Honey for sleep

[horselover]

I have had CFS for 34 years and I have had insomnia for at least the last ten years. No matter what I would take to get myself to sleep, including 5-HTP, valerian, hops, l-theanine, GABA, melatonin and various combinations of the above mentioned supplements nothing would work. I simply could not sleep and would lay awake for hours and sometimes I would not sleep at all and others I would fall asleep after 3 or 4 in the morning. None of this affected my CFS schedule, however, which is that I feel good one day and bad the next regardless of whether I sleep or not. In fact, I have had many days when I felt better with little or no sleep then on days following a good night's sleep.

But most of the time if I do not get sleep at night I simply cannot function the next day so out of desperation I looked up on a website that I go to for holistic advice called Earthclinic.com to see if they had any good advice and there I actually found something that worked. Although the remedy that I found was listed under apple cider vinegar, it actually involved taking honey with apple cider vinegar and I decided to try it and I can't believe the results that it had. I took the remedy and I feel asleep almost immediately upon going to bed. And that remedy has been working for me for about 2 months now.

Since then I have done more research on honey and it has many benefits besides helping with sleep but sleep is a big benefit of taking honey. The remedy that I found said to mix one cup of honey with 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar ( with the mother) and store that in an air tight container and each night at bedtime take 2 tablespoons of the mixture. I did that and it definitely worked. On another site it described that taking honey caused a mild glucose spike which causes a release of insulin from a pancreas which drives tryptophan into the brain. The tryptophan is converted to serotonin and in darkness the serotonin is converted to melatonin in the pineal gland.

Since taking the honey at night I have basically gotten rid of insomnia but I still find that I need to stay awake until at least 11 PM before I attempt to go to bed. If I go earlier then I can't sleep for some reason and the insomnia is back. I must actually stay awake until at least 11 PM, take the honey remedy and then I will fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours. Most nights I don't even wake up to go to the bathroom.

However, although this remedy has helped my sleep it has not done anything to help my CFS. I wake up after a good night's sleep on one day and feel great and have all kinds of energy. Then I wake up the next day after another good night's sleep and feel like I could sleep all day long. This has been a symptom of mine for 34 years and nothing I do seems to help that and it has nothing to do with what I do each day as my activities are the same on all days. But at least the honey has helped with sleep giving me a deep sleep that I have not experienced in years. So for anyone that is desperate for sleep maybe trying some raw unfiltered honey might help.

 

[Wishful]

I doubt that it would work for me. All easily-digested carbs, such as sugar and refined flour, give me insomnia. I seem to have enough TRP going to my brain. Something else is triggering the insomnia.

 

[IThinkImTurningJapanese]

This honey has an amazing floral aroma.

 

[perchance dreamer]

@IThinkImTurningJapanese, what an incredible video! I'd love to try some of that honey, but I wouldn't want to dangle from cliffs to get it. It's amazing they don't have to wear protective clothing around the bees.

 

[IThinkImTurningJapanese]

It's amazing they don't have to wear protective clothing around the bees.

You know, there was at one time reports of relief from ME/CFS by purposefully getting yourself stung by honeybees. You gotta be pretty desperate to try that, my dumbass did.

Having a neurological illness, one characterized by increased sensitivity to pain, and getting yourself stung by bees doesn't work out so well.

But you can buy this honey, it's a bit more expensive than Manuka honey and in the potency I obtained, not very intoxicating.

 

[Wolfcub]

@horselover I am so glad you find that honey is helping you. Bless those bees!
Actually it is quite amazing what honey (and other bee products) are good for. Honey has healed serious wounds and some have antibiotic properties.

Even though the honey mix doesn't help your CFS and sometimes you don't feel much better for a good sleep, it is necessary to get sleep. And chronic insomnia is a torture all of its own. It is better to sleep.

What honey do you use? There is so much about nowadays with corn syrup to bulk it up. (and other sweeteners) Raw honey is best.
Apparently to honey connoisseurs, the healing properties of a honey depend on what nectars went into it -from which plants....and the time it is collected, etc. As well obviously as the health of the hive.

I wish you well with this and hope you get more good sleep.

