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Eat these foods to sleep soundly when you’re stressed

There is something you can do to nod off quicker when you’re stressed - and the answer might be in your kitchen.

Sleep prebiotics

A racing mind doesn’t lend itself to sound sleep. But there is something you can do to nod off quicker when you’re stressed - and the answer might be in your kitchen.

Eating prebiotic food may help you sleep after experiencing stressful events, a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience suggests.

Prebiotics are a type of fiber that feed probiotics, or the good bacteria that keep your gut happy. You can find them in foods like apples, legumes, oatmeal, and asparagus.

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Researchers put a group of rats on a prebiotic diet for several weeks before purposefully stressing them out. They induced the same stressful event in another group of rats that weren’t fed prebiotics.

Afterwards, the mice who ate the prebiotics didn’t experience the stress-induced disruption to their gut microbiota as the other rats did - that’s important, since a messed-up microbiome can cause your sleep to suffer.

In fact, the mice fed the prebiotics returned to normal sleep patterns sooner after experiencing the stressful events than the other mice did.

While the experiments were done on rats, the results are likely applicable to humans too, since the events the rats experienced would be the human equivalent to death of a loved one or a car accident, lead author Robert Thompson, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado at Boulder noted in a news release.

More research will be done to see exactly how humans’ gut bacteria—and sleep patterns—changes when they’re given prebiotics after trauma.

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And that’s important, since a gut microbiome that’s out of whack can affect more than just your sleep: Depleted gut health has been linked to systemic inflammation, obesity, depression, lowered insulin resistance, and numerous digestive conditions, too.

While the scientists still need to solidify the link in humans, it doesn’t hurt to up your prebiotics in your diet now.

So far, no bad effects from eating prebiotics have been reported, Thompson said in the release.

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