Insomnia Aid:Is Drinking A Glass Of Warm Milk An Effective Insomnia Aid?
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.
October 9th, 2010 at 3:02 am
‘Ello! I wondered upon this article and found it to be fairly interesting but your code wouldn’t completely load. It only seemed to load about 25% of the page. Are you aware of this?
Anywho, I don’t completely agree with all that I’ve read so far, but I’ll check back later to see if everything is fixed to finish reading. Thanks again.