7 easy sleep tips to help blood sugar

Not sleeping enough doesn’t just make you less efficient and grumpier the following day. Recent research says that not getting enough sleep may contribute to insulin resistance. These tips will help.

An easy way to feel less stressed during the day — one that most of us fail to capitalize on — is to get enough sleep at night. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to bed and wake up with better blood sugar control? In effect, that may be what you do when you get adequate sleep. One reason insulin resistance suffers is that poor sleepers often experience sleep apnea, a condition that interferes with normal breathing and has been linked to diabetes.

There's also evidence that sleep by itself helps the body use glucose more efficiently. One study found that people who got only about five hours of sleep had 40 percent lower insulin sensitivity than people who got about eight hours.

Most people get 60 to 90 minutes less than they really need. If this sounds like a problem with a simple solution, it is. Sleep more!

But getting enough sleep is as much about quality as quantity, and it's not always easy to drift off when you want to, especially when you're under stress.

If you're eating right, exercising and managing stress, you're already doing plenty that will help you get good sleep. If you still need help, however, try these tips.

Snoozing late on weekends seems an obvious way to catch up on your winks, but it may be doing more harm than good by throwing your body out of rhythm, making it more difficult to get to sleep at night.

If you're going to add sleep time, do it by going to bed earlier and getting up at the usual time. Then try to stick to your new schedule so that your body clock knows when to cue feelings of sleepiness at night.

Keep the TV out of the bedroom, and don't pay bills or do other paperwork in bed.

Put down that page-turner well ahead of bedtime, and if at all possible, don't start conversations that could lead to disagreements.

If you find yourself bombarded by worries at night, take a half hour before bed to record your concerns and jot down possible solutions. When you feel you've dealt with an issue, you're more likely to drift off.

If you can't sleep after 30 minutes, get out of bed, or you'll just get frustrated with your efforts to fall asleep. In one study, volunteers who were offered money to fall asleep quickly took longer to nod off than those who weren't under any pressure. Keep the lights low and pick up a boring book or tune into a dull TV program until you feel sleepy again.

Once you nod off, you'll have a better chance of falling back to sleep if you just stay in bed, and your body will be getting rest, even if you're not sleeping.

You want to do everything you can to keep blood sugar under control and if that means changing your sleeping habits, it’s worth following through. This advice will help you to manage sleep effectively for better blood sugar control.