Wake Up Refreshed

How to Wake up Alert and Refreshed

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(Elena Eryomenko/Shutterstock)

Researchers have discovered that you can wake up each morning without feeling sluggish by paying attention to three key factors: sleep, exercise, and breakfast.

Do you feel groggy until you’ve had your morning joe? Do you battle sleepiness throughout the workday?

You’re not alone. Many people struggle with morning alertness, but the new study demonstrates that awaking refreshed each day is not just something a lucky few are born with.

From car crashes to work-related accidents, the cost of sleepiness is deadly.

The findings come from a detailed analysis of the behavior of 833 people who, over a two-week period, were given a variety of breakfast meals; wore wristwatches to record their physical activity and sleep quantity, quality, timing, and regularity; kept diaries of their food intake; and recorded their alertness levels from the moment they woke up and throughout the day.

The researchers included twins—identical and fraternal—in the study to disentangle the influence of genes from environment and behavior.

The researchers found that the secret to alertness is a three-part prescription requiring substantial exercise the previous day, sleeping longer and later into the morning, and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates, with limited sugar.

The researchers also discovered that a healthy controlled blood glucose response after eating breakfast is key to waking up more effectively.

“All of these have a unique and independent effect,” says Raphael Vallat a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and first author of the study. “If you sleep longer or later, you’re going to see an increase in your alertness. If you do more physical activity on the day before, you’re going to see an increase. You can see improvements with each and every one of these factors.”

Morning grogginess is more than just an annoyance. It has major societal consequences: Many auto accidents, job injuries, and large-scale disasters are caused by people who cannot shake off sleepiness. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania, and an even worse nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, are well-known examples.

“Many of us think that morning sleepiness is a benign annoyance. However, it costs developed nations billions of dollars every year through loss of productivity, increased health care utilization, work absenteeism. More impactful, however, is that it costs lives—it is deadly,” says senior author Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology and author of Why We Sleep (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

“From car crashes to work-related accidents, the cost of sleepiness is deadly. As scientists, we must understand how to help society wake up better and help reduce the mortal cost to society’s current struggle to wake up effectively each day.”

What You Eat

Walker and Vallat teamed up with researchers in the United Kingdom, the US, and Sweden to analyze data acquired by a UK 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 researchers gave participants preprepared meals, with different proportions 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, was 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.

…there are still some basic, modifiable, yet powerful ingredients to the awakening equation that people can focus on…

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 says

“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 adds. “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.”

How You 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 speculates.

“In addition, sleeping later can help with alertness for a second reason,” he says. “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 says. “Participants that, on average, are happier also feel more alert.”

But Vallat also notes 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 says.

Walker notes 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 says. “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 Under Your Control

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 says. “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.

I usually wake up just ahead of my alarm. What’s up with that?

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Humans have an elegant and intricate system of internal processes that help our bodies keep time, with exposure to sunlight, caffeine and meal timing all playing a role. But that doesn’t account for “precision waking.”

Sarah Mosquera/NPR

Maybe this happens to you sometimes, too:

You go to bed with some morning obligation on your mind, maybe a flight to catch or an important meeting. The next morning, you wake up on your own and discover you’ve beat your alarm clock by just a minute or two.

What’s going on here? Is it pure luck? Or perhaps you possess some uncanny ability to wake up precisely on time without help?

It turns out many people have come to Dr. Robert Stickgold over the years wondering about this phenomenon.

“This is one of those questions in the study of sleep where everybody in the field seems to agree that’s what’s obviously true couldn’t be,” says Stickgold, who’s a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Stickgold even remembers bringing it up to his mentor when he was just starting out in the field — only to be greeted with a dubious look and a far from satisfactory explanation. “I can assure you that all of us sleep researchers say ‘balderdash, that’s impossible,’ ” he says.

And yet Stickgold still believes there is something to it. “This kind of precision waking is reported by hundreds and thousands of people,'” he says, including himself. “I can wake up at 7:59 and turn off the alarm clock before my wife wakes up.” At least, sometimes.

Of course, it’s well known that humans have an elegant and intricate system of internal processes that help our bodies keep time. Somewhat shaped by our exposure to sunlight, caffeine, meals, exercise and other factors, these processes regulate our circadian rhythms throughout the roughly 24-hour cycle of day and night, and this affects when we go to bed and wake up.

If you are getting enough sleep and your lifestyle is aligned with your circadian rhythms, you should typically wake up around the same time every morning, adjusting for seasonal differences, says Philip Gehrman, a sleep scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

But that still doesn’t adequately explain this phenomenon of waking up precisely a few minutes before your alarm, especially when it’s a time that deviates from your normal schedule.

“I hear this all the time,” he says. “I think it’s that anxiety about being late that’s contributing.”

Scientists get curious — with mixed results

Actually, some scientists have looked into this enigma over the years with, admittedly, mixed results.

For example, one tiny, 15-person study from 1979 found that, over the course of two nights, the subjects were able to wake up within 20 minutes of the target more than half of the time. The two subjects who did the best were then followed for another week, but their accuracy quickly plummeted. Another small experiment let the participants choose when they’d get up and concluded that about half of the spontaneous awakenings were within seven minutes of the choice they’d written down before they went to sleep.

