Scientists discover secret to waking up alert and refreshed | Hacker News Reader

Scientists discover secret to waking up alert and refreshed

news.berkeley.edu

44 pointshhs56 comments

Hey here's the secret they found. Get more exercise, get more sleep, and get a good breakfast in you. Genius!

> “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 added.

Okay, I'm glad to see another mention about how harmful sugar is at least.

> “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.”

> “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 said

> 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.

So they presented several breakfast options. Including one high sugar, and one high carb, which as we know is going to end up as sugar. What they did not do is include an option that involves not having a meal at all until several hours after waking.

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

Well, no they didn't "discover" that, and if they're not checking against the option of not eating breakfast at all, then they can't know that it is key to waking up more effectively.

I personally feel much better while fasting until the afternoon than eating.

Same. I've been on a 7hr feeding window for two years now. I don't eat until noon. It's something else that I just decided to try on a whim for fun, but then decided to make it a permanent part of my life because of how well it seemed to fit.

I switched to this habit as well and reduced my meals to only 2 per day. I also learned to not fill up to the brim by waiting to see if I'm really hungry. Another habit that I adopted is chewing my food thoroughly.

> chewing my food thoroughly.

I've been trying to work on that. For better digestion and slower speed. For some reason, I've always been a fast eater and I'll end up eating more than is needed because I was faster than my body's feedback loop.

Same. I think there's something about having been a public school student in the past 10-20 years that's to blame. We'd only get half an hour sometimes to eat lunch, and that's the only break between classes, so I grew up with the negative incentive to wolf down/inhale my shitty pizza/chicken sandwich as fast as possible so I could rid myself of the lunch tray and go play with my friends, study, or sulk in a corner.

My grade school daughter’s actual time to eat lunch, at a public high school in an affluent area, after lines/outdoor time/etc (I have not been able to ascertain what eats up so much of the ~30 minutes lunch period allocation) varies between 3 and 7 minutes. She always has a packed lunch, so none of her time is spent waiting in line for actual food. This is staggering to me. I didn’t go to school in the US, but my wife did and says it was not like that in her day at a public school. Needless to say, she doesn’t have time to eat her lunch, so it inevitably comes home every day in its entirety except for quickly consumed items like yogurt and hummus. I have been considering experiments to try to figure out what’s going on, because the school administration denies this is the case but other parents confirm that their kids report the same thing. Any ideas for a good investigative method?

You know it’s going to be this good when the headline starts with “Scientists discover secret to”.

I particularly love the idea that TMI and Chernobyl, not failures of nuclear regulatory bodies or human factors.. nope. Actually, the workers were just unable to shake off sleepiness! They should have gotten a better breakfast, and then Chernobyl would be fine!

It's a bizarre puff article.

Yeah. They also missed the espresso and a cigarette breakfast option...

You missed the third part of that routine, which is the immediate bowel flushing.

For best results, chug a liter/quart of water before that espresso.

Lol. Usually the cigarette and the bowel flushing are simultaneously executed. That was until She complained about the smell in Her bathroom.

Accompanied, of course, by a scroll through HN at the same time.

I've tried but failed to consume that tasty high carbonhydrates and sugar breakfast before waking up more alert than without having that breakfast first.

> 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.

a muffin and a milkshake is likely 800-1000 calories!!! and there's almost no protein in that unless they specifically add protein powder. Lacking strength in nutrition basics in this study.

I lost 30 pounds by switching to black coffee at breakfast and not eating my first meal until 12pm-2pm. They should include research into eating only high-protein/high-fat (i.e. bacon and eggs/keto option) and fasting.

How is a muffin and milkshake the high protein option? Why not just eggs?

> if they're not checking against the option of not eating breakfast at all, then they can't know that it is key to waking up more effectively.

They did, kind of. The factor "waketime to breakfast" [Fig 3] has a beta of .14, which is by far the strongest modifiable factor. This may suggest that not eating breakfast at all may be even better than eating a bowl of sugar.

I really do not understand how the authors fail to even mention this result in the paper.

Too spammy, didn't click? Here's the kicker: "substantial exercise the previous day, sleeping longer and later into the morning, and eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates, with limited sugar"

"Just sleep later."

Gee, thanks.

Go to bed earlier. Like, 9 hours before you are due to wake up so you have an hour to properly relax.

But that's not what the article said - it suggested you needed to wake up later.

In this respect I disagree with the article.

The comment was clearly referring to the “sleep later into the morning” part, though.

Well yeah, that is not a great plan, but the overall goal is to allow your body to have 8 hours of sleep.

But how else is my late-night bedtime procrastination cycle going to continue? I just absolutely _must_ stay up until 2:00 AM reading Wikipedia pages on obscure tropical plants, because I guess I only need to be up by 8:15 AM for my 8:30 AM standup!

The Dragon Scroll was blank all along!

I'm only a data point but my experience is very different: I never had problems waking up and being immediately functional, with or without breakfast. Maybe that counts as "limited sugar"?

another study by captain obvious?

My fitbit will do sleep tracking and use a silent alarm (ie. it vibrates rather than beeps) to wake me up during a window of time where it detects I'm not in a REM cycle. This has worked extremely well for me and it's almost a bit jarring. I wake up, not instantly "alert", but not groggy. I don't get that "smack the phone to turn off the alarm" desire. It's more of a "Huh, I'm awake now. Okay." type of feeling. The only catch is it needs a 30 minute window in order to detect and it can "wake" you at any point during that window.

I have a lamp that will turn on and play bird noises over the course of half an hour (starting from almost nothing and coming to full intensity over the course of that half hour) and I suspect the mechanism is the same. I set it for half an hour before I actually think I need to be up though because of that window.

