the moment he woke up, he recorded his level of alertness throughout the day. Identical twins and sibling twins were included in the study to disentangle genetic influences from environment and behavior.
In a new study, Vallat, Walker, and their colleagues examined the influence of non-genetic factors, including genes and the environment, on attention during wakefulness.By measuring how arousal varies between individuals and in the same individual on different days, we were able to clarify the role played by exercise, sleep, type of breakfast, and postprandial glucose response. Credits: Raphael Vallat and Matthew Walker, University of California, Berkeley
Researchers found that the secret to alertness is a three-pronged regimen that requires plenty of exercise the day before, a long night of sleep until morning, and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates and low in sugar. discovered. Researchers have also found that a healthy, controlled blood sugar response after eating breakfast is the key to waking up more effectively.
“These all have their own independent effects,” said Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and the first author of the study. “More or less sleep improves alertness. More physical activity the day before shows an increase. We see improvements in each of these factors.”
Morning sluggishness is more than just an annoyance. Many traffic accidents, industrial accidents, and large-scale disasters are caused by people who cannot shake off their sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania, and the more serious nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine are well-known examples.
“Most of us think morning sleepiness is harmless. But more impactful is that it costs lives — it’s fatal,” said senior author Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology. “From car accidents to work-related accidents, the cost of drowsiness is deadly. We must understand how to help reduce costs that are critical to the struggle for
Vallat, Walker, and their colleagues recently published their findings in the journal
The worst type of breakfast, on average, contained high amounts of simple sugar; it was associated with an inability to wake up effectively and maintain alertness. When given this sugar-infused breakfast, participants struggled with sleepiness.
In contrast, the high carbohydrate breakfast — which contained large amounts of carbohydrates, as opposed to simple sugar, and only a modest amount of protein — was linked to individuals revving up their alertness quickly in the morning and sustaining that alert state.
“A breakfast rich in carbohydrates can increase alertness, so long as your body is healthy and capable of efficiently disposing of the glucose from that meal, preventing a sustained spike in blood sugar that otherwise blunts your brain’s alertness,” Vallat said
“We have known for some time that a diet high in sugar is harmful to sleep, not to mention being toxic for the cells in your brain and body,” Walker added. “However, what we have discovered is that, beyond these harmful effects on sleep, consuming high amounts of sugar in your breakfast, and having a spike in blood sugar following any type of breakfast meal, markedly blunts your brain’s ability to return to waking consciousness following sleep.”
It wasn’t all about food, however. Sleep mattered significantly. In particular, Vallat and Walker discovered that sleeping longer than you usually do, and/or sleeping later than usual, resulted in individuals ramping up their alertness very quickly after awakening from sleep. According to Walker, between seven and nine hours of sleep is ideal for ridding the body of “sleep inertia,” the inability to transition effectively to a state of functional cognitive alertness upon awakening. Most people need this amount of sleep to remove a chemical called adenosine that accumulates in the body throughout the day and brings on sleepiness in the evening, something known as sleep pressure.
“Considering that the majority of individuals in society are not getting enough sleep during the week, sleeping longer on a given day can help clear some of the adenosine sleepiness debt they are carrying,” Walker speculated.
“In addition, sleeping later can help with alertness for a second reason,” he said. “When you wake up later, you are rising at a higher point on the upswing of your 24-hour circadian rhythm, which ramps up throughout the morning and boosts alertness.”
It’s unclear, however, what physical activity does to improve alertness the following day.
“It is well known that physical activity, in general, improves your alertness and also your mood level, and we did find a high correlation in this study between participants’ mood and their alertness levels,” Vallat said. “Participants that, on average, are happier also feel more alert.”
But Vallat also noted that exercise is generally associated with better sleep and a happier mood.
“It may be that exercise-induced better sleep is part of the reason exercise the day before, by helping sleep that night, leads to superior alertness throughout the next day,” Vallat said.
Walker noted that the restoration of consciousness from non-consciousness — from sleep to wake — is unlikely to be a simple biological process.
“If you pause to think, it is a non-trivial accomplishment to go from being nonconscious, recumbent, and immobile to being a thoughtful, conscious, attentive, and productive human being, active, awake, and mobile. It’s unlikely that such a radical, fundamental change is simply going to be explained by tweaking one single thing,” he said. “However, we have discovered that there are still some basic, modifiable yet powerful ingredients to the awakening equation that people can focus on — a relatively simple prescription for how best to wake up each day.”
It’s not in your genes
Comparisons of data between pairs of identical and non-identical twins showed that genetics plays only a minor and insignificant role in next-day alertness, explaining only about 25% of the differences across individuals.
“We know there are people who always seem to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when they first wake up,” Walker said. “But if you’re not like that, you tend to think, ‘Well, I guess it’s just my genetic fate that I’m slow to wake up. There’s really nothing I can do about it, short of using the stimulant chemical caffeine, which can harm sleep.
“But our new findings offer a different and more optimistic message. How you wake up each day is very much under your own control, based on how you structure your life and your sleep. You don’t need to feel resigned to any fate, throwing your hands up in disappointment 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 change how you awake each morning, feeling alert and free of that grogginess.”
Walker, Vallat, and their colleagues continue their collaboration with the Zoe team, examining novel scientific questions about how sleep, diet, and physical exercise change people’s brain and body health, steering them away from disease and sickness.
Reference: “How people wake up is associated with previous night’s sleep together with physical activity and food intake” by Raphael Vallat, Sarah E. Berry, Neli Tsereteli, Joan Capdevila, Haya Al Khatib, Ana M. Valdes, Linda M. Delahanty, David A. Drew, Andrew T. Chan, Jonathan Wolf, Paul W. Franks, Tim D. Spector and Matthew P. Walker, 19 November 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34503-2
The study was funded by Zoe Ltd.
