Five Foods That Ruin Your Sleep

Food can fuel your body to get through each day, but at night you want to wind down before bed. Here are five foods and drinks that may be ruining your sleep:

💤​ Spicy Foods - One possible side effect of spicy foods that could keep you up at night is acid reflux, which only gets worse when you lie down. Another is that the capsaicin in spicy foods elevates your body temperature, which is counter-intuitive since your body naturally lowers its internal temp to fall asleep and stay comfortable.

💤​ Chocolate - While it’s not as much as a cup of coffee, chocolate contains some caffeine. The darker the chocolate, the higher the caffeine too. So keep this in mind if you’re reaching for dessert and it’s close to bedtime.

💤​ Alcohol - While it can definitely make you feel sleepy and fall asleep, alcohol actually interferes with the quality of sleep you’ll get. First of all, it’s a diuretic, so you may find yourself making more trips to the bathroom throughout the night. It’s also been found to make it more difficult to reach REM sleep, which is the stage that leads to improved mood and memory.

💤​ Caffeinated Drinks - Caffeine suppresses melatonin and can impact your ability to fall asleep and cause you to never reach deep sleep once you do. It takes most people 5 hours to eliminate caffeine from their system, so keep this in mind as bedtime approaches. Be mindful of any coffee, tea, or soda you have in the evening and make sure you know if it contains caffeine or not.

💤​ Sugar - There are plenty of reasons to reduce sugar in your diet and the quality of your sleep is one of them. Evidence has shown that sugary snacks before bed can lead to restlessness and easily-disrupted sleep.