Tips for Waking Up Refreshed and Alert

There are some very simple and doable things you can start doing right away to alter how you wake up every morning.

Researchers have found that by focusing on three crucial factors—sleep, exercise, and breakfast—you can wake up every morning without feeling sluggish.

Do you experience morning grogginess before drinking your coffee? Do you struggle with sleepiness at work?

You are not by yourself. Despite the fact that many people struggle with morning alertness, the new study shows that waking up feeling refreshed each day is not just a trait that a select few people are blessed with.

The results are based on a thorough examination of the actions of 833 participants who, over a two-week period, were given a variety of breakfast meals, wore wristwatches to track their physical activity and sleep quantity, quality, timing, and regularity, kept food diaries, and recorded their alertness levels from the moment they woke up until the end of the day.

To separate the effects of genes from environment and behavior, the researchers studied identical and fraternal twins.

The researchers discovered that the key to alertness is a three-part prescription that calls for significant exercise the day before, longer and later nights, and a breakfast rich in complex carbohydrates with little sugar.

Additionally, the researchers found that the secret to a more productive wake-up is a healthy, controlled blood glucose response following breakfast.

According to the study’s first author, Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, “all of these have a unique and independent effect.” Sleeping later or for longer stretches of time will increase your alertness. You’ll notice an improvement if you exercise more the day before. With each of these factors, improvements can be seen.

Morning fatigue is more than just an inconvenience. It has significant societal repercussions: People who are unable to overcome their sleepiness are often to blame for large-scale disasters, workplace injuries, and auto accidents. Examples include the well-known Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, and even worse Chernobyl nuclear accident.

“Many of us consider morning sleepiness to be a minor inconvenience. But it costs developed countries tens of billions of dollars annually through lost productivity, increased use of healthcare, and employee absenteeism. The fact that it is deadly and costs lives, however, is more significant, according to senior author Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the creator of the book Why We Sleep (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

“Sleepiness has a fatal cost, from car accidents to workplace accidents. Scientists must comprehend how to improve society’s ability to awaken and how to lessen the fatal costs associated with society’s ongoing struggle to awaken successfully each day.

WHAT YOU EAT

Walker and Vallat collaborated with scientists from the US, UK, and Sweden to examine data collected by a UK company called Zoe Ltd. that followed hundreds of individuals for a two weeks period in order to discover how to forecast individualized metabolic responses to foods based on a person’s biological characteristics, lifestyle factors, and the nutritional makeup of the foods.

For the duration of the two weeks, the participants received premade meals with varying nutrient proportions baked into muffins to see how the subjects responded to various diets when they woke up. A standardized breakfast with moderate amounts of fat and carbohydrates was compared to a breakfast with high protein (muffins and a milkshake), high carbohydrate, or high sugar (glucose drink). In order to track their blood sugar levels throughout the day, the participants also wore continuous glucose monitors.

The worst kind of breakfast, on average, had a lot of simple sugar; it was linked to a poor ability to wake up and stay alert. Participants experienced sleepiness after consuming this sugar-laden breakfast.

A high-carbohydrate breakfast, on the other hand, was associated with people awakening quickly in the morning and maintaining that alert state because it contained large amounts of carbohydrates as opposed to simple sugar and little protein.

According to Vallat, “a breakfast high in carbohydrates can boost alertness, provided your body is healthy and capable of effectively eliminating the glucose from that meal, preventing a sustained spike in blood sugar that would otherwise blunt your brain’s alertness.”

In addition to being toxic for the cells in your body and brain, a diet high in sugar is bad for sleep, as we have long known, says Walker. However, we’ve found that, in addition to these negative sleep effects, eating a lot of sugar for breakfast and having a blood sugar spike after any type of breakfast meal significantly hinder your brain’s ability to wake up after sleep.

HOW YOU SLEEP

But it was not all about the food. Significant importance was placed on sleep. Particularly, Vallat and Walker found that people ramped up their alertness very quickly after awakening from sleep when they slept longer than usual or slept later than usual.

Walker recommends seven to nine hours of sleep to rid the body of “sleep inertia,” or the inability to transition effectively to a state of functional cognitive alertness upon awakening. Most people require this amount of sleep to eliminate adenosine, a chemical that accumulates in the body throughout the day and causes sleepiness in the evening, a condition known as sleep pressure.

Given that most people in society don’t get enough sleep during the week, Walker hypothesizes that sleeping more on a given day might help people pay off some of their adenosine sleepiness debt.

Sleeping later can also improve alertness for another reason, he adds. The 24-hour circadian rhythm, which ramps up throughout the morning and increases alertness, rises at a higher point when you wake up later.

However, it’s unclear how exercise affects alertness the following day.

The correlation between participants’ mood and alertness levels was very strong in this study, according to Vallat. “It is well known that physical activity, in general, improves your alertness and also your mood level,” she says. “Participants who are generally happier also feel more alert.”

But Vallat also points out that getting more exercise is typically linked to better sleep and a more positive outlook.

According to Vallat, it’s possible that exercise the day before helped people sleep better, which contributed to their increased alertness the following day.

Walker points out that it is unlikely that the return to consciousness after a period of non-consciousness—from sleep to wakefulness—is a straightforward biological process.

If you take a moment to reflect, you will realize that changing from being unconscious, seated, and immobile to becoming a thoughtful, conscious, attentive, and productive human being who is active, awake, and mobile is not a simple feat. Such a radical, fundamental change is unlikely to be explained by changing just one thing, the author claims. However, we have found that there are still some fundamental, changeable, yet potent components to the awakening equation that people can concentrate on—a fairly straightforward prescription for how to wake up each day in the best possible way.

IT’S UNDER YOUR CONTROL

Data comparisons between identical and non-identical twin pairs revealed that genetics only has a minor and insignificant influence on next-day alertness, accounting for only about 25% of the variations between individuals.

“We are aware of some individuals who always appear to be bushy-tailed and bright-eyed when they first awaken,” says Walker. However, if you’re not like that, you frequently assume that your slow awakening is simply a result of your genetic make-up.  I really have no choice but to use the stimulant chemical caffeine, which is bad for sleep.

Our latest findings, however, provide a different and more upbeat message. Depending on how you set up your life and how you sleep, you have a lot of control over how you wake up every day. You don’t have to accept your fate, throwing your hands up in defeat because ‘…it’s my genes, and I can’t change my genes.’ ’To change how you wake up every morning, feeling alert and free of that grogginess, there are some very simple and doable things you can start doing today and tonight.