Dr. Matt Walker

Other aspects are that when you become recumbent, when you lie down, you have a higher risk of gastric reflux coming back up and therefore you get heartburn and that's pretty miserable.

And people will describe that too by way of closer proximity of food intake relative to when you're falling asleep.

Nevertheless, if you look at the data

and I did a recent very deep dive on this personally myself about 12 months ago, it's not quite as extreme as the dogma makes out.

If you eat two hours before bed, on average, it doesn't seem to necessarily harm your sleep.

Now, that's very different than saying what is best to improve or enhance your sleep, but the way these studies were designed, it was looking at detriments.

They then went to 90 minutes before sleep onset.

And even there, there didn't seem to be marked impairments.

60 minutes, you started to see maybe some signs, but on average, the effect size was somewhat weak.

But then when you get close to sort of 45 minutes or so, then things did start to deteriorate.

I think it depends hugely on your chronotype and also just on your appetite, circadian rhythm preferences too.

I am someone who I do not feel very hungry when I first wake up in the morning.

I don't feel very hungry throughout most of the day.

And I will onboard most of my calories probably in...

the hours probably in about a four hour period, maybe less, even three hour period.

And then I will cut myself off about 90 minutes before sleep.

So I'm classically, I would have been considered as, you know, violating this sleep dogma of cutting yourself off at least three hours.

I think it's very personal though.

Just experiment with it.

You will know the situation.