A little known cause of insomnia

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time getting back to sleep? Sometimes you have something specific on your mind, sometimes it just feels like “I’m awake and anxious, but I don’t know why.”

This type of insomnia could be due to a drop in blood sugar. This can feel like anxiety, but it is your body alerting you to the fact that you are hungry. You can think of this as “physical anxiety” and it needs a physical fix: more fats close to bedtime. 

I first learned about the “slow burn” effect of fats when I began backpacking at high and cold altitudes as a teen. I was taught that carbs are like kindling - they give you quick energy in the moment. Proteins are like medium logs - they keep the fire/energy going. Fats are like the big, slow-burning logs that you might use to bank a fire overnight. The takeaway then was that fats at night helped you stay warm. 

That’s because fats are digested more slowly than carbs and proteins. So they give you enough fuel to stay warm at night when you are backpacking and they help sleep through the night when you wake due to low blood sugar insomnia. 

I see this type of insomnia in patients who are trying to not eat after a certain time in the evening, or who snack or graze for dinner, or are under extra stress so they are burning up their food a bit more quickly.

The easy solution, in addition to including plenty of dietary fats at dinner, is to have a small fat snack before bed. It doesn't have to be much: part of an avocado, a spoonful of almond or other nut butter or a handful of nuts, a small serving of full-fat yogurt or coconut chia seed pudding, or a generous pad of butter on a sliced radish topped with sea salt (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it - delicious!!),

Sorry - Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t do the trick. Yes, full-fat ice cream has lots of fat, but it also has lots of sugar, which is stimulating (like kindling). It needs to be a snack with not much-added sugar. 

In my world, any reason to eat more avocados is welcome!

Eat more fat to sleep soundly,
Kirstin Lindquist