Most of the signals we read as something going wrong are the body doing exactly what it should. That is the premise of a piece our chief medical adviser, Dr Patrick Heath, wrote for Newsweek this week: a run through ten everyday symptoms that look alarming and are, almost always, a sign of a system working properly.
He covers the hypnic jerk that makes you feel like you are falling as you drift off, the watery eyes when you yawn, the joints that crack, the vivid dreams, the runny nose over a hot curry. Ordinary quirks with tidy mechanical explanations, none of them worth losing sleep over.
The one worth slowing down on
The second symptom is the one we want to pick up: feeling sleepy after a carb-heavy meal. As Patrick explains it, mild drowsiness after a big plate of pasta is a normal insulin response. Glucose rises, the brain's wakefulness signalling (run by neurons that produce orexin) quietens, and you feel the dip. Normal, and not a problem in itself.
What the symptom doesn't tell you is how big your own version of it is. Only carbohydrates become glucose, and how steeply a given plate lifts yours and then drops it varies a lot from person to person, and from meal to meal. One person finishes the pasta pleasantly full; another is flattened on the sofa for an hour. Same meal, different physiology. That afternoon slump is the most felt-in-the-body version of what a CGM makes visible: the size of the swing, and how it settles as your metabolism changes.
The body isn't being mysterious when it does this. It is telling you something specific about the last thing you ate, if you know how to read it.
Nico can give you that data, help you read it and change habits if you need to.