14. A Bitter Way To Sleep Stronger
If good quality pillow time is eluding your evenings bitter foods offer the best possible solution for waking up refreshed
Computers need to power off to install software upgrades. You’re no different. It comes in the form of sleep. This nightly shut down helps you recover and release all the juicy hormones that make your life better. Sleep helps you burn more fat. It improves mood. It increases productivity. Elevates your immune system. Picking the best parts of sleep is like choosing meat at a Brazilian steakhouse. There are so many options, and they just keep on coming.
Unfortunately, today, sleep plays second fiddle to the TV remote. As many as 70 million Americans suffer low sleep levels. If you want to be healthier, optimizing sleep quality is an easy win. Higher quality sleep will see you wake up fresher than a mint on a pillow and bitter foods amplify your chances of doing just this using these six steps.
Step 1: 10 out 10 People Advise Sleep
Everyone you know sleeps. Those you love. Those you hate. People you admire. Even famous historical folks slept. Sleep gives you central nervous system a coffee break from the ruthless signaling. It works especially well for exercise. When you’re trying to bench press, your central nervous system does something called spatial recruitment. It tries to activate more motor units to achieve greater force, but this is tiring.
Fortunately, high-quality sleep creates central nervous system recovery. This lets you chase peak performance on the daily. You’ll also embody the traits of people you admire. Elon Musk. Obama. Oprah. You like them because they embody the behaviors you love but do it on 5-6 hours of sleep. Emotionally resilience. Good energy. High level decision making. Sleep quality is the cogs that make these turn.
Step 2: Make Daily Food Commitment
How do bitter foods impact sleep? Take the humble walnut. The bitterest of all nuts. This is largely thanks to its preposterously high antioxidant content. A paper in the journal Nutrition found walnuts may increase your blood melatonin concentrations which works to activate their antioxidants so your body can use them better. Melatonin keeps your circadian rhythm in balance, which help you get the best nights rest. Sure, you can supplement with it, but walnuts do it as nature intended.
Walnuts are not the only food example because research published in Nutrients found the foods with the highest melatonin levels often had bitterest tastes. These were foods such as the skin of grapes, black rice, wild mushrooms, mustard seeds, and cacao. If you’re committed to being a boss at building muscle, burning fat and being a productivity ninja at work, bitter foods gives this your body the consistency it needs to deliver.
Step 3: Listen to Sleep Doctors
What do sleep doctors suggest are the dreamiest foods? The pillow experts at the American Sleep Association also suggest a natural variety of tryptophan rich foods to help you sleep, such as chicken, fish, yoghurt, and nuts. This amino acid helps you get to snooze stronger and have a higher quality nod, found a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. What does raw tryptophan taste like? Bitter. Ultra-bitter. It’s graded as the bitterest of all amino acids.
The sleep experts also suggest heavy hitting bitter heroes such as kale and nuts to those who want to enjoy a little more pillow talk. The other recommendations are usually fast digesting sweet foods, such as honey or banana, that you’re told to eat pre-bed because they spike your glucose levels then leave you to crash into a heap on your pillow. They force your blood sugar to run a marathon then leave you to collapse in a destroyed heap that leaves your internal workings exhausted. Effective, but it’s more of a smoke and mirrors parlor trick while healthy foods are more sustainable real deal.
Step 4: Appreciate What Sleep Gives
Sleep also offers a chicken or tryptophan-rich eggs quandary. The more you sleep the healthier you are. The healthier you are, the more you sleep. To this end, when people increased their time in bed by 50-90 minutes each day, so they slept 7-9 hours, they had a 10 gram decrease in their daily free sugar intake, from things like syrups and fruit juice, found a paper in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Sleep more, eat less harmful sugars.
This is reciprocity at its purest. The more rested you are, the less sugars you’ll eat. You’ll be smarter, leaner, and healthier which creates a momentum shift. This might explain why people who slept less than 6 hours a night were more likely to be seriously obese, found a paper in The American Journal of Human Biology. You can bet these overweight folk were reaching for the sweet and salty drive thru options instead of the bitter kale and nuts.
Step 5: Understand Sleep is Scarce
The CDC says insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic. It’s partly because we feel like we don’t have enough time. Time is all you have. Apparently, all the average American gets is 5 measly hours of free time each day. That’s not much. Time is probably your scarcest resource. So, you may not want to waste it sleeping.
Fortunately, you don’t need to clock up monster 8-9 hour lie ins. It’s smarter to sleep with quality in mind. To this end, a paper in Advances in Nutrition found sleep quality is improved by the Mediterranean diet. This includes legumes, nuts and of course olives. Olives in their raw form are incredibly bitter and almost inedible unless cured. If you’re low on time, stick to the bitter foods to max out on sleep quality over quantity.
Step 6: Copy the Best Sleepers
If you want to copy the sleep habits of the people who live the longest, then emulate their diet and way of life. The Mediterranean lifestyle is the home ground of the blue zone where people regularly create fire risks thanks to the100 candles weighing down their birthday cakes. Their regime is also easy to copy. Hang with family and your loved ones. Have enough energy to move a little each day. Eat the Med diet that’s full of bitter foods.
Too often we try to unravel the longevity secrets of the Med diet by looking at its macro nutrient profiles. Instead, it’s smarter to look at the tastes and raw materials. Nuts. Olives. Grapes. Beans. Of course, there are flavorsome counterbalances such as diary, fish, and fresh fruits. These create equilibrium. They create happiness. They also create the optimum conditions for rest that will help you sleep like a baby knowing you’re very likely going to live to see many more days ahead. Regularly feasting on bitter foods will work toward making you look your best, even when your PJ’s come off.
What do you reckon? Let me know if you agree or think I’m just completely full of it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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