Improve Your Gut Health, Improve Your Sleep

Besides maintaining healthy sleep habits, like keeping your room dark, establishing a sleep schedule, and staying away from blue light near bedtime, following a gut-healthy lifestyle will set the foundation for long-term vitality and sound, restful sleep:

Take a daily probiotic.
When it comes to replenishing and maintaining the friendly flora in your gut, supplementing with a multi-strain, time-release probiotic formula is the single most important step you can take on your path to a healthy gut.

The good microbes that set up shop in your digestive tract will work to produce and regulate sleep-inducing hormones and neurotransmitters, and crowd out inhospitable bacteria that can lead to dysbiosis and pain.

Feed your good bugs.
It’s not enough to simply get the good guys in your gut; you need to nourish and feed them as well!

Focus on a whole food diet full of prebiotics, indigestible fibers found in many plant-based foods that your probiotics just love to eat.

Prebiotics are like fertilizer for a garden — they give your beneficial bacteria all they need to really thrive in your gut. Apples, oats, asparagus, honey, and avocados are all good prebiotic sources, and you can also boost your intake with a prebiotic supplement designed to encourage the growth of healthy bacteria.

Avoid probiotic enemies.
Unfortunately, so many factors in today’s hectic lifestyles can deplete the good bacteria in your microbiome.

Antibiotics (both in food and as medicine), antibacterial cleaners, environmental toxins, pesticides, antimicrobial personal care products, processed foods, and even stress can all have a negative impact on the balance of good to bad bacteria in your microbiome, so choose natural products and food whenever possible and keep stress to a minimum.

Get outside and play!
Your microbiome needs to encounter all kinds of microbes in the environment to really operate at its best supporting your health and your sleep.

You see, exposure to different bacteria outdoors, from animals, and in the soil can help to train your immune system (80% of which resides in the gut), the foundation of your health and wellness.

So, get out there and take a camping trip, indulge in some gardening, go horseback riding, or take your dog for a walk, and don’t be afraid to get a little dirty!

Make time to exercise.
Research shows that people who exercise regularly have more diverse populations of gut bacteria than people who don’t stay active. And, studies suggest that exercise can increase the amount of friendly microbes in your gut by a staggering 40%.

What’s more, moderate aerobic exercise has been proven to decrease the time it takes to fall asleep, increase sleep efficiency, and improve self-reported measures of feeling well-rested in the morning.

Find an exercise regimen that you absolutely love (like hiking, jogging, dancing, or yoga) and stick to it — your entire body (including your microbiome) will thank you!

Sleep is like many precious things in life — we don’t know how crucial it is to our everyday emotional and physical well-being until it’s gone. So, next time you’re up at 2:00 a.m. wondering why you just can’t sleep, think of your microscopic friends within.

Taking the time to nurture and nourish your beneficial gut bacteria may be just what you need to reset your sleep cycles and start experiencing restful, restorative nights so you can enjoy your healthiest, happiest days!

Excerpt from article Is Gut Health The Key To A Good Night’s Sleep?, read the article in its entirety from Thrive Global here: https://medium.com/thrive-global/is-gut-health-the-key-to-a-good-nights-sleep-414e9e7df545