Has this happened to you? You go to sleep easily, but 2 am comes around and your eyes pop open. You look at the clock and groan – you have to be up at 5 am to get ready for work, and you know you’ll be groggy, irritable, and fuzzy-brained if you can’t get back to sleep.
Your mind searches for the reason why you can’t sleep. You go over your recent fight with your husband, word for word, over and over. Or you agonize over the poor grade you got on that test. You may discover problems you didn’t even know you had – not enough time to yourself, too much stress, too little respect from your family or coworkers.
The negative thoughts charge on, and you stay wide awake.
Is it depression? Is it stress? Do you need sleeping pills, or anti-depressants?
Maybe. But before you begin medicating yourself, try this simple experiment. Don’t eat any sugar for a week, and don’t drink any alcohol after 5 in the afternoon.
You may discover that you can sleep just fine, because you’ve eliminated the true cause of your insomnia.
If you eat that big piece of chocolate cake or sip that glass of whiskey just before going to bed, your blood stream will be bombarded with extra sugar. Too much sugar or alcohol in the blood stream is a dangerous situation, and your body will pull out all it’s forces to remove the excess sugar from your bloodstream. Unfortunately, the battle is fought too aggressively, so by 2 am your blood sugar levels are dangerously low, and you wake up.
Your blood sugar level will eventually come back into balance – but in the meantime, you lie there awake.
Your brain will look for the reason you woke up, but you won’t find it unless you understand that the 2 am wakening might be caused by sugar or alcohol.
If you don’t know that you should look at your diet for a clue to the problem, your brain will look for the problem everywhere else – at the state of your marriage, at your financial situation, at your children’s school grades, at your career prospects…
But if you think it’s possible that you woke up because your blood sugar levels were too low, you won’t need to analyze your life for problems you don’t really have. And that, in itself, will make it easier to fall back to sleep.
Next time you wake up too early, think about what you ate and drank last night. By finding the real cause of your insomnia, you may be able to save yourself a trip to the doctor – and give yourself an excuse for a healthier lifestyle at the same time. Many people have discovered that their “depression” magically goes away when they give up the sugar or the late-evening glass of Scotch.
