How To Use Fasting To Reset Your Sleep Cycle

2 min read

Intermittent fasting contains dynamics that extend beyond the simple promise of weight loss. I’ve been running with the breakfast-skipping regime even now I’m no longer looking to drop weight. It’s a lifestyle commitment at this point.

There are a host of benefits to the mental and physical, although this particular one will be more useful to those who are having to regularly shuffle back and forth between day and night shifts.

The best way to fix sleep is to enshrine the habit of going to bed and waking up at set times. This doesn’t work so well when you’re stuck with an irregular work schedule that throws up the pattern just as you’ve regained some control over your body clock.

In order to figure out where fasting can play out this situation, it’s worth examining what mechanisms help you get into the rhythm. The circadian rhythm is the body’s internal ticker that adjusts sleep and wakefulness around the day-night cycle.

Simply stop eating for 16 hours before you want to be awake. So if it’s 2AM, then have your last meal at 10AM the previous day.

 
The Reset

There is a way of manipulating that for when you’re getting up for a fresh 2AM, but I’ll get to that in another article. This one’s going to be about the second clock. The one that’s set up to stop you starving to death.

Simply stop eating for 16 hours before you want to be awake. So if it’s 2AM, then have your last meal at 10AM the previous day. When you get up, have a meal to break the fast, and the brain will interpret that as the first meal of the morning.

This evolution is in place to stop you from feeling sleepy when you should be foraging around for more food. Therefore the brain can reset the cycle within one day, which is a fair distance better than the usual week it takes to overcome an abrupt change to the schedule.

So if you’re having to deal with night shifts or jet-lag on a regular basis, intermittent fasting might be worth including in the tool-bag.

Related Guide – The Caveman Way To Fix Your Sleep

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