MINNEAPOLIS — The key to a healthier lifestyle is diet and exercise, right? Try adding a third component to that list.
"It is diet. It is exercise. It is sleep. It's all three of those," said Dr. Michael Howell, a sleep expert with M Health Fairview and the U of M Medical School. "There is a very close relationship between what you're eating, how you're sleeping at night and then how you sleep at night driving the food choices you make."
Howell said when a person is sleep deprived, they tend to choose foods that are higher in sugar.
"When you're sleep deprived, your brain is trying to make sense of this and it's probably coming to the conclusion that you need a readily available energy source immediately," he said. "Sugar is a drug on our brain, basically informing our brain that there is a readily available energy source for us."
Dr. Howell says sleep deprivation affects function in the frontal lobe of our brain, and poor judgment typically ensues.
"When we are sleep deprived, our brains turn into what our brains were like when we were teenagers... we lose that executive lobe function that provides us a little more wisdom, shall we say? And we're more likely to make impulsive decisions," he said.
There is also evidence that sleep deprivation increases levels of the hormone which makes a person feel hungry.
"Then when we eat, we don't feel as full as we do otherwise," Howell said. "So we will eat more and we'll eat more often."
If you want to get on a better track with your sleep, Dr. Howell recommends three things you can do to get started:
- Watch what you eat before bed, avoid caffeine and alcohol
- Start paying attention to your natural sleep rhythm, the times your body wants to go to bed and get up in the morning and stay consistent with that
- Howell recommends naps, if you can get them
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