ANCSLEEP BLOG

Even the deepest sleepers experience brief moments of wakefulness throughout the night. These tiny interruptions—called microawakenings—are completely normal and often go unnoticed. In fact, most people have dozens of them every night.

But while microawakenings are a natural part of the sleep cycle, they can become problematic when they occur too frequently or last too long. When that happens, they can fragment sleep, leave you feeling unrefreshed in the morning, and subtly contribute to daytime fatigue, mood changes, and cognitive fog.

Understanding what microawakenings are, why they happen, and how they affect your rest can help you make sense of symptoms you may not even realize are sleep-related.

In today’s fast-paced world, many couples struggle to find moments of calm connection. Between demanding work schedules, family responsibilities, and daily stress, it’s easy for physical closeness, emotional bonding, and restful sleep to suffer. One practice that has steadily gained popularity for nurturing both wellness and relationships is the couples massage.

While most people think of couples massages as a spa-day luxury, they offer benefits that extend far beyond simple relaxation. Research increasingly shows that massage—especially when shared with a partner—can improve sleep quality, reduce stress hormones, enhance emotional connection, and support physical intimacy.

Here’s how couples massages can help you sleep better and grow closer, along with tips for making massage a restorative ritual within your relationship.

Sleep is one of the body’s most essential restorative processes—but for people living with overactive bladder (OAB), restful sleep can feel frustratingly out of reach. Waking up multiple times a night with the sudden urge to urinate interrupts sleep cycles, increases daytime fatigue, and contributes to stress and reduced quality of life. What’s often underestimated is how deeply OAB affects not only nighttime comfort but also overall physical and mental health.

If you find yourself waking up repeatedly to go to the bathroom or lying awake worried you might need to get up soon, you’re not alone. Overactive bladder affects millions of adults of all ages, and nighttime symptoms—known as nocturia—are among the most disruptive.

This article explores how OAB interferes with sleep, why it happens, and evidence-based ways to improve nighttime rest.

For many people, the morning doesn’t officially begin until they’ve had their first cup of something warm. While coffee often gets the spotlight, tea offers a gentler, more sustained path to wakefulness—without the jittery spike-and-crash that caffeine sometimes causes. What makes tea such a reliable pick-me-up isn’t just the caffeine itself, but the synergy of unique bioactive compounds found in different varieties.

If you’re looking to sharpen focus, boost mental clarity, or simply feel more energized throughout the day, here are the key tea ingredients that naturally support wakefulness—and how they work in your body.

For decades, breakfast has been called “the most important meal of the day.” While that phrase can feel a little cliché, there is a strong scientific basis behind how your first meal influences energy, focus, metabolism, and mood throughout the day.

Not everyone wakes up hungry, and not every breakfast is automatically energizing—but what you eat (or don’t eat) in the morning has a meaningful impact on how your body functions for the next 12 hours.

In this post, we’ll unpack the physiology behind breakfast, the role it plays in blood sugar regulation, why skipping it affects some people more than others, and how to build a morning meal that actually supports stable energy levels.

Caffeine is the world’s most widely used stimulant—and for good reason. A morning coffee sharpens focus, boosts energy, elevates mood, and helps you push through long days or early starts. But the same boost that gets you going can also lead to an abrupt decline hours later: the notorious caffeine crash.

A caffeine crash can leave you feeling drained, foggy, irritable, and hungrier than usual, as if someone suddenly pulled the plug on your energy supply. If you rely heavily on caffeine, especially late into the day, you may experience this crash regularly without realizing exactly why it happens.

In this post, we’ll break down what a caffeine crash actually is, why it happens on a physiological level, what symptoms to look for, and how to avoid the rollercoaster altogether.

Sleep challenges are extremely common among autistic children. Research suggests that anywhere from 40% to 80% of autistic kids experience difficulties falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early. These struggles often stem from a mix of sensory sensitivities, anxiety, differences in melatonin production, and challenges with self-regulation.

Among the many tools parents explore, weighted blankets have become one of the most popular—and for good reason. While they’re not a cure-all, many families report meaningful improvements in their child’s ability to settle at night, calm their body, and achieve deeper, more consistent rest.

In this post, we’ll break down why weighted blankets can be helpful, what the science says, how they affect the nervous system, and how to choose and use one safely.

Sleep isn’t simply a matter of feeling tired and closing your eyes—it’s a highly coordinated biological shift. The body must move from a state of alertness into a state of deep restoration, and that transition is controlled largely by two branches of your autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.

Think of them as the body’s accelerator and brake. Both are essential. Both influence sleep. And both can work for—or against—you depending on your daily habits and stress levels.

In this post, we’ll break down what these systems do, how they interact during the sleep–wake cycle, and how you can support the parasympathetic system to promote deeper, more restorative rest.

Sleep depends on a delicate balance of neurotransmitters, particularly serotonin and dopamine, which play opposing but complementary roles.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that helps the body produce serotonin and melatonin, key chemicals for mood and sleep regulation. While often associated with turkey, many everyday foods can support better sleep naturally.