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Today I wanted to share a few practical ways that you could use to improve your sleep.
I'm going to go through a discussion of some of the damage that is caused by a lack of sleep,
Both on our emotional and physical state,
And also some of the benefits of a restful night of sleep.
If you're not as interested in some of the more education based damages caused by lack of sleep,
You can skip ahead right to the solutions.
I'll put a time stamp in the description below that says where I will discuss what to avoid and what to start engaging in to help try to improve your sleep.
As always,
It's good to talk with your doctor and work closely with your medical provider if you're having ongoing sleep problems.
A few possible causes of sleep problems that people experience are things like sleep apnea,
A lot of common mental health problems also are correlated with insomnia,
Things like PTSD,
Depression,
Anxiety,
Bipolar disorder.
And sometimes your diet too could be another cause of sleep issues.
So this is some of the harm that is caused to your physical health when you don't get enough sleep.
And when I say you don't get enough sleep,
I mean seven hours or less.
Really six and a half hours or less is where we see this association between major physical health problems and the lack of sleep really start to show up.
One of the first things is that people who sleep less end up having a shorter life.
One of the things they've found is that a lack of sleep produces certain cancer assassin cells.
We have these cells in our body that just kind of run through our system all the time and are attacking the small cancer cells that pop up and grow.
But when we don't get enough sleep,
They've been able to measure that we don't have as much of these cells in our body.
Another physical health problem is increases in hunger.
Our body produces more of a hunger hormone called ghrelin.
And what this comes out to is about eating another extra 200 to 300 calories per day,
Which leads up to about 10 to 15 pounds a year.
Lack of sleep also makes us more likely to reach for the wrong foods.
I mean foods like simple sugars,
Simple carbohydrates,
Junk food.
Lack of sleep has also been associated with high blood pressure,
Obesity,
Type 2 diabetes,
Impaired immune health,
Heart disease,
And dementia.
They found that lack of sleep ages men by a decade in the amount of testosterone that their body is producing.
So it's even affecting people at the hormonal level.
They also know that you're at a higher risk for injury during physical exertion because your balance declines when you haven't gotten enough sleep the night before.
So those are some of the physical causes.
Let's go over some of the emotional causes when you don't get enough sleep at night.
Sleep deficits accumulate over time.
So this means the person who's lacking sleep becomes more and more impaired in their ability to concentrate and focus.
But they're not aware of these impairments.
Sort of like the drunk person who thinks they can drive home safely.
Lack of sleep makes it more likely that we will also remember negative experiences rather than positive ones.
And they've also found correlations between lack of sleep and feeling more lonely and depressed.
So that's some of the downside.
Some of the negative stuff.
But some of the benefits of a good night's sleep,
Meaning 7 to 9 hours a night,
Is that it is one of the best performance enhancers that we know of.
What I mean by this is that when you're trying to learn a new skill,
Getting a good night's sleep after some practice was shown to help people increase their ability to engage in a new skill by 20 to 30 percent.
So say that you're trying to learn the guitar and you're trying to learn a new chord or a new riff and you just can't quite get it.
If you're able to get a good night's sleep and then wake up the next morning,
You probably will do much better.
So some of the practical ways to get better sleep.
There's a couple things that you want to avoid and then there's a couple things that you want to start trying to incorporate into your evening routine.
One of the things that you want to avoid is stressing about not sleeping.
It can be very stressful when you're not getting enough sleep at night and it only kind of compounds your stress.
So when you lay down and you're having difficulty with sleeping,
It can be really stressful.
But one of the things you want to try to do is to not stress yourself out as best you can when you're laying down at night and not sleeping.
You want to keep your stress as low as possible.
You also want to avoid eating one to two hours before bed.
It's important to note that this can vary from person to person.
Some people may be able to eat 30 minutes before bed,
But it's important to just experiment around and see what works for you.
But you definitely want to avoid eating large amounts of sugar before bed.
