6 ms·

Scientists discover secret to waking up alert and refreshed

44 points by hhs 4y ago

l1n 4y ago
Too spammy, didn't click? Here's the kicker: "substantial exercise the previous day, sleeping longer and later into the morning, and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates, with limited sugar"
- Tao3300 4y ago
  The Dragon Scroll was blank all along!
- jollyllama 4y ago
  "Just sleep later." Gee, thanks.
  - antihero 4y ago
    Go to bed earlier. Like, 9 hours before you are due to wake up so you have an hour to properly relax.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      But that's not what the article said - it suggested you needed to wake up later.
      - antihero 4y ago
        In this respect I disagree with the article.
    - mypastself 4y ago
      The comment was clearly referring to the “sleep later into the morning” part, though.
      - antihero 4y ago
        Well yeah, that is not a great plan, but the overall goal is to allow your body to have 8 hours of sleep.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      But how else is my late-night bedtime procrastination cycle going to continue? I just absolutely _must_ stay up until 2:00 AM reading Wikipedia pages on obscure tropical plants, because I guess I only need to be up by 8:15 AM for my 8:30 AM standup!
- pmontra 4y ago
  I'm only a data point but my experience is very different: I never had problems waking up and being immediately functional, with or without breakfast. Maybe that counts as "limited sugar"?
- ekianjo 4y ago
  another study by captain obvious?
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I'm not going to dispute many of the recommendations (exercise a lot! Sleep more! Eat better! Sleep later aka don't have an alarm clock or job!) But... this seems a lot like "apple a day keeps the doctor away" and other fiendishly planted sayings by industry into the general discourse. These days the industries fund pro-industry studies and then trumpet them in media. Breakfast has been under assault by lifestyle trends for decades, this smacks of an industry study.
michaelmcdonald 4y ago
My fitbit will do sleep tracking and use a silent alarm (ie. it vibrates rather than beeps) to wake me up during a window of time where it detects I'm not in a REM cycle. This has worked extremely well for me and it's almost a bit jarring. I wake up, not instantly "alert", but not groggy. I don't get that "smack the phone to turn off the alarm" desire. It's more of a "Huh, I'm awake now. Okay." type of feeling. The only catch is it needs a 30 minute window in order to detect and it can "wake" you at any point during that window.
- burnished 4y ago
  I have a lamp that will turn on and play bird noises over the course of half an hour (starting from almost nothing and coming to full intensity over the course of that half hour) and I suspect the mechanism is the same. I set it for half an hour before I actually think I need to be up though because of that window.
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    I have a lamp like that and the bird noise is about a 4 second, very obviously looped, loop. It's even more unbearable to be slowly woken up by that that just hit over the proverbial head with a loud normal alarm.
countvonbalzac 4y ago
I recently stopped drinking caffeinated beverages (coffee, tea, soda) but I still probably get a small amount of caffeine from decaffeinated beverages / chocolate, though maybe 2-5% of what it was before. I find though, that the quality of my sleep has improved tremendously.
- zemvpferreira 4y ago
  I'm a caffeine addict and go through phases of more and less coffee. My longest stretch on zero caffeinated beverages in my adult life was about a year. The reduction for 1 to 0 coffees was brutal. Slept loads more and so much better the fist week. After a month of no coffee my sleep regressed to the same as now, drinking 4 coffees per day. Research somewhat supports this, you get used to a certain caffeine consumption and only abrupt changes in consumption produce changes in sleep/wakefulness. I wish you the best friend, but you might not find abstinence to be a long term solution.
tejohnso 4y ago
Hey here's the secret they found. Get more exercise, get more sleep, and get a good breakfast in you. Genius! > “We have known for some time that a diet high in sugar is harmful to sleep, not to mention being toxic for the cells in your brain and body,” Walker added. Okay, I'm glad to see another mention about how harmful sugar is at least. > “However, what we have discovered is that, beyond these harmful effects on sleep, consuming high amounts of sugar in your breakfast, and having a spike in blood sugar following any type of breakfast meal, markedly blunts your brain’s ability to return to waking consciousness following sleep.” > “A breakfast rich in carbohydrates can increase alertness, so long as your body is healthy and capable of efficiently disposing of the glucose from that meal, preventing a sustained spike in blood sugar that otherwise blunts your brain’s alertness,” Vallat said > A standardized breakfast, with moderate amounts of fat and carbohydrates, was compared to a high protein (muffins plus a milkshake), high carbohydrate or high sugar (glucose drink) breakfast. So they presented several breakfast options. Including one high sugar, and one high carb, which as we know is going to end up as sugar. What they did not do is include an option that involves not having a meal at all until several hours after waking. > The researchers also discovered that a healthy controlled blood glucose response after eating breakfast is key to waking up more effectively. Well, no they didn't "discover" that, and if they're not checking against the option of not eating breakfast at all, then they can't know that it is key to waking up more effectively.
- SllX 4y ago
  You know it’s going to be this good when the headline starts with “Scientists discover secret to”.
- bradwood 4y ago
  Yeah. They also missed the espresso and a cigarette breakfast option...
  - WaxProlix 4y ago
    You missed the third part of that routine, which is the immediate bowel flushing.
jhylands 4y ago
