Acidic Foods: Passing on highly acidic foods, such as tomato-based dishes, can improve sleep by minimizing causes of acid reflux, that heartburn feeling that especially tortures people when they are lying down.Spicy foods: Replacing those late-night ghost pepper chips with something lower on the Scoville scale is another way of easing digestion and staying asleep.Heavy, fatty foods: That double bacon cheeseburger may not be worth the pleasure if your body ends up struggling to digest it as you sleep, causing you to wake up.“So if their typical bedtime is around 10 o’clock, we usually say, you know, by noon, one o’clock, that’s an ideal time to cut it out.” “The half-life of caffeine is about five to seven hours,” Drerup said. Dark chocolate: Due to its caffeine content, dark chocolate can disrupt deep sleep.“People may wake up after a few hours and have difficulty falling back asleep.” “We think of it as something that relaxes us, but it actually disrupts the way we go into different stages of sleep through the night and causes more un-restorative sleep,” she added. Alcohol: All “liquid bread” jokes aside, booze is admittedly not food but still makes the list, Drerup says, because it is “the absolute worst” for sleep.While the root issue may vary from person to person, avoiding these five types of food before bedtime can help, Drerup says: If it takes someone 45 minutes to fall asleep and that’s normal for them and they allow enough time, it’s not necessarily a problem.”Ī 2023 poll by the National Sleep Foundation found that over 90 percent of Americans with very good overall sleep health say they have no significant depressive symptoms.įor millions of Americans, however, this desperately needed REM cycle can feel elusive.

“Most people, if they don’t have any sleep difficulties, probably fall asleep within 10 to 20 minutes,” Drerup said. The researchers determined that nightmares increased by 50 percent in people who caught the virus in the early months of the pandemic.

You may have even developed sleeping troubles in the past few years – an international study performed across 14 countries from May to July 2020 found a link between the COVID-19 pandemic and nightmares.

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