Milk

A glass of warm milk will put you to sleep

Warm milk is one of the first recommendations for insomnia. If you cannot sleep, a glass of warm milk is supposed to have you snoozing away in no time. Over a thousand years ago, even the Talmud recommended drinking milk to help you sleep. Many people continue to believe that warm milk will get them snoring quickly. In one study, a third of elderly patients who had tried something to help them sleep in the last year reported that they drank milk to try to get to sleep. Warm milk is one of the most common strategies people use to battle their insomnia.

Unfortunately for the exhausted insomniacs reading this book in the middle of the night, there is no scientific evidence that warm milk will help you sleep. While some patients report that milk helps them sleep, there are no studies showing any benefit in terms of how long it takes to fall asleep or for how long one sleeps.

Some people claim that warm milk is a great cure for insomnia because milk contains tryptophan. You may know that turkey contains tryptophan, and many people blame this substance as the reason why turkey makes you sleepy. Both milk and turkey do contain tryptophan, but you cannot blame the tryptophan from either one for putting you to sleep. (If you read our book, Don’t Swallow Your Gum!, you may remember that turkey does not make you sleepy.) Neither milk nor turkey contains exceptional amounts of tryptophan. Turkey contains about the same amount of tryptophan per gram as ground beef or chicken—0.24 gram of tryptophan per 100 grams of the food. Eggs and cheese contain much more tryptophan per gram than turkey, at 0.3 to 1 gram of tryptophan per gram of food. And milk? A mere 0.08 gram of tryptophan per gram of milk. Not much at all! You need much more tryptophan than that to put you to sleep. An egg and cheese sandwich would be a better bet for the tryptophan, but even with that you would need to eat a lot of sandwiches to get enough tryptophan to have an effect. Moreover, tryptophan is not absorbed well with food. Other people claim that milk somehow changes how tryptophan is absorbed by the body, but there is no science to support that milk helps you sleep by changing how different types of tryptophan are absorbed.

What does work to help you sleep? One of the more effective ways to help you sleep without taking drugs is to use stimulus control therapy. In this technique, you try to retrain yourself to associate the bed with being sleepy. If you are unable to sleep within twenty minutes, you are supposed to leave the bedroom and return only when you are very sleepy. You also avoid doing things like reading or watching television in bed. The only thing you are supposed to do in bed is sleep there. This could actually become one of the ways that milk would work to help someone sleep. If one believes strongly that warm milk makes you sleepy, then this might become a strong enough association in your own mind that milk will help you feel sleepy. Relaxing your muscles slowly, one by one, has also been found to be an effective technique to help you sleep.