Dr. Arthur Brooks explains why eating dinner around 6pm improves sleep. High blood sugar at bedtime disrupts your circadian rhythm and sleep architecture, while active digestion keeps you awake. Finishing dinner hours before bed protects the quality of your sleep.
6pm
How does the end of your day start? And the answer? Well, the first question should be when does the end of your day start? And the answer is dinner. That's when the end of your day is. Starting is at the beginning of dinner. What's the best time to eat dinner? Now you have to decide that. But the basic truth around this is a long time before you go to sleep. It's important to have space between your eating and your bedtime. For me, I like to eat dinner at 6pm now, why is it important to have a lot of space between mealtime and bedtime? You do not want to have a high blood sugar level when trying to go to sleep. And you don't want your digestion just cranking through a meal. When you're doing this, it's going to mess up your circadian rhythms. It's going to interfere with your sleep architecture. Sleep latency is going to become a problem. That means it's going to take you longer to get sleep. All of those things are actually going on. You don't want to actually be processing a great big hard to digest meal.