I have a lamp like that and the bird noise is about a 4 second, very obviously looped, loop. It's even more unbearable to be slowly woken up by that that just hit over the proverbial head with a loud normal alarm.

This looks like the press release for the inconclusive and basically useless study that was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719671

How people wake up and regain alertness in the hours after sleep is related to how they are sleeping, eating, and exercising. Here, in a prospective longitudinal study of 833 twins and genetically unrelated adults, we demonstrate that how effectively an individual awakens in the hours following sleep is not associated with their genetics, but instead, four independent factors: sleep quantity/quality the night before, physical activity the day prior, a breakfast rich in carbohydrate, and a lower blood glucose response following breakfast. Furthermore, an individual’s set-point of daily alertness is related to the quality of their sleep, their positive emotional state, and their age. Together, these findings reveal a set of non-genetic (i.e., not fixed) factors associated with daily alertness that are modifiable.

I recently stopped drinking caffeinated beverages (coffee, tea, soda) but I still probably get a small amount of caffeine from decaffeinated beverages / chocolate, though maybe 2-5% of what it was before. I find though, that the quality of my sleep has improved tremendously.

I'm a caffeine addict and go through phases of more and less coffee. My longest stretch on zero caffeinated beverages in my adult life was about a year. The reduction for 1 to 0 coffees was brutal. Slept loads more and so much better the fist week. After a month of no coffee my sleep regressed to the same as now, drinking 4 coffees per day.

Research somewhat supports this, you get used to a certain caffeine consumption and only abrupt changes in consumption produce changes in sleep/wakefulness. I wish you the best friend, but you might not find abstinence to be a long term solution.

I'm not going to dispute many of the recommendations (exercise a lot! Sleep more! Eat better! Sleep later aka don't have an alarm clock or job!)

But... this seems a lot like "apple a day keeps the doctor away" and other fiendishly planted sayings by industry into the general discourse. These days the industries fund pro-industry studies and then trumpet them in media.

Breakfast has been under assault by lifestyle trends for decades, this smacks of an industry study.

What is this false dichotomy between inheritable/genetic traits and "things that are under your control"? There are plenty of attributes to the human body that can be acquired from the moment of fertilization and on through a person's life that are still far outside a person's control.

Signed, someone with (uninherited, acquired, incurable) narcolepsy.

Not only that, but there are environmental factors, particularly if they take effect early in your life, that are virtually impossible to change the effects of later on in life. Obvious case in point being your mother tongue. Or the level of nutrition you get while reaching your adult height.

> 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.

What a bizarre statement. In what world is a 25% statistical effect "minor and insignificant"?

The exercise and sleep part makes (obvious) sense, but the breakfast part seems a bit off. You are already awake and engaging in activities by the time you have made and then have eaten breakfast. A lot of people don't immediately grab food as soon as they wake up.

If the point of emphasis is not to be groggy when you wake up, then that state (of being groggy or not) has already occurred by the time you have finished breakfast. Which depending on your routine, could be 20 minutes to even an hour later, after waking up. For instance some people take showers or brush their teeth first in the morning. It seems the point, of waking up alert and refreshed, should have nothing to do with breakfast. It should rather be based on how soon a person can achieve the state of being alert and functional, after they have woke up.

Uh, Matthew Walker, the fraudulent scientist

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

> 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.

Not to make light of these tragedies, but this paragraph got a laugh from me - who thinks of Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as, primarily, examples of _morning sleepiness_?

Damn, I was hoping for this one weird trick. Instead it's "wake up later" - and no tips on how anyone's supposed to achieve that. What is surprising is that there's no indication doing exercise immediately after waking up is supposed to be helpful, yet that's exactly what works for me (even if it's just walking the dog).

The time between waking up and eating was a much stronger predictor of alertness than the different types of breakfast, so maybe _not_ eating breakfast at all is even better than eating a bowl of sugar?

How did the authors get away with not even mentioning the strongest modifiable predictor of alertness in their study? I cannot comprehend this.

Otherwise GREAT study.

I'm not sure I understand. They're talking about how to wake up alert and refreshed, but focus on breakfast. That happens after you wake up. Are they saying that if you wake up groggy, the right breakfast can make you alert? Or that the right breakfast on one day affects how you wake up the next day?

"eating a breakfast high in complex carbohydrates"

How can you reconcile that with intermittent fasting which people claim may also boost your mental and physical energy?

Usually you eat nothing until 2-3pm(16/8 method).

Isn't the key to waking up alert and refreshed to do so between sleep cycles (so no alarm). You just have to keep consistent lifestyle / schedule so you wake up same time automatically.

I quit coffee recently and feel much more awake during the day now

I would be much more interested in the secret to waking up alert and refreshed while living with preschoolers.

Eat, Move, Sleep.

There's even a book w this title.

"sleeping later into the morning"

Weekend me already knows how to do this

Vacation me has perfected that into early in the afternoon.

Everyday me used to know how to do that until my kids entered school and I had to get up to get them there. Which is troubling as the science always tells that school should start later in the day. If not for the sake of the children, think about the parents!

Top tip: FIRST the socks THEN the shoes.

I absolutely confirmed that my diet is the biggest factor in sleep patterns.

If I eat takeout or delivery food I will be groggy all day, sleep late, have trouble going to sleep at the same time every night.

If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals at home, including a yogurt and muesli breakfast every day, I awake refreshed and ready with the sunrise. I have energy throughout the day. And I fall asleep at about the same time every night without relying on drugs or medications.

> If I prepare my own fresh, organic meals

What happens when you eat your own prepared fresh, conventional meals?

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