Other researchers have taken more subjective approaches, asking people to report if they have the ability to wake up at a certain time. In one such study, more than half of the respondents said they could do this. Indeed, Stickgold says it’s quite possible that “like a lot of things that we think we do all the time, we only do it once in a while.”

OK, so the scientific evidence isn’t exactly overwhelming.

But there was one intriguing line of evidence that caught my eye, thanks to Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Stress hormones might play a role

In the late ’90s, a group of researchers in Germany wanted to figure out how expecting to wake up influenced what’s known as the HPA axis — a complex system in the body that deals with our response to stress and involves the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands.

Jan Born, one of the study’s authors, says they knew that levels of a hormone that’s stored in the pituitary gland, called ACTH, start increasing in advance of the time you habitually wake up, which in turn signals the adrenal glands to release cortisol, a so-called “stress hormone” that helps wake you up, among other things.

“In this context, we decided to try it out and it came out actually as hypothesized,” says Born, who’s now a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Tubingen, in Germany.

Here’s what Born and his team did: They found 15 people who would normally wake up around 7 or 7:30 a.m., put them in a sleep lab and took blood samples over the course of three nights.

The subjects were divided into three different groups: Five of them were told they’d have to get up at 6 a.m.; others were assigned 9 a.m.; the third group were given a 9 a.m. wake-up time, but were then unexpectedly awakened at 6 a.m.

Born says a clear difference emerged as their wake-up time approached.

The subjects who anticipated waking up at 6 a.m. had a notable rise in the concentration of ACTH, starting about 5 a.m. It was as if their bodies knew they had to get up earlier, says Born.

“This is a good adaptive preparatory response of the organism,” says Born with a chuckle, “because then you have enough energy to cope with getting up and you can make it until you have your first coffee.”

That same rise in stress hormones before waking up wasn’t recorded in members of the group who did not plan to get up early, but were surprised with a 6 a.m. wake-up call. The third group — the one assigned a 9 a.m. wake-up time, didn’t have a pronounced rise in ACTH an hour before getting up. (Born says that suggests that this was simply too late in the morning to see the same effect.)

Born’s experiment wasn’t actually measuring whether people would ultimately wake up on their own before a predetermined time, but he says the findings raise some intriguing questions about that phenomenon. After all, how did their bodies know that they would have to get up earlier than normal?

“It tells you that the system is plastic, it can adapt, per se, to shifts in time,” he says. And it also suggests that we have some capacity to exploit this “system” while awake. That idea isn’t entirely foreign in the field of sleep research, he says.

A “scientific mystery” still to be solved

“It is well known that there is a kind of mechanism in the brain that you can use by volition to influence your body, your brain, while it is sleeping,” says Born. He points to research showing that a hypnotic suggestion can help make someone sleep more deeply.

Zee at Northwestern says there are probably “multiple biological systems” that could explain why some people seem capable of waking up without an alarm clock at a given time. It’s possible that the worry about getting up is somehow “overriding” our master internal clock, she says.

“This paper really is neat because it shows that your brain is still working,” she says.

Of course, exactly how it’s working and to what extent you can rely on this enigmatic internal alarm system remains a big, unanswered question. And while none of the sleep researchers I spoke to are planning to ditch their alarm clocks, Harvard’s Stickgold says he’s not ready to dismiss the question.

“It’s a true scientific mystery,” he says, “which we have a lot of.” And as in many fields, he adds, when facing a mystery, it would be arrogant “to assume that since we don’t know how it could happen, that it can’t.”

4 Easy Ways to Wake Up Refreshed

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1. Eat more fiber.

Swap sugary, fatty foods for fiber-rich grains, veggies and fruit. You’ll not only fall asleep faster, you’ll spend more time in “slow-wave sleep,” the deep, restorative slumber that leaves you ready to tackle the world. In a new study, researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center found that even a single day of better eating led to improved sleep.

2. Change bulbs.

Energy-efficient bulbs may be good for the environment, but they’re a menace to sleep, producing more snooze-disrupting blue light than old-fashioned incandescent ones. Instead, screw in a low-wattage conventional red bulb or consider “smart” LEDs for your bedside lamp, which transition from energizing white light in the morning to calming, orange-hued light before bedtime.

3. Nix the eight-hour rule.

Our sleep needs vary, experts say. People thrive on anywhere from seven to nine hours a night, according to the National Sleep Foundation. “Eight hours is just an average and most people aren’t average, especially those who are struggling with sleep,” says sleep expert Colleen Ehrnstrom, Ph.D. New research suggests seven hours might actually be the sweet spot when it comes to optimal cognitive and physical health.

4. Toss your alarm clock.

The jarring buzz of an alarm can contribute to the groggy, half-awake state known as sleep inertia. To avoid this, consider switching to an alarm clock that mimics a natural sunrise through dawn-simulation and nature sounds, such as birds or ocean waves. Several studies have shown gradual light exposure increases alertness, enhances mental and physical performance, and improves mood. Try special alarm clocks or apps such as Morning Sun for iPhone or Glimmer for Android.