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Can taking Wegovy improve your sleep?
- Wegovy helps regulate the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which affect your sleep as well as your appetite.
- For people with overweight or obesity, losing weight with Wegovy could help improve sleep quality.
- By reducing your appetite, Wegovy helps you avoid eating near bedtime (which is associated with disrupted sleep).
- Wegovy may also help improve sleep in people with type-2 diabetes or obstructive sleep apnoea.
Medically reviewed by
Craig Marsh, Independent Prescriber
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Last updated on Sep 05, 2024.
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There is some evidence that there’s a link between Wegovy and sleep. Wegovy could improve your sleep quality as it affects your hormones, appetite, and blood sugar levels.
But this isn’t the main purpose of taking Wegovy. If you’re having trouble sleeping, it’s really important to speak to a medical professional. This helps address any underlying health concerns or individual circumstances that could be affecting your sleep.
Why you might sleep better with Wegovy
Wegovy is a medicine you inject once per week to help you lose weight, alongside eating a balanced diet and engaging in regular physical activity. The active ingredient in Wegovy, semaglutide, is known as a GLP-1 receptor agonist, which mimics the effects of natural GLP-1 hormone in the body. This reduces your appetite by slowing down the speed your stomach empties, helping you to eat less and achieve your weight loss goals.
While Wegovy isn’t designed to help you sleep better, there could be benefits of Wegovy and weight loss that can improve your sleep quality.
Sleep hormone regulation might improve
We say ‘might’, because the research that’s out there paints a complex picture of the relationship between GLP-1 and two hormones linked with sleep: ghrelin and leptin.
Semaglutide has been shown to increase metabolism, as well as improving sensitivity to leptin and reducing ghrelin levels.
Leptin helps send signals to your brain that tell it you have enough energy, which makes you feel more satisfied after eating. Leptin is also thought to help preserve deep sleep by antagonising orexin neuron function, which is involved in monitoring sleep and wakefulness.
Ghrelin is thought to stimulate your appetite as levels rise, making you feel hungry. Scientific data indicates a clear interaction between ghrelin and GLP-1, with people that were given GLP-1 displaying a lower post-meal increase in ghrelin plasma concentrations. But keeping your ghrelin levels low throughout the day could mean they rise during the night; evidence suggests that increased nocturnal ghrelin levels can increase non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. While REM sleep was previously thought to be the most important phase of sleep as it helped with learning and memory, newer data suggests non-REM sleep could be more important for these – and non-REM sleep is the phase that’s the most restful.
However, there’s no guarantee that Wegovy will increase your ghrelin levels during the night because it reduces them during the day. Finding the right balance of grehlin, leptin and GLP-1 can be tricky. Low grehlin levels, for example, have been found in people experiencing insomnia, so it seems like these hormones can affect people differently.
To sum up, it’s likely that more evidence is needed to find out exactly how these hormones can play a role in helping you lose weight, while also improving the quality of your sleep.
Reduced appetite
Eating too close to bedtime is associated with disrupted sleep. A study suggests that people who ate within three hours of going to bed were more likely to wake up in the night (27.8% of participants) than those who ate more than three hours before bedtime (19.2%).
So avoiding eating within three hours of bedtime can help you remain asleep through the night and improve the quality of your sleep. Using Wegovy should help you feel more satisfied and can help you to avoid eating too close to bedtime.
Weight loss
There’s also plenty of evidence that losing weight can improve sleep quality – and that getting a good night’s sleep can play a role in weight loss.
A study split 77 overweight volunteers, many of which reported sleep problems like sleep apnoea, fatigue, restless or interrupted sleep, into two groups. One group went on a weight loss diet with supervised physical activity, and the other group just went on the diet. After six months, participants in both groups lost an average of 15lbs, reduced their belly fat by 15%, and improved sleep quality – with a reduction in belly fat being the best indicator of improved sleep. Another study investigating sleep in overweight and obese people found that there was an association between being overweight and obese and reduced amounts of sleep.
Other studies highlight that better sleep health is associated with improved weight loss. One such study, involving 125 overweight or obese adults who took part in a 12-month weight loss intervention, displays this relationship. It concluded that better sleep health is associated with increased weight and fat loss – but recognised further studies are needed to explore whether there are other factors in play.
Sleep apnoea
One way losing weight with Wegovy might help you sleep better is by improving obstructive sleep apnoea. Sleep apnoea is a disorder that causes your breathing to stop and start while you’re asleep. Symptoms include snoring loudly, and feeling tired the day after you’ve had a full night’s sleep. There are different kinds of sleep apnoea that have different causes, with the main types being:
- Obstructive sleep apnoea (or OSA), where your throat muscles block airflow in and out of your lungs.
- Central sleep apnoea (CSA), where the part of the brain that controls breathing doesn’t send the proper signals to your breathing muscles while you’re asleep.
- Treatment-emergent (or complex) sleep apnoea, which develops when someone is receiving treatment for OSA and it converts into CSA.
Weight loss won’t help you with central or complex sleep apnoea, as these involve messages from the brain not being sent properly. But there is evidence that losing weight can relieve symptoms of obstructive sleep apnoea.
A study in which 89 individuals with OSA were assigned an 8-week weight loss and lifestyle intervention reported that, after the 8 week programme was over, 45% of participants no longer needed CPAP therapy to help them sleep. Six months after the intervention, 62% of participants didn’t need to use CPAP therapy anymore – suggesting losing weight could continue to have positive effects on your sleep in the longer term.
There’s also some early evidence that GLP-1 receptor agonists like Wegovy might help improve OSA by reducing apnoea-hypopnoea index. Also known as AHI, this is a combination of the average amount of apnoeas and sleep apnoeas per hour of sleep. But there are other studies with contradicting results, and more clinical trials need to be carried out before GLP-1 receptor agonists are considered for OSA treatment.
Blood sugar levels can improve
GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide were originally developed as type 2 diabetes medications, and they can help manage your blood sugar levels as well as your weight. By mimicking natural GLP-1 hormones (which tell your body to release insulin after eating) they help you make more insulin to keep your blood sugar levels in check.
Research suggests a link between poor control of blood sugars in people with type-2 diabetes and worse sleep quality, as it decreases the amount of time you spend asleep before the first REM phase. So using Wegovy to help manage your blood sugar levels can lead to better sleeping patterns – which can also benefit your weight loss journey.
Can taking Wegovy worsen your sleeping patterns?
While there is evidence that losing weight with Wegovy can help improve the quality of your sleep – there’s some evidence to the contrary, too. One study reported a significant number of participants with fatigue as a side effect of Wegovy. Another common side effect of Wegovy is nausea, which could also disrupt your sleeping patterns.
The good news is that nausea from Wegovy often passes quickly as your body gets used to the treatment. And as you lose weight with Wegovy, it should help improve the quality of your sleep in different ways – which can help address any fatigue you experience as a side effect.
Is Wegovy the right way to improve your sleep?
Wegovy isn’t a treatment that’s designed to improve your sleep – but it could help you sleep better as an added benefit to losing weight. If a lack of sleep is affecting your health, you should speak to a clinician to try and identify any underlying causes. They’ll be able to recommend treatment that can address these causes, and help improve your sleep. But if excess weight is the main cause of your sleeping problems, there’s a chance taking Wegovy could both help you lose weight, and sleep better as a result.
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