Use This ‘4-Part Prescription' to Wake Up Alert and Refreshed Every Morning

Over 60% of Americans hardly ever wake up feeling energized or rested, according to a 2020 survey conducted by RestoreZ.

But not all hope is lost, because there are behaviors that can increase your alertness in the morning and keep you alert for the rest of the day, according to Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Human Sleep Science at U.C. Berkeley.

Vallat recently co-authored a Nature Communications study that observed certain habits that can improve energy after a night's sleep.

To determine what activities kept people energized, individuals were asked to record how alert they felt after waking up and throughout the rest of the day. These were the behaviors that were associated with alertness immediately after getting out of bed and beyond.

The '4-part prescription' for increased alertness after a night's sleep

1. Engaging in physical activity the day before. "The higher the amount of physical activity, the more awake and alert you feel the next day," Vallat tells CNBC Make It.
2. Sleeping longer and/or later than you typically do, i.e. an extra 30 minutes.
3. Eating a breakfast high in low-glycemic carbohydrates like whole bread, oats and brown rice – while avoiding high-glycemic carbohydrates like potatoes, white rice and white bread.
4. Avoiding breakfast meals high in sugar or that include an excessive amount of protein, which can reduce alertness

More than 800 participants were given different meals for breakfast and kept food journals to note their food intake. They also wore wrist watches that monitored their physical activity, and individuals reported their sleep habits including length, quality, timing and regularity of sleep.

Additional factors that may contribute to feeling energized when you wake up

The four-part prescription above details behaviors that are very easy to implement, but there were non-behavior related factors that were associated with alertness after a night's sleep as well, says Vallat:

• Age: How old a person was, actually had a substantial effect on how alert they felt throughout the day, says Vallat. "Age is not really something you can do anything about," he says, but "what we found is that the older you get, the more alert you feel."
• Happiness: Mood and happiness also ended up being fairly important for feeling energized after waking up. "Most surprisingly in the study, we found a super strong correlation between how alert you feel and how happy you rate yourself," Vallat says.
• Genes: To investigate the influence of genetics, the study included several sets of identical twins, who share 100% of their genomes. "There was a 25% contribution of your genes to the differences in the alertness between individuals," he adds.

"And actually 60% was determined by the environment, and when I say environment, I'm typically referring to these modifiable lifestyle factors like your amount of sleep and mood also," Vallat says.

"I thought that was an optimistic message."

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