Berkeley Scientists Discover Secret to Waking Up Alert and Refreshed

Researchers on the College of California, Berkeley have discovered that by specializing in three key components – sleep, train, and breakfast- one can get up every morning feeling refreshed and alert.

Ideas the researchers recognized: Sleep for an extended length and at a later time, have interaction in bodily exercise the day earlier than, and eat a breakfast low in sugar and excessive in carbohydrates.

Do you’re feeling sleepy till you’ve had your morning espresso? Do you wrestle with sleepiness through the workday?

In case you wrestle with morning alertness, you’re not alone. Nevertheless, a brand new examine from the University of California, Berkeley, exhibits that waking up feeling refreshed isn’t just a matter of luck. The scientists discovered that taking note of three elements – sleep, train, and breakfast – can assist you begin your day with out feeling groggy.

The findings come from an in depth evaluation of the habits of 833 individuals who, over a two-week interval, got quite a lot of breakfast meals; wore wristwatches to report their bodily exercise and sleep amount, high quality, timing, and regularity; saved diaries of their meals consumption; and recorded their alertness ranges from the second they awoke and all through the day. Twins — an identical and fraternal — had been included within the examine to disentangle the affect of genes from atmosphere and habits.

Within the new examine, Vallat, Walker, and their colleagues regarded on the affect of genes and non-genetic elements, together with atmosphere, on alertness upon waking. By measuring how alertness varies amongst people and in the identical particular person on completely different days, they had been in a position to tease out the position performed by train, sleep, kind of breakfast, and an individual’s glucose response after a meal. Credit score: Raphael Vallat and Matthew Walker, UC Berkeley

The researchers discovered that the key to alertness is a three-part prescription requiring substantial train the day prior to this, sleeping longer and later into the morning, and consuming a breakfast excessive in complicated carbohydrates, with restricted sugar. The researchers additionally found {that a} wholesome managed blood glucose response after consuming breakfast is vital to waking up extra successfully.

“All of those have a novel and unbiased impact,” mentioned UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Raphael Vallat, the primary creator of the examine. “In case you sleep longer or later, you’re going to see a rise in your alertness. In case you do extra bodily exercise on the day earlier than, you’re going to see a rise. You possibly can see enhancements with each one in all these elements.”

Morning grogginess is extra than simply an annoyance. It has main societal penalties: Many automobile accidents, job accidents, and large-scale disasters are brought on by individuals who can’t shake off sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania, and an excellent worse nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, are well-known examples.

“Many people assume that morning sleepiness is a benign annoyance. Nevertheless, it prices developed nations billions of {dollars} yearly via lack of productiveness, elevated healthcare utilization, and work absenteeism. Extra impactful, nonetheless, is that it prices lives — it’s lethal,” mentioned senior creator Matthew Walker, UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology. “From automobile crashes to work-related accidents, the price of sleepiness is lethal. As scientists, we should perceive methods to assist society get up higher and assist cut back the mortal value to society’s present wrestle to get up successfully every day.”

Vallat, Walker, and their colleagues lately printed their findings within the journal Nature Communications. Walker, the author of the international bestseller, Why We Sleep, runs one of the world’s preeminent sleep research labs, the Center for Human Sleep Science, and is a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley.

A personalized approach to eating

Walker and Vallat teamed up with researchers in the United Kingdom, the U.S, and Sweden to analyze data acquired by a U.K. company, Zoe Ltd., that has followed hundreds of people for two-week periods in order to learn how to predict individualized metabolic responses to foods based on a person’s biological characteristics, lifestyle factors, and the foods’ nutritional composition.

The participants were given preprepared meals, with different amounts of nutrients incorporated into muffins, for the entire two weeks to see how they responded to different diets upon waking. A standardized breakfast, with moderate amounts of fat and carbohydrates, as compared to a high protein (muffins plus a milkshake), high carbohydrate, or high sugar (glucose drink) breakfast. The subjects also wore continuous glucose monitors to measure blood glucose levels throughout the day.

