You went to bed at eleven and woke up at seven. That’s eight hours. You did the thing everyone tells you to do.
And you still feel like you’ve been hit by a bus.
This is one of the most common things I hear, and it makes people feel slightly crazy, because the number on the clock is right. So why does the body keep filing complaints?
What most sleep advice misses is this: how long you sleep and how well you sleep are two different conversations. Blood sugar is in the middle of the second one.
Picture a normal evening. Dinner at eight — maybe pasta with vegetables, a glass of wine, something fruity for pudding. Sounds sensible enough. Bed at eleven. Somewhere around two or three in the morning, your blood sugar quietly drops below where your body wants it to be.
Your body doesn’t take that lying down. It releases cortisol and adrenaline (stress hormones) to bring the glucose back up. You don’t necessarily wake up, but the depth of your sleep changes. The repair work your body does in the deepest stages gets cut short. The dreaming later in the night gets fragmented.
By morning, you’ve been horizontal for eight hours. But the actual restoration was nowhere near eight hours of work.
A few things make this much more likely:
Something sweet or starchy late in the evening, especially on its own
A “light” dinner that doesn’t include enough protein or fat to hold you through the night
Wine — sedating at first, disruptive later, particularly for blood sugar
Eating very close to bedtime
A few things help:
Build dinner around protein and fat, not just a bowl of pasta or a salad
Aim to finish eating two to three hours before bed
Get sunlight on your face in the first hour after waking — your body uses morning light to set the timing of cortisol, melatonin and the whole architecture of the night ahead
Notice what you ate the evening of a rough morning versus a good one
That last one is the one I’d really encourage you to try. Your worst mornings tend to follow a pattern. Two or three weeks of paying attention is usually enough to find it.
That’s your data.
If you suspect blood sugar might be behind more of this than you’d realised, my free guide Is Your Blood Sugar Working Against You? Ten Signs Most People Completely Miss will help you spot the pattern. Download it at francesnorgate.com/#bloodsugarguide.
If you’d like a real conversation about what’s specifically going on for you, my free 30-minute Blood Sugar Audits are open this month. Book at francesnorgate.com/blood-sugar-audit.
— Frances x