How people wake up and regain alertness in the hours after sleep is related to how they are sleeping, eating, and exercising. Here, in a prospective longitudinal study of 833 twins and genetically unrelated adults, we demonstrate that how effectively an individual awakens in the hours following sleep is not associated with their genetics, but instead, four independent factors: sleep quantity/quality the night before, physical activity the day prior, a breakfast rich in carbohydrate, and a lower blood glucose response following breakfast. Furthermore, an individual’s set-point of daily alertness is related to the quality of their sleep, their positive emotional state, and their age. Together, these findings reveal a set of non-genetic (i.e., not fixed) factors associated with daily alertness that are modifiable.
beefman 4y ago
This looks like the press release for the inconclusive and basically useless study that was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719671
chrisweekly 4y ago
Eat, Move, Sleep. There's even a book w this title.
Fripplebubby 4y ago
> Morning grogginess is more than just an annoyance. It has major societal consequences: Many auto accidents, job injuries and large-scale disasters are caused by people who cannot shake off sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania and an even worse nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, are well-known examples. Not to make light of these tragedies, but this paragraph got a laugh from me - who thinks of Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as, primarily, examples of _morning sleepiness_?
clumsysmurf 4y ago
Isn't the key to waking up alert and refreshed to do so between sleep cycles (so no alarm). You just have to keep consistent lifestyle / schedule so you wake up same time automatically.
zacharyvoase 4y ago
What is this false dichotomy between inheritable/genetic traits and "things that are under your control"? There are plenty of attributes to the human body that can be acquired from the moment of fertilization and on through a person's life that are still far outside a person's control. Signed, someone with (uninherited, acquired, incurable) narcolepsy.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Not only that, but there are environmental factors, particularly if they take effect early in your life, that are virtually impossible to change the effects of later on in life. Obvious case in point being your mother tongue. Or the level of nutrition you get while reaching your adult height.
Eleison23 4y ago
I absolutely confirmed that my diet is the biggest factor in sleep patterns. If I eat takeout or delivery food I will be groggy all day, sleep late, have trouble going to sleep at the same time every night. If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals at home, including a yogurt and muesli breakfast every day, I awake refreshed and ready with the sunrise. I have energy throughout the day. And I fall asleep at about the same time every night without relying on drugs or medications.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals What happens when you eat your own prepared fresh, conventional meals?
Tozen 4y ago
The exercise and sleep part makes (obvious) sense, but the breakfast part seems a bit off. You are already awake and engaging in activities by the time you have made and then have eaten breakfast. A lot of people don't immediately grab food as soon as they wake up. If the point of emphasis is not to be groggy when you wake up, then that state (of being groggy or not) has already occurred by the time you have finished breakfast. Which depending on your routine, could be 20 minutes to even an hour later, after waking up. For instance some people take showers or brush their teeth first in the morning. It seems the point, of waking up alert and refreshed, should have nothing to do with breakfast. It should rather be based on how soon a person can achieve the state of being alert and functional, after they have woke up.
mysterydip 4y ago
I would be much more interested in the secret to waking up alert and refreshed while living with preschoolers.
beaned 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand. They're talking about how to wake up alert and refreshed, but focus on breakfast. That happens after you wake up. Are they saying that if you wake up groggy, the right breakfast can make you alert? Or that the right breakfast on one day affects how you wake up the next day?
breckinloggins 4y ago
> Comparisons of data between pairs of identical and non-identical twins showed that genetics plays only a minor and insignificant role in next-day alertness, explaining only about 25% of the differences across individuals. What a bizarre statement. In what world is a 25% statistical effect "minor and insignificant"?
darepublic 4y ago
"sleeping later into the morning" Weekend me already knows how to do this
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  Vacation me has perfected that into early in the afternoon.
- randomdata 4y ago
  Everyday me used to know how to do that until my kids entered school and I had to get up to get them there. Which is troubling as the science always tells that school should start later in the day. If not for the sake of the children, think about the parents!
wizofaus 4y ago
Damn, I was hoping for this one weird trick. Instead it's "wake up later" - and no tips on how anyone's supposed to achieve that. What is surprising is that there's no indication doing exercise immediately after waking up is supposed to be helpful, yet that's exactly what works for me (even if it's just walking the dog).
tomp 4y ago
Uh, Matthew Walker, the fraudulent scientist Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Silverback_VII 4y ago
"eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates" How can you reconcile that with intermittent fasting which people claim may also boost your mental and physical energy? Usually you eat nothing until 2-3pm(16/8 method).
jerpint 4y ago
I quit coffee recently and feel much more awake during the day now
euroderf 4y ago
Top tip: FIRST the socks THEN the shoes.
pytonslange 4y ago
The time between waking up and eating was a much stronger predictor of alertness than the different types of breakfast, so maybe _not_ eating breakfast at all is even better than eating a bowl of sugar? How did the authors get away with not even mentioning the strongest modifiable predictor of alertness in their study? I cannot comprehend this. Otherwise GREAT study.

