Can drinking tea at bedtime make my sleep worse?
I was asked recently how a healthy bedtime habit, like drinking tea, could actually worsen sleep.
On the surface, it’s a perfectly fine wind down habit.
A little tea at bedtime can be a great thing to do before bed. It can be relaxing and grounding. It can be an enjoyable activity that helps shift from the the business of the day to the calm of the evening, but there are a few ways this can backfire.
Of course, if you’re drinking a very large amount of tea right before bed this can lead to wakeups to use the restroom.
You’ll also want to stick to herbal tea so that there’s no caffeine keeping you awake.
However, there’s another reason that may be more surprising.
A sneaky way that tea at bedtime can undermine sleep is through something called sleep effort. More on that in a minute, but it’s important to first establish that brief awakenings in the middle of the night are normal.
This often shocks people.
Not everyone remembers these awakenings, but it’s okay if you do remember them. The trouble isn’t with waking up necessarily, but more so the difficulty returning to sleep.
For example, a normal brief awakening can look like waking up rolling over and returning to sleep. Or even getting up briefly to use the restroom then returning to sleep… but when sleep effort is in the mix, those brief awakenings can turn into hours of tossing and turning and trying to fall back asleep. Sleep effort is anything we do to try to make sleep happen. Sleep is an involuntary process, and requires us to let go or release control as we fall asleep. Another way of saying this is sleep isn’t something we do, it’s something that happens to us under the right conditions.
Drinking tea to relax, or because you enjoy it can be a wonderful nighttime activity. Drinking tea to try to sleep, often backfires. This is a subtle, but important difference.
Sleep effort can spiral quickly and reinforce insomnia.
If you want help sorting out if sleep effort is part of the problem, you can book a free consultation
Hi I’m Kasryn! (Pronounced Kaz-Rin)
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