How people wake up is associated with previous night’s sleep together with physical activity and food intake

How individuals slumber, exercise, and consume food affects how they wake up and become alert in the hours following sleep. In this prospective longitudinal study by Vallat et al. (2022) involving 833 twins and genetically unrelated adults, the authors show that four independent factors, including physical activity the day before, the amount and quality of sleep the night before, a breakfast high in carbohydrates, and a lower blood glucose response after breakfast, are more closely related to how well an individual awakens in the hours after sleep than genetics. The quality of a person’s slumber, their age, and their level of happiness all have an impact on their everyday alertness set point. Together, the authors conclude that these results point to a number of modifiable non-genetic (i.e., not fixed) variables connected to everyday attentiveness. [NPID: Circadian rhythms, sleep, heritable quantitative trait, human behavior]

Year: 2022

Reference: Vallat, R., Berry, S.E., Tsereteli, N. et al. How people wake up is associated with previous night’s sleep together with physical activity and food intake. Nat Commun 13, 7116 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34503-2