44 points by hhs 4y ago

l1n 4y ago

Too spammy, didn't click? Here's the kicker: "substantial exercise the previous day, sleeping longer and later into the morning, and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates, with limited sugar"

Tao3300 4y ago
The Dragon Scroll was blank all along!
jollyllama 4y ago
"Just sleep later." Gee, thanks.
- antihero 4y ago
  Go to bed earlier. Like, 9 hours before you are due to wake up so you have an hour to properly relax.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    But that's not what the article said - it suggested you needed to wake up later.
    - antihero 4y ago
      In this respect I disagree with the article.
  - mypastself 4y ago
    The comment was clearly referring to the “sleep later into the morning” part, though.
    - antihero 4y ago
      Well yeah, that is not a great plan, but the overall goal is to allow your body to have 8 hours of sleep.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    But how else is my late-night bedtime procrastination cycle going to continue? I just absolutely _must_ stay up until 2:00 AM reading Wikipedia pages on obscure tropical plants, because I guess I only need to be up by 8:15 AM for my 8:30 AM standup!
pmontra 4y ago
I'm only a data point but my experience is very different: I never had problems waking up and being immediately functional, with or without breakfast. Maybe that counts as "limited sugar"?
ekianjo 4y ago
another study by captain obvious?

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

I'm not going to dispute many of the recommendations (exercise a lot! Sleep more! Eat better! Sleep later aka don't have an alarm clock or job!) But... this seems a lot like "apple a day keeps the doctor away" and other fiendishly planted sayings by industry into the general discourse. These days the industries fund pro-industry studies and then trumpet them in media. Breakfast has been under assault by lifestyle trends for decades, this smacks of an industry study.

michaelmcdonald 4y ago

My fitbit will do sleep tracking and use a silent alarm (ie. it vibrates rather than beeps) to wake me up during a window of time where it detects I'm not in a REM cycle. This has worked extremely well for me and it's almost a bit jarring. I wake up, not instantly "alert", but not groggy. I don't get that "smack the phone to turn off the alarm" desire. It's more of a "Huh, I'm awake now. Okay." type of feeling. The only catch is it needs a 30 minute window in order to detect and it can "wake" you at any point during that window.

