Living and eating healthier can lead to benefits in every aspect of your life; this includes your sleeping habits. Certain foods will disrupt your sleep schedule and certain foods will allow you to sleep easier, it is just a matter of choosing the right foods at the right time. Eating the right foods can be the best natural sleep aids available to you, as opposed to popping pills to help you sleep that could leave you feeling groggy and run down.

Caffeine can be great when we need to wake up, but can be a curse when we are trying to fall asleep. For sure this have to avoid to your child. Drinking coffee before bed is usually a bad thing, but the after effects of having caffeine late in the afternoon can also lead to problems sleeping. Sugar is another enemy of sleep, because the short burst of energy leads to uneven blood sugar levels and create issues trying to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Tryptophan is an amino acid that is turned into serotonin, which gets converted to melatonin. Melatonin is the natural hormone that helps you sleep. Turkey is infamous for having tryptophan in it, but some carbohydrate snacks like whole grain cracks can help you fall asleep too if used as the bedtime snack. Magnesium is also a natural sedative and a deficiency of it can lead to all sorts of health issues, not just trouble sleeping. Foods that are high in magnesium include dark leafy green vegetables, almonds, cashew, legumes, and seeds.

Taking the time to work on your diet will lead to better sleep as well as an overall better life as your body will be healthier. Natural sleep aids, such as whole grain crackers, will be much better in the long run then popping sleeping pills. Most of the time putting natural things into your body is always better than artificial, but make sure to consider all sorts of sleep aid solutions if you are having trouble sleeping.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Insomnia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.