Sleep Kryptonite

You wake up groggy and unrested despite 7+ hours of sleep. Your sleep tracker confirms you slept through the night. What's going on?

Hidden sleep saboteurs may be the culprit but all is not lost: You can find and banish them!

Kryptonite Suspects

These timing factors silently undermine your sleep quality. Test recommended cutoff times to see if you wake up feeling different:

8-12 hours before bed: No Caffeine Time needed to metabolize and clear your system so you can fall asleep and stay asleep.

4-8 hours before bed: No Alcohol Time needed to metabolize alcohol so you protect the quality of restorative deep sleep and avoid REM sleep disruptions.

2-4 hours before bed: No Food Time needed for digestion to complete so your body can focus on rest and repair. Digestion always takes priority!

1.5 hours before bed: No Stimulating Exercise Time needed for heart rate and core body temperature to drop—essential for quality sleep. 

The Suspects

Lurking Caffeine

You fall asleep fine after that afternoon coffee, so caffeine isn't the problem, right? Wrong. Caffeine not yet metabolized can cause multiple nighttime wake-ups you don't even remember. Without awareness of these disruptions, it's impossible to connect your morning grogginess to yesterday's latte.

Alcohol's False Promise

Alcohol feels like a sleep aid, but it's actually sedation - not restorative sleep. Two problems emerge:

1st. Poor electrical sleep quality undermines your deep sleep’s restorative capabilities. 

2nd. The brain's fight-or-flight response also gets triggered as the alcohol wears off, causing unnoticed or wake-ups and loss of REM sleep, your brain's emotional processing and memory consolidation time.

Late-Night Eating: The Bully

Digestion demands priority and takes 2-4 hours.

When you eat close to bedtime, your body postpones deep sleep's rest and repair processes until digestion finishes. Here's the kicker: those delayed processes don't get rescheduled - they get skipped! They don't get enough time to complete their job.

Exercise Timing

Vigorous activity raises heart rate and core body temperature. Your body needs 60-90 minutes to cool down and quiet down to get into the sleep mode.

Exercise within this window can disrupt your ability to fall asleep and optimize your deep sleep in the first few hours of sleep.

The good news: Consensual sex is exempt - it's been proven good for sleep!

Your Next Move

Waking up tired yet no problems falling asleep? Run your own experiment. If you feel more rested after testing one of these suspects, it’s likely a saboteur.  

If multiple suspects are a possibility, test one at a time for several days in a row. This isolation approach will reveal if one or more of these saboteurs are guilty. 

It may be hard to give up your evening glass of wine or afternoon caffeine fix. Perfection is not required - or recommended! But feeling genuinely rested most mornings may be worth the trade-off. Either way, you will be making a more informed choice! 

For links to the details direct from the experts, explore our Playbook Sleep Portal.

Sweet dreams,

Janice