Dr. Matt Walker

That would probably be the advice.

Great.

It's very interesting.

There was somewhat of a dogma out there that we have to stop eating three or four hours before bed for optimal sleep.

If you look at the data, the data is quite a spread, no pun intended.

There are some people for whom that works very well.

And if they eat even two hours before bed, they just get disrupted in terms of their sleep.

Some of that is about people just feeling too full and not feeling comfortable.

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.