Plus the one impacted area that makes all the difference
Do you wake up in the middle of the night… or toss and turn before you finally crash… or struggle to force yourself out of bed in the morning. Whichever bad sleep story sounds like yours, they all have a common cause. Stress.
The biggest threat to your sleep isn’t barking dogs or a big, rich dinner. It’s not your neighbor’s music or your partner’s snoring. It’s not even the cup of coffee you had after lunch.
The worst sleep thief is stress, but not in the ways you may think. It attacks sleep in many different ways—some you’d never expect—so you’re left feeling tired, frustrated, and irritated.
Even if you go to bed calmed down, the stress you’ve felt during the day… even during the week… can steal your sleep and leave you deprived.
But there is a way to turn down the volume on stress so you can sleep longer and better every night.
Sneaky Ways Stress Sabotages Your Sleep
Stress can keep worrying thoughts spiraling just when you want to settle down and get some rest. But stress also does a lot more to undermine conscious relaxation and falling sleep, making it nearly impossible for you to get a solid seven hours.
The effects of stress can also linger, having a delayed impact. Stressful events today can leave you struggling to sleep days or even weeks later.[1]
Research shows that stress attacks sleep in several ways:[2,3,4,5]
- Decreasing restorative slow wave sleep even when total sleep time stays the same
- Increasing the number of times you wake up during the night, fragmenting your sleep
- Disrupting your body’s internal clock and your natural sleep-wake cycles
- Spurring more vivid dreams and nightmares
- Reducing total REM sleep and changing REM sleep cycles
- Causing muscle tension, a part of the fight-or-flight response that gets your body ready to fight or flee, that keeps you from relaxing
- Causing your heart to pound faster and your breath to quicken, making it harder to rest
- Disrupting the gut microbiome, a major (but little-known) factor in restorative sleep
All of these make it harder for you to fall asleep, stay asleep, and experience restful sleep... But the last bullet concerning your gut health could be most destructive.
Why? Because when your gut microbiome is disrupted, you’re basically blocking your body’s main path to quality sleep.
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The Stress-Gut-Sleep Connection
Your gut microbiome—the trillions of bacteria in your gut—plays a huge role in whether or not you’ll sleep tonight and how well. There’s a direct line of communication called the gut-brain axis that flows in both directions between your gut and your brain. In fact, scientists consider your gut to be your “second brain” because it’s home to your enteric nervous system (ENS), which contains hundreds of millions of nerve cells.[6] Your ENS sends signals to your central nervous system (CNS) along the vagus nerve, letting your gut talk to your brain. This is the gut-brain axis in action. Your gut bacteria use that connection to affect your sleep behavior.[7]
In a healthy gut, beneficial probiotic bacteria run the show and influence your ability to sleep in several important ways. They send positive sleep messages over the gut-brain axis. They produce short chain fatty acids such as butyrate and propionate that help you fall asleep faster and sleep longer.[8] Beneficial bacteria promote the production of crucial sleep chemicals including melatonin, serotonin, and GABA.[9] And, they help regulate the body’s sleep-