Most people agree that the quality of sleep we get has a direct impact on how we feel the next day. Without enough sleep we will not only feel tired, but we are likely to feel fatigued and stressed. This can lead to feelings of frustration and even irritability which of course can have an impact on how we relate to the people around us. And if we are feeling exhausted it is unlikely that we will want to exercise or even go to much effort to prepare a nutritious meal. This means that we may opt to grab fast food and spend the evening on the couch. Read more…
If you are not getting enough sleep, you could be causing a lot of damage to your health and well being. People who are sleep depraved are often irritable, tired, and accident prone. Also, if your insomnia lasts for a long time, it could create serious health problems. But how do you cure insomnia? Well, in order to find the right cure, you have to find what is causing your insomnia. Here are some common causes of insomnia. Read more…
Inevitably, when someone is suffering from insomnia, one of their friends or family members will suggest that drinking a glass of warm milk before bedtime is an effective insomnia aid. If you’re one of those people having difficulty sleeping I’m sure you’d like to know if this is true or is it an old wives’ tale? And the answer is, it depends! There really are two schools of thought and warm milk may or may not be an effective insomnia aid, it just depends on how much warm milk you can drink.
The theory is that the same chemical that we all think makes us sleepy when we eat turkey, tryptophan, is also found in milk. But the belief that the tryptophan in turkey makes us sleepy is also an urban legend. While it’s true that tryptophan does have an effect on our sleep, it’s only the first phase of sleep where it makes a difference, the phase where you’re just getting sleepy. In fact, too much tryptophan, taken in a supplement form, can have adverse effects on the deeper phases of sleep.
In any case, in order to consume enough tryptophan from turkey for it to really make a difference in your sleeping patterns, you’d have to eat 40 pounds of turkey. So you can imagine how much warm milk you’d have to drink before bedtime if you were relying on it to be an effective insomnia aid. And I’m sure you can also imagine the extreme adverse effects it would have on your sleep patterns because you’d be running to the bathroom all night.
However, studies do indicate that drinking warm milk at bedtime can make you drowsy if it’s part of your normal bedtime routine. Scientists tell us that anything we do on a routine basis will cause a psychological response of some sort. So if you ordinarily drink a glass of warm milk before bedtime, it’s not actually the milk that makes you drowsy, it’s that your mind has become conditioned to the act of drinking the milk and it knows it’s time to start winding down for the day.
Both beverages will also cause you to wake up in the middle of the night because you have to go to the bathroom.
So maybe that old wives’ tale that warm milk is an effective insomnia aid isn’t so far off the mark after all. Instead of drinking that glass of wine or brandy, and instead of having a sugar, caffeinated soda, substitute a glass of warm milk as part of your bedtime routine. Just remember though that it’s not how much milk you drink, it’s the fact that you make it part of your bedtime routine.
If you’ve been keeping up with my blog posts lately you’ll know I’ve come to adding a few news posts from around the web on this subject. I’ve got a couple more today that are new and updated, so let me know what you think of em…
Ok so 3 more posts today that I’ve dug up – I’m an information JUNKIE on this stuff lately. Give em a browse and let me know what ya reckon. They’re just from a few different sites I’ve been surfing lately that are generally good for information like this…
Ok so 3 more posts today that I’ve dug up – I’m an information JUNKIE on this stuff lately. Give em a browse and let me know what ya reckon. They’re just from a few different sites I’ve been surfing lately that are generally good for information like this…
For some people, getting quality sleep can be tricky and so they turn to prescription medication or herbal sleep aids for help to get some shut eye. There are a couple of things about sleep prescriptions that many people find troublesome; they can cause dependency and they sometimes only succeed in knocking you out, not Read more…
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