“RP: Yeah. And, some people wake up cyclically during the night. When I was counseling dieters, there were some very fat people who would wake up: one of them woke up every hour during the night. The other one, I think, was sleeping an hour and a half, or so. And I got them to set an alarm clock to wake themselves up about 5 or 10 minutes before their expected waking, and eat anything with carbohydrates (milk, or juice, or even a cracker or something), and to do that every hour. And, within a week, they were sleeping through the night, and then they were able to start losing weight. Those stress hormones that raise your temperature and pulse rate around dawn were also increasing the blood sugar ( in diabetics, they call it the dawn phenomenon). But it’s the result of the stress hormones that rise during the night. The darkness itself is causing stress, activating hormones. So, in the winter, people are more likely to have disturbed sleep, because of long nights. And getting extra carbohydrates late in the day can help you sleep longer without these episodes of…usually, its nightmares waking people up with a pounding heart.
HD: That’s the adrenalin, right ?
RP: Yeah.”
Author
Cari