By the way it seems fairly common that some with ME/CFS have weird effects from sleep/lack of it.
At my worst, I sometimes felt physically better when I had slept very little and once or twice even not at all! Terribly tired but healthier! It was strange and I couldn't understand it.
And I was an 8-hours a night person before that.
And now it's a little different. I can sleep normally again and feel no worse. We change I think.
It's also common for some of us to have some level of delayed sleep phase syndrome. That is we don't actually have "insomnia". We just can NOT get to sleep early, but sleep okay when we do, and wake up later than is popular! I am one of those but am retired so can make friends with my dsps.
(By the way....11pm bedtime! That would be shockingly early bedtime for me! Wow....last time I got to sleep at that time I'd pulled a 36-hour waking shift!)
Well I can always dream of going to sleep at that time.....it would be nice.....

 

[Wolfcub]

You know, there was at one time reports of relief from ME/CFS by purposefully getting yourself stung by honeybees. You gotta be pretty desperate to try that, my dumbass did.

Having a neurological illness, one characterized by increased sensitivity to pain, and getting yourself stung by bees doesn't work out so well.

But you can buy this honey, it's a bit more expensive than Manuka honey and in the potency I obtained, not very intoxicating.

View attachment 30696

It's true. The bee venom is also healing for the immune system.
But when a bee stings it dies, The sting is ripped out of it and rips the abdomen. The idea of it hurts my heart. I love bees and they have been kind to me.
It's a pity we can't extract the venom without killing the bee....but I don't think that is so far possible.

 

[Mary]

Thanks @horselover - I'm going to try that! I keep finding things that help with sleep, but almost all of them only work short-term and then I have to find something else.

 

[RWP (Rest without Peace)]

Since then I have done more research on honey and it has many benefits besides helping with sleep but sleep is a big benefit of taking honey. The remedy that I found said to mix one cup of honey with 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar ( with the mother) and store that in an air tight container and each night at bedtime take 2 tablespoons of the mixture. I did that and it definitely worked. On another site it described that taking honey caused a mild glucose spike which causes a release of insulin from a pancreas which drives tryptophan into the brain. The tryptophan is converted to serotonin and in darkness the serotonin is converted to melatonin in the pineal gland.

I also have been eating honey near bedtime. I did this intuitively without checking out the research. Good info.

RWP

 

[Wishful]

I was thinking more about the insulin->TRP->serotonin->sleep claim, and I think it's unlikely. Only a small fraction (~1%) of the cerebral TRP gets converted to 5-HTP (first step to melatonin), so our brains typically have plenty of TRP. I found a good article on TRP function: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908021/ One comment is:

'When taken together, the findings from these studies suggest that changes in tryptophan availability can be manipulated to some extent through dietary intake, although it is unlikely that ordinary changes in dietary tryptophan or the CAAs through protein or carbohydrate manipulations will produce changes substantial enough to have a noticeable impact on behavior in a healthy individual'

Also: ' In one study, comparison of three calorically equivalent high carbohydrate meals across the day showed an elevated tryptophan/CAA ratio only after the first meal of the day.83 Another study85 showed that evening meals comprised of either 20% protein or 500 kcal carbohydrates had no significant effect on the tryptophan/CAA ratio.'

It's relatively easy to test whether the insulin boost is responsible (or not) for effects on sleep: take some BCAA's with the honey, which would block the increased transport of TRP.

Also, if it is the insulin boost that's responsible, then any high-glycemic-index food should have the same effect. If a cookie or soft drink doesn't have the same effect as honey, there must be something else in the honey causing the effect.

If honey works but other carbs don't, you might want to experiment with different types of honey to figure out which is most effective. Maybe the processing (or lack of) is important, or the type of blossoms the bees visit.

 

[perchance dreamer]

Normally, I eat low carb, but a couple of times a week I have a sweet potato with dinner. It helps my sleep. I sleep even better when I combine the sweet potato with turkey. Complex carbs feel better to me than simple ones.

It's funny: Chicken is supposed to have a bit more tryptophan than turkey, but chicken does not help my sleep at all, and turkey really does.

My favorite sweet potato is the hannah, AKA as O'Henry or Jersey at some stores. It's less sweet than other sweet potatoes and has a dry texture like a white potato. That makes them ideal for roasted sweet potato fries.

 

[jesse's mom]

Thanks for the post, all of this is very interesting!

Poor Deepack!

 

[5150]

Since then I have done more research on honey and it has many benefits besides helping with sleep but sleep is a big benefit of taking honey. The remedy that I found said to mix one cup of honey with 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar ( with the mother) and store that in an air tight container and each night at bedtime take 2 tablespoons of the mixture. I did that and it definitely worked. On another site it described that taking honey caused a mild glucose spike which causes a release of insulin from a pancreas which drives tryptophan into the brain. The tryptophan is converted to serotonin and in darkness the serotonin is converted to melatonin in the pineal gland.

