A doctor is going viral for his sleep hack, but it goes against other sleep advice we’ve heard before. In a TikTok video, Chiropractor Dr. Scott Beyer offers a solution for those dealing with a common sleep issue: waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back to sleep. He says if you’re waking up between 2 and 4a.m. for anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, it could be due to an imbalance of two hormones - cortisol and adrenaline.
Cortisol’s main job is to regulate blood sugar, but it also gets released at higher levels when you’re under stress. Cortisol levels should be rising while we sleep, and peaking in the morning, but if you’re stressed, your “cortisol rhythm becomes blunted and flat,” Beyer explains. That can cause adrenaline to be released while you’re sleeping and since adrenaline is what he calls a “huge central nervous system stimulant,” it can force you to wake up in the middle of the night.
To help prevent that, Beyer suggests something unconventional: eating close to bedtime and again when you wake up. He says doing this for a couple of weeks can help regulate these hormones by “taking a load off of the demand for blood sugar regulation” and that over time, it will help people start sleeping soundly throughout the night. For that pre-bedtime snack, he recommends something heavy in protein and fat to help with the snoozing. While this advice goes against that of most sleep experts, who advise not eating for three to four hours before bed, Beyer claims people who are stressed to the point that it affects their cortisol levels overnight can benefit from his hack.
Source: The Sun