burnished 4y ago
I have a lamp that will turn on and play bird noises over the course of half an hour (starting from almost nothing and coming to full intensity over the course of that half hour) and I suspect the mechanism is the same. I set it for half an hour before I actually think I need to be up though because of that window.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  I have a lamp like that and the bird noise is about a 4 second, very obviously looped, loop. It's even more unbearable to be slowly woken up by that that just hit over the proverbial head with a loud normal alarm.

countvonbalzac 4y ago

I recently stopped drinking caffeinated beverages (coffee, tea, soda) but I still probably get a small amount of caffeine from decaffeinated beverages / chocolate, though maybe 2-5% of what it was before. I find though, that the quality of my sleep has improved tremendously.

zemvpferreira 4y ago
I'm a caffeine addict and go through phases of more and less coffee. My longest stretch on zero caffeinated beverages in my adult life was about a year. The reduction for 1 to 0 coffees was brutal. Slept loads more and so much better the fist week. After a month of no coffee my sleep regressed to the same as now, drinking 4 coffees per day. Research somewhat supports this, you get used to a certain caffeine consumption and only abrupt changes in consumption produce changes in sleep/wakefulness. I wish you the best friend, but you might not find abstinence to be a long term solution.

tejohnso 4y ago

Hey here's the secret they found. Get more exercise, get more sleep, and get a good breakfast in you. Genius! > “We have known for some time that a diet high in sugar is harmful to sleep, not to mention being toxic for the cells in your brain and body,” Walker added. Okay, I'm glad to see another mention about how harmful sugar is at least. > “However, what we have discovered is that, beyond these harmful effects on sleep, consuming high amounts of sugar in your breakfast, and having a spike in blood sugar following any type of breakfast meal, markedly blunts your brain’s ability to return to waking consciousness following sleep.” > “A breakfast rich in carbohydrates can increase alertness, so long as your body is healthy and capable of efficiently disposing of the glucose from that meal, preventing a sustained spike in blood sugar that otherwise blunts your brain’s alertness,” Vallat said > A standardized breakfast, with moderate amounts of fat and carbohydrates, was compared to a high protein (muffins plus a milkshake), high carbohydrate or high sugar (glucose drink) breakfast. So they presented several breakfast options. Including one high sugar, and one high carb, which as we know is going to end up as sugar. What they did not do is include an option that involves not having a meal at all until several hours after waking. > The researchers also discovered that a healthy controlled blood glucose response after eating breakfast is key to waking up more effectively. Well, no they didn't "discover" that, and if they're not checking against the option of not eating breakfast at all, then they can't know that it is key to waking up more effectively.

SllX 4y ago
You know it’s going to be this good when the headline starts with “Scientists discover secret to”.
bradwood 4y ago
Yeah. They also missed the espresso and a cigarette breakfast option...
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  You missed the third part of that routine, which is the immediate bowel flushing.

jhylands 4y ago

How people wake up and regain alertness in the hours after sleep is related to how they are sleeping, eating, and exercising. Here, in a prospective longitudinal study of 833 twins and genetically unrelated adults, we demonstrate that how effectively an individual awakens in the hours following sleep is not associated with their genetics, but instead, four independent factors: sleep quantity/quality the night before, physical activity the day prior, a breakfast rich in carbohydrate, and a lower blood glucose response following breakfast. Furthermore, an individual’s set-point of daily alertness is related to the quality of their sleep, their positive emotional state, and their age. Together, these findings reveal a set of non-genetic (i.e., not fixed) factors associated with daily alertness that are modifiable.

beefman 4y ago

This looks like the press release for the inconclusive and basically useless study that was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719671

chrisweekly 4y ago

Eat, Move, Sleep. There's even a book w this title.