________________________________________________
^ certainly like this info ^

I read this post yesterday, gathered my great honeys not-yet-finished, enough for the Cup (Aseda wild from Africa, Dr. Mercola's raw, and a bit of Manuka, put in the 2 TSP of acv, and waited until about 15 minutes before bedtime. I then took a couple of small licks to test it, and it was so powerful as to be almost too much --->head spinning, etc

So I waited another 15 minutes and repeated the process as before. Same result.
I'm not certain if it's the power of those extraordinary honeys, 'or if it's just too much sugar' (?) , even though I reduced the volume consumed. It was either too strong or too sweet for my personal limit.

Thanks for bringing up an interesting topic.

 

[Wishful]

It's funny: Chicken is supposed to have a bit more tryptophan than turkey, but chicken does not help my sleep at all, and turkey really does.

The frequent claim that it's the tryptophan in turkey that makes people sleepy seems to be a myth. It's the overeating that is common with turkey that typically makes people sleepy. Meats, including poultry, have more CAA (chained amino acids) than tryptophan, which means that the CAA's block the transport of TRP into the brain.

If turkey makes you sleepier than chicken, it's probably not the TRP content responsible.

 

[perchance dreamer]

The frequent claim that it's the tryptophan in turkey that makes people sleepy seems to be a myth. It's the overeating that is common with turkey that typically makes people sleepy.

I don't overeat when I have turkey. It's my favorite meat, so we eat it year round rather than the big holiday meals.

 

[horselover]

@horselover I am so glad you find that honey is helping you. Bless those bees!

What honey do you use? There is so much about nowadays with corn syrup to bulk it up. (and other sweeteners) Raw honey is best.

By the way it seems fairly common that some with ME/CFS have weird effects from sleep/lack of it.
At my worst, I sometimes felt physically better when I had slept very little and once or twice even not at all! Terribly tired but healthier! It was strange and I couldn't understand it.
And I was an 8-hours a night person before that.
And now it's a little different. I can sleep normally again and feel no worse. We change I think.
It's also common for some of us to have some level of delayed sleep phase syndrome. That is we don't actually have "insomnia". We just can NOT get to sleep early, but sleep okay when we do, and wake up later than is popular! I am one of those but am retired so can make friends with my dsps.
(By the way....11pm bedtime! That would be shockingly early bedtime for me! Wow....last time I got to sleep at that time I'd pulled a 36-hour waking shift!)
Well I can always dream of going to sleep at that time.....it would be nice.....

I use raw, unfiltered honey as that is what all the articles said to use. I went to buy some honey from a vendor on the street and said to him that I wanted to use the honey as a sleep aid and he said to me that all honey will help a person to sleep. It acted as if that was common knowledge but I had never heard of it until I read about it online.

I also have had times when I felt that I would feel better with no sleep or little sleep rather than getting a lot of sleep. I have had nights when I did not sleep at all and would feel just fine the next day but that is not the normal thing for me. If I don't sleep at all I usually will feel extremely awful and sleepy the next.

Normally I would go to sleep at 10:30 and if I felt wide awake I would not sleep at night and feel awful the next day. Then the next night since I felt so sleepy and awful anyway I would have no trouble falling asleep and would sleep well and feel okay that next day. And the pattern would repeat. On my good days I would have to take many sleep aids to make myself sleepy so I could sleep and then I would sleep and still feel horrible the next day even though I had slept, which is why I sometimes felt that I would do better if I did not sleep at all, but I do have to have sleep.

Then I started to take the honey and I went to sleep feeling wide awake and within minutes I was sound asleep and slept straight through for 8 hours. But that still did not mean I would have a good day just because I slept well but at least on my good days I don't have to worry about not sleeping that night.

I just had a night a couple of days ago where I was really busy and wide awake doing something until 1 A.M. Normally, since I was so wired from what I was doing that would guarantee that I would not sleep but I took the honey and ACV mixture and I fell asleep right away for 8 hours and even felt good the next day, which actually was supposed to be a bad day for me. But I am making up for it today as today is a bad day and it was supposed to be a good one. I am always trying to figure out how to make everyday good but so far I can't come up with a solution.