You also want to avoid screens at least one hour before bed.
And ideally,
When it gets dark outside,
It will be good to turn all the lights back in your house.
And last,
You want to avoid alcohol and cannabis.
Two substances that definitely make you feel relaxed and a lot of people use to help you go to sleep,
But don't actually help people get into that deep stage of sleep that we need.
Our body needs the REM sleep,
Or this is also known as the dream sleep stage.
But when we drink alcohol or smoke cannabis,
These are two substances that block dream sleep.
And if you're someone who's ever wanting to on a little break and tried to abstain for a little while,
You might have noticed that when you did,
Your dreams became a lot more vivid.
And this is part of the reason for that.
Now a few things that you want to try start incorporating.
You want to try to get yourself on a regular sleep schedule,
Meaning that you go to bed at the same time and you wake up at the same time.
So maybe you go to bed at 9 a.
M.
Or I'm sorry,
9 p.
M.
Every night and maybe you wake up at 6 a.
M.
Every morning.
You want to keep that the same even on the weekends.
This is going to help regulate your circadian rhythms.
You also want to keep yourself cool.
The brain needs to cool by two to three degrees for sleep to happen.
You could take a hot bath or you could just turn the temperature down in your home.
A regular meditation practice is also very helpful in helping you learn how to relax and helping you learn how to wind down.
One of the other interesting things that you can do to help regulate your circadian rhythms is to start viewing sunlight early in the morning and late in the afternoon.
It might seem like what does this have to do with getting good sleep?
But there is different wavelengths of light early in the morning and late in the evening that signal to the brain in the morning that it's time to wake up and then in the evening it's time to go to sleep.
So soon after you wake up,
The sun is rising,
Get outside for just a little while,
Maybe go for a short morning walk.
If the sun is very bright out,
You'll probably only need somewhere between 2 to 10 minutes and then on an overcast day you'll probably need to stay out a little bit longer,
About 15 to 20 minutes.
And then do the same thing in the evening.
When the evening comes,
Go back outside for about 5 to 10 minutes if it's bright out.
This practice may take 2 to 3 days to start to regulate or normalize your circadian rhythms if they've been a bit out of whack,
So be patient with yourself.
You also want to exercise,
But you want to ideally exercise early in the day.
Exercising late in the evening can actually make it more difficult for you to go to sleep.
You definitely don't want to be exercising within about 2 or 3 hours of going to sleep.
All forms of exercise have shown to be helpful,
Aerobic,
Resistance training,
But one of the most effective ways to exercise to sleep is using mind-body exercises.
These are things such as yoga,
Where you're engaging the mind in some sort of meditation,
But you're also engaging the body.
Another practice that was found to improve individual sleep was leisure-related physical activities.
Now,
For all you workaholics out there,
Hard work doesn't count.
I'm sorry.
Well,
At least in the study it was shown that just physical activity related to work was not shown to help improve people's sleep.
But physical activity related to fun and doing things just for pure pleasure did have an effect on helping people to sleep better.
So I encourage you,
I've kind of shared a lot of different techniques here,
A lot of different things to avoid.
If you're like me,
Don't try to do it all in one day.
Don't overwhelm yourself.
I tend to overwhelm myself trying to make all these changes at once.
So I think that it is good to just pick out one or two of those things and try to incorporate them.
And once it becomes a new habit,
Pick out another two and try to work those in.
So that is all for now,
And I hope you get a good night's sleep.
The material for this education was gathered from the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
It came from two articles,
The first being named,
The Interrelationship Between Sleep and Exercise,
A Systematic Review,
And the second was,
The Extraordinary Importance of Sleep.
The rest of the information was taken from the Huberman Lab podcast.
The remainder of it was taken from Dr.
Matthew Walker.
Dr.
Andrew Huberman and Dr.
Matthew Walker both have podcasts where you can find more information on practical ways to sleep better.
