While it’s true that some vitamins can help you get better sleep, it’s important to understand that improving your sleep quality requires the right combination of vitamins plus other life habits including diet, exercise and time spent outdoors. And it is a process that can take some time.
How Vitamins & Minerals Help With Sleep
In order to move smoothly through normal sleep cycles, such as REM sleep, deep sleep and light sleep, the brain uses neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that send messages in our brain at key times. Normal brain function requires certain vitamins and minerals in order to make these neurotransmitters.
If you’re experiencing disrupted sleep, insomnia, frequent nighttime awakenings, daytime sleepiness or other sleep disorders, your brain may not have the raw materials it needs to make the necessary neurotransmitters. That’s where vitamin and mineral supplementation can help.
Certain vitamins help your body regulate sleep in a variety of ways. For example, some vitamins are involved in helping your body sync up with the day-night cycle (or circadian rhythm), while other vitamins regulate proper paralysis during sleep for optimal repair of moving parts.
If vitamin and mineral deficiencies are left unchecked, there is increased risk that your sleep issues may evolve into chronic illness.
So, which vitamins help improve sleep quality?
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is an essential vitamin for sleep. Vitamin D affects the chemistry of the neurotransmitters that allow us to fall asleep and transition through various stages of sleep.
Unfortunately, The world’s population is now more vitamin D deficient and more sleep deprived than ever. You might be wondering, why now?
To best understand our current problem, it is also important to understand that “vitamin D” is actually not a vitamin at all. It is not a nutrient. It is a naturally occurring hormone that we make on our skin, and does not require supplementation in a healthy, outside-living population.
Throughout history, healthy populations achieved proper vitamin D levels from regular sun exposure and in babies, from their mothers who had regular sun exposure during pregnancy and passed healthy levels of D to their babies in utero and through breast milk.
In modern culture, sun exposure has been greatly reduced. More people working indoors means less exposure to healthy doses of sunlight. Sunscreen and avoidance of the sun, while originally intended to prevent sunburn, is now being recommended for all populations around the globe. Sunscreen overuse and sun avoidance has resulted in some unintended consequences, and one of the most important is abnormal sleep.
While we do want to avoid sunburn, the message that the sun is “bad” has made some people fear being exposed to direct sunlight altogether. I believe this has had a disastrous impact on global vitamin D levels, and overall health.
Modern babies are often born vitamin D deficient. If your mother had vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, then you were likely born with low vitamin D levels, before you even had a chance to get healthy exposure to the sun. It’s a vicious cycle since low vitamin D levels start a “domino effect” of other vitamin deficiencies that compromise your health and your sleep. The good news is that low vitamin D levels can be prevented and corrected through supplementation and by being outside more.
This begs the harder question: How do you supplement vitamin D safely and effectively?
Many health & wellness websites recommend an arbitrary daily vitamin D dose for everyone. This is problematic for several reasons:
The amount of vitamin D you should take per day is unique for each person. Because D is a hormone the proper goal is to achieve a healthy vitamin D level, which can only be determined through a blood test. While supplementation can be a critical part of helping a D-deficient person regain health, it is important to supplement with caution. Your body has protective measures that prevent “overdose” of vitamin D through sun exposure alone, but vitamin D supplementation in combination with sun exposure, can result in a high vitamin D blood level that can be harmful.
Everyone has a different starting point (initial vitamin D level) AND a different way of responding to vitamin D supplementation based on their deficiency state. The only safe way to supplement is by collecting your own data, measuring your D blood levels in response to the D dose you are taking. The RightSleep Workbook shows you how to do this easily and accurately.
Vitamin D is a bacterial growth factor that you need to have a healthy intestinal microbiome. If you’ve been D deficient for long periods of time your microbiome has changed to a D-deficient microbiome. In other words, while your microbiome has been D-deficient your body has been trying to function despite not receiving hundreds of substances that the normal bacteria regularly supply, including the B vitamins.
B Vitamins
The B vitamins are eight other substances that are critical to healthy, restorative sleep. Just like with vitamin D, a healthy outside-living population does not need to supplement B’s, because their healthy gut bacteria will produce the complete set of B vitamins naturally.
Healthy people have four very specific types of gut bacteria. Together, those four groups make a total of 8 chemicals called bacterial growth factors, otherwise known as the B vitamins. When you have the healthy four groups of gut bacteria, you receive the 8 chemicals that we call B vitamins and you enjoy optimal health – from digestion to sleep.