The worst type of breakfast, on average, contained high amounts of simple sugar; it was associated with an inability to wake up effectively and maintain alertness. When given this sugar-infused breakfast, participants struggled with sleepiness.

In contrast, the high carbohydrate breakfast — which contained large amounts of carbohydrates, as opposed to simple sugar, and only a modest amount of protein — was linked to individuals revving up their alertness quickly in the morning and sustaining that alert state.

“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

“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. “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.”

It wasn’t all about food, however. Sleep mattered significantly. In particular, Vallat and Walker discovered that sleeping longer than you usually do, and/or sleeping later than usual, resulted in individuals ramping up their alertness very quickly after awakening from sleep. According to Walker, between seven and nine hours of sleep is ideal for ridding the body of “sleep inertia,” the inability to transition effectively to a state of functional cognitive alertness upon awakening. Most people need this amount of sleep to remove a chemical called adenosine that accumulates in the body throughout the day and brings on sleepiness in the evening, something known as sleep pressure.

“Considering that the majority of individuals in society are not getting enough sleep during the week, sleeping longer on a given day can help clear some of the adenosine sleepiness debt they are carrying,” Walker speculated.

“In addition, sleeping later can help with alertness for a second reason,” he said. “When you wake up later, you are rising at a higher point on the upswing of your 24-hour circadian rhythm, which ramps up throughout the morning and boosts alertness.”

It’s unclear, however, what physical activity does to improve alertness the following day.

“It is well known that physical activity, in general, improves your alertness and also your mood level, and we did find a high correlation in this study between participants’ mood and their alertness levels,” Vallat said. “Participants that, on average, are happier also feel more alert.”

But Vallat also noted that exercise is generally associated with better sleep and a happier mood.

“It may be that exercise-induced better sleep is part of the reason exercise the day before, by helping sleep that night, leads to superior alertness throughout the next day,” Vallat said.

Walker noted that the restoration of consciousness from non-consciousness — from sleep to wake — is unlikely to be a simple biological process.

“If you pause to think, it is a non-trivial accomplishment to go from being nonconscious, recumbent, and immobile to being a thoughtful, conscious, attentive, and productive human being, active, awake, and mobile. It’s unlikely that such a radical, fundamental change is simply going to be explained by tweaking one single thing,” he said. “However, we have discovered that there are still some basic, modifiable yet powerful ingredients to the awakening equation that people can focus on — a relatively simple prescription for how best to wake up each day.”

It’s not in your genes

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.

“We know there are people who always seem to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when they first wake up,” Walker said. “But if you’re not like that, you tend to think, ‘Well, I guess it’s just my genetic fate that I’m slow to wake up. There’s really nothing I can do about it, short of using the stimulant chemical caffeine, which can harm sleep.

“But our new findings offer a different and more optimistic message. How you wake up each day is very much under your own control, based on how you structure your life and your sleep. You don’t need to feel resigned to any fate, throwing your hands up in disappointment because, ‘… it’s my genes, and I can’t change my genes.’ There are some very basic and achievable things you can start doing today, and tonight, to change how you awake each morning, feeling alert and free of that grogginess.”

Walker, Vallat, and their colleagues continue their collaboration with the Zoe team, examining novel scientific questions about how sleep, diet, and physical exercise change people’s brain and body health, steering them away from disease and sickness.

Reference: “How people wake up is associated with previous night’s sleep together with physical activity and food intake” by Raphael Vallat, Sarah E. Berry, Neli Tsereteli, Joan Capdevila, Haya Al Khatib, Ana M. Valdes, Linda M. Delahanty, David A. Drew, Andrew T. Chan, Jonathan Wolf, Paul W. Franks, Tim D. Spector and Matthew P. Walker, 19 November 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34503-2

The study was funded by Zoe Ltd.