Fripplebubby 4y ago

> Morning grogginess is more than just an annoyance. It has major societal consequences: Many auto accidents, job injuries and large-scale disasters are caused by people who cannot shake off sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania and an even worse nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, are well-known examples. Not to make light of these tragedies, but this paragraph got a laugh from me - who thinks of Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as, primarily, examples of _morning sleepiness_?

clumsysmurf 4y ago

Isn't the key to waking up alert and refreshed to do so between sleep cycles (so no alarm). You just have to keep consistent lifestyle / schedule so you wake up same time automatically.

zacharyvoase 4y ago

What is this false dichotomy between inheritable/genetic traits and "things that are under your control"? There are plenty of attributes to the human body that can be acquired from the moment of fertilization and on through a person's life that are still far outside a person's control. Signed, someone with (uninherited, acquired, incurable) narcolepsy.

wizofaus 4y ago
Not only that, but there are environmental factors, particularly if they take effect early in your life, that are virtually impossible to change the effects of later on in life. Obvious case in point being your mother tongue. Or the level of nutrition you get while reaching your adult height.

Eleison23 4y ago

I absolutely confirmed that my diet is the biggest factor in sleep patterns. If I eat takeout or delivery food I will be groggy all day, sleep late, have trouble going to sleep at the same time every night. If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals at home, including a yogurt and muesli breakfast every day, I awake refreshed and ready with the sunrise. I have energy throughout the day. And I fall asleep at about the same time every night without relying on drugs or medications.

randomdata 4y ago
> If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals What happens when you eat your own prepared fresh, conventional meals?

Tozen 4y ago

The exercise and sleep part makes (obvious) sense, but the breakfast part seems a bit off. You are already awake and engaging in activities by the time you have made and then have eaten breakfast. A lot of people don't immediately grab food as soon as they wake up. If the point of emphasis is not to be groggy when you wake up, then that state (of being groggy or not) has already occurred by the time you have finished breakfast. Which depending on your routine, could be 20 minutes to even an hour later, after waking up. For instance some people take showers or brush their teeth first in the morning. It seems the point, of waking up alert and refreshed, should have nothing to do with breakfast. It should rather be based on how soon a person can achieve the state of being alert and functional, after they have woke up.

mysterydip 4y ago

I would be much more interested in the secret to waking up alert and refreshed while living with preschoolers.

beaned 4y ago

I'm not sure I understand. They're talking about how to wake up alert and refreshed, but focus on breakfast. That happens after you wake up. Are they saying that if you wake up groggy, the right breakfast can make you alert? Or that the right breakfast on one day affects how you wake up the next day?

breckinloggins 4y ago

> Comparisons of data between pairs of identical and non-identical twins showed that genetics plays only a minor and insignificant role in next-day alertness, explaining only about 25% of the differences across individuals. What a bizarre statement. In what world is a 25% statistical effect "minor and insignificant"?

darepublic 4y ago

"sleeping later into the morning" Weekend me already knows how to do this

someweirdperson 4y ago
Vacation me has perfected that into early in the afternoon.
randomdata 4y ago
Everyday me used to know how to do that until my kids entered school and I had to get up to get them there. Which is troubling as the science always tells that school should start later in the day. If not for the sake of the children, think about the parents!

wizofaus 4y ago

Damn, I was hoping for this one weird trick. Instead it's "wake up later" - and no tips on how anyone's supposed to achieve that. What is surprising is that there's no indication doing exercise immediately after waking up is supposed to be helpful, yet that's exactly what works for me (even if it's just walking the dog).

tomp 4y ago

Uh, Matthew Walker, the fraudulent scientist Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Silverback_VII 4y ago

"eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates" How can you reconcile that with intermittent fasting which people claim may also boost your mental and physical energy? Usually you eat nothing until 2-3pm(16/8 method).

jerpint 4y ago

I quit coffee recently and feel much more awake during the day now

euroderf 4y ago

Top tip: FIRST the socks THEN the shoes.

pytonslange 4y ago

The time between waking up and eating was a much stronger predictor of alertness than the different types of breakfast, so maybe _not_ eating breakfast at all is even better than eating a bowl of sugar? How did the authors get away with not even mentioning the strongest modifiable predictor of alertness in their study? I cannot comprehend this. Otherwise GREAT study.