 

[horselover]

I was thinking more about the insulin->TRP->serotonin->sleep claim, and I think it's unlikely. Only a small fraction (~1%) of the cerebral TRP gets converted to 5-HTP (first step to melatonin), so our brains typically have plenty of TRP. I found a good article on TRP function: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908021/ One comment is:

'When taken together, the findings from these studies suggest that changes in tryptophan availability can be manipulated to some extent through dietary intake, although it is unlikely that ordinary changes in dietary tryptophan or the CAAs through protein or carbohydrate manipulations will produce changes substantial enough to have a noticeable impact on behavior in a healthy individual'

Also: ' In one study, comparison of three calorically equivalent high carbohydrate meals across the day showed an elevated tryptophan/CAA ratio only after the first meal of the day.83 Another study85 showed that evening meals comprised of either 20% protein or 500 kcal carbohydrates had no significant effect on the tryptophan/CAA ratio.'

It's relatively easy to test whether the insulin boost is responsible (or not) for effects on sleep: take some BCAA's with the honey, which would block the increased transport of TRP.

Also, if it is the insulin boost that's responsible, then any high-glycemic-index food should have the same effect. If a cookie or soft drink doesn't have the same effect as honey, there must be something else in the honey causing the effect.

If honey works but other carbs don't, you might want to experiment with different types of honey to figure out which is most effective. Maybe the processing (or lack of) is important, or the type of blossoms the bees visit.

@Wishful definitely other carbs do not work for me as I absolutely love chocolate and always have some kind of chocolate desert at night and that does not help me at all and it also doesn't hinder me as I have been going without desert for a while and there was no change. The only change started when I took the honey and I can't believe the response that I had to it. I also have ACV mixed in so maybe that helps but on some nights I just took straight honey and it still helped me to sleep. I have no idea why it works but it does work and that is all I care about right now.

This Honey/Insulin/Melatonin cycle that I described was taken from a website at
www.organicolivia.com/2015/11/eat-honey-before-bed-for-deep-sleep-weight-loss-liver-health/

A lot is explained about glucose vs fructose and also the glycogen level in the liver and how much glycogen is used by the liver and how much it needs to function at might when we are fasting. Certainly I am not smart enough to understand what is being said but it sounds that you might get something out of reading that page.

 

[horselover]

[QUOTE="horselover, post: 1021503


I read this post yesterday, gathered my great honeys not-yet-finished, enough for the Cup (Aseda wild from Africa, Dr. Mercola's raw, and a bit of Manuka, put in the 2 TSP of acv, and waited until about 15 minutes before bedtime. I then took a couple of small licks to test it, and it was so powerful as to be almost too much --->head spinning, etc

So I waited another 15 minutes and repeated the process as before. Same result.
I'm not certain if it's the power of those extraordinary honeys, 'or if it's just too much sugar' (?) , even though I reduced the volume consumed. It was either too strong or too sweet for my personal limit.

Thanks for bringing up an interesting topic.

@5150 There are also other remedies for sleep using honey. Some of them only use a little bit of honey and some form of fat such as coconut oil. One recipe used 1/4 tsp honey and 1 tsp coconut oil or you can just make sure to use fat and honey at a 4 to 1 ratio. One website talked about eating ghee for the fat but still using the 4 to 1 ratio. I tried this one using coconut oil and it worked also but I can't stand coconut oil so I opted for the other recipe. If you look online there are many websites that talk about honey for sleep and you certainly do not have to use the one I am using. I am only using it because it worked for me and I would rather take ACV then coconut oil. Some also suggest taking a pinch Redmond's sea salt at the same time which I have also done.

 

[Wishful]

The article you linked to seems like fake science to me: building a major claim from a small actual difference. It claims that honey is best because it's glucose/fructose level is ideal for the liver. Well, 38/32 is pretty close to ordinary sugar 50/50, so it doesn't seem like it should have a major effect. Similarly, they make a fuss about the insulin->sleep bit, but the article (scientific, peer-reviewed) I linked to shows that it's an insignificant effect. Health magazines have goals other than good science.

If the honey you are presently using works for you, great. If it stops working, or if you can't get that brand anymore, you might want to try to find out what component of that honey is causing the effect. Testing glucose/fructose is easy. If it's some component of the blossoms visited, it could be a long search.

 

[samantha-g]

It's true. The bee venom is also healing for the immune system.
But when a bee stings it dies, The sting is ripped out of it and rips the abdomen. The idea of it hurts my heart. I love bees and they have been kind to me.
It's a pity we can't extract the venom without killing the bee....but I don't think that is so far possible.

It can be made without hurting or killing bees. I can't remember which websites but if you look at some of the honey and bee venom New Zealand sites you will find some with descriptions and can buy.