In order to thrive, these four groups of healthy bacteria need D, which we supply. If your vitamin D has been low for years, the healthy bacteria that used to make your B vitamins didn’t survive. They were replaced by other not-so-healthy bacteria. So low D sabotaged both your gut health, and your sleep.
You may have heard that “all health is connected to your gut.” If you’ve ever wondered why you have both sleep issues AND gut issues, such as irritable bowel syndrome, food allergies or gluten sensitivity, it’s because sleep health and gut health go hand in hand.
Though many B vitamins have gained popularity for their individual function — for example “B1 can reduce stress,” “B6 may improve mood,’ or “B12 can increase energy” — it is important to understand that healthy people who sleep great have a balanced SET of all 8 B vitamins being supplied by their healthy bacteria in specific ratios.
B vitamins fun fact: Even though Medicine originally labeled B vitamins with numbers 1 through 12, now there are only 8 that are still called ”vitamins” . B4, B8, B10, and B11 are chemicals that we can make internally so they are not called vitamins anymore. The 8 B vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and B12) are the ones that we need from our gut bacteria.
RightSleep®, provides a customizable framework of guidance on the dosage and timing necessary to restore your vitamin D and B levels, to heal your gut microbiome, and ultimately, restore your sleep.
There are also other vitamins and minerals that can play a role in better sleep. The most important thing to know as you learn about these vitamins is that they will only help you if you have a deficiency that needs to be corrected.
Magnesium
Magnesium is a mineral. Magnesium can be consumed through whole foods, as well as nutritional supplements. Magnesium glycinate and magnesium threonate appear to be more easily absorbed into the brain, and may be more effective than other types of magnesium.
Interestingly, magnesium can play a major role in healthy sleep. Magnesium helps regulate neurotransmitters which have direct effects linked to phases of sleep. Magnesium levels in the brain appear to change in relationship to the phases of sleep.
This means, if you have a magnesium deficiency, both your REM and deep sleep can be positively impacted with magnesium.
Melatonin
A healthy population will have optimal melatonin levels, as melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone. That means, in a perfect world, we all produce melatonin naturally.
However, just like with the B vitamins, you can become melatonin deficient, and that deficiency can have a negative impact on your sleep.
Newer research shows that melatonin not only has multiple roles in many parts of our body, but that it also plays an important role in initiating sleep. This is why many people take it at night, as an over-the-counter supplement, to aid in falling asleep.
Some people with sleep issues won’t respond to melatonin if they do not happen to have a deficiency. Others find a melatonin supplement helpful in aiding the transition from waking to sleeping, but find these supplements to be a trade off, since they can induce unwanted side effects, such as an increase in nighttime awakenings.
Calcium
Calcium is a mineral that is most often associated with healthy bones; however calcium may also play an important part in sleep. Particularly, calcium is believed to increase REM sleep, when someone has previously had a calcium deficiency. It has also been considered a natural sleep aid that helps with nighttime drowsiness. This may be why many over-the-counter sleep aids, including some melatonin supplements, contain calcium.
There is also a relationship between calcium and vitamin D. One of the main functions of D is to help absorb calcium better. Because the RightSleep® program helps optimize vitamin D levels, many people who follow the program find that they no longer need to supplement calcium, since vitamin D helps them absorb what they need from food.
Iodine
Iodine is necessary for thyroid hormone production, and thyroid hormone is very important for optimal sleep. So if for you, iodine deficiency is causing low thyroid hormone, supplementing with iodine can support better sleep. You can get iodine in pill or drop form, as well as from high-iodine foods, such as kelp.
What About Other Supplements?
People often ask, “What other vitamins and minerals can support sleep?” What about zinc, vitamin C, or vitamin A? While these can all play an important role in health, and you may see articles about their direct link to sleep, what is most important is to notice your body’s unique response to these supplements added individually. Always notice what your body says about any change in your habit, whether it’s walking outside daily or adding a supplement.
The goal of RightSleep® is for your body to be making important repairs every night while you are sleeping. When your sleep is optimized, you will fall asleep easily and stay asleep approximately 8 hours until the morning, waking up feeling rested and ready to go. That goes for older adults too!
In order to accomplish these repairs, the brain needs multiple raw materials. Not only vitamin D and the B vitamins but also a normal microbiome providing hundreds of additional substances that we need to be healthy.