10 Ways To Sleep Better

Howdy!

Nowadays, most of us are ignoring sleep and rest.

We are always forced and feel pushed to never sit, never stops, always work, be in movement, watch something.

You can’t be tired, you can’t sleep long enough, so you get tired, brain fog, and try to compensate with coffee, energy drinks and other stuff.

Sleep is actually one of the healthiest and most vital things you need to be the healthy, lean, strong, resilient, productive and happy being you want to be.

Here are 10 science-backed tips to make you sleep like a baby:

The Power of Sleeping

Sleep is the most anabolic moment your body can be in. It helps you recover from training, be more productive and creative, stay more alert and focus throughout the day. It is the number one help for most problems in your life.

One of those problems is brain fog. It happens when you awake while your body wasn’t done with a sleep cycle. Indeed, when you sleep, your body goes into 3-4 cycles during the night, going progressively more and more into a deeper sleep, to fully recover. You actually wake up or are half awake between those cycles, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for several minutes. But you rarely fully awake or remember those moments. The problem is when you awake right in the middle of it. Your brain is actually disrupted during its rest phase and have trouble to adjust immediately, you need about 4h to fully be awake afterward. This is why you absolutely need to take care of several things.

Go To Bed At Around 10 PM For a Better Sleep

Your body will produce the most amount of growth hormone between 10 PM and 2 AM, this is also the period during your liver and intestine will regenerate and heal up from whatever they have to. We aren’t supposed to go to bed very late and also aren’t supposed to wake up late, this is something that is actually very recent, and modern, thanks to the next reason you may have trouble sleeping.

Avoid As Much As Possible Blue Lights To Sleep Well

Blue light is supposed to be produced by the sun when it’s very bright, like between 10 AM and 4 PM during summer. This is the hardest light on our eyes and what makes our bodies realize it’s daytime. When the sun goes down, our bodies get that the light is going down, and naturally begin to produce melatonin to go to sleep.

The problem is that all our electronic devices produce blue lights: phones, tablets, TV screens, computers, laptops, traffic lights, most building lights… And you literally can’t escape them. What happens then is that our melatonin levels drop, and we don’t feel sleepy when it’s time to go to bed.

“[In a study …] volunteers exposed to an LED-backlit computer for five hours in the evening produced less melatonin, felt less tired, and performed better on tests of attention than those in front of a fluorescent-lit screen of the same size and brightness.

Similarly, for subjects in a 2013 study led by Mariana Figueiro of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, interacting with an iPad for just two hours in the evening was enough to prevent the typical nighttime rise of melatonin.

And in a two-week trial at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, published in 2014, volunteers who read on an iPad for four hours before bed reported feeling less sleepy, took an average of 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and slept less deeply compared with those who read paper books at night.”

There aren’t a thousand ways to fix this: stop using electronic devices at least an hour before bed, prefer reading off paper instead off screens, shift the “Night Mode” on for all your devices, even during day time, try to keep your screens luminosity levels as low as possible, use LED light blocker glasses and if possible, reduce your overall time of using those devices.

 

Make Your Bedroom Quiet, Dark And Cool

Any bit of lightning in your bedroom can disrupt your rhythm. If it’s too loud with devices, outside noises, etc, falling asleep and getting into deep sleep will be more difficult. Furthermore, a very hot bedroom will not allow you to have a restful night since you are most likely to wake up in the middle of the night feeling dry and very thirsty. Remember those nights during summer, right? Science looked into it:

“Insomnia has been linked directly to the body’s temperature rising to high levels when attempting to rest.

Heat can jolt one awake whereas a cooler surrounding will give comfort to the body allowing it to drift off peacefully.

Normalizing the body temperature, by cooling it down, will lead to falling to sleep faster and staying asleep throughout the night.”

All of those sounds and lights at night are mostly coming from electricity, we never were supposed to have them. Make sure to turn off everything in your bedroom, no little red lights from on/off buttons, no screen still functioning, door and shutters closed. You can keep the windows slightly open if you want some fresh air. You can also use a sleep mask and ball ears to help you fall asleep.

Adapt Your Position And Sleep In Less Clothing

As we said above, your body will sleep better if the temperature is cool, therefore, be sure to not wear a lot of clothes, but just enough to not get cold.

Some people can actually sleep naked year-round, some might need shorts, underwear or pajamas. Do what feels best for you, but remember to use the blanket to keep you warm and a bit “compressed”. Much like babies, we sleep better when we feel a bit tight into our sleep spot, covered with heavy blankets and against a wall for example.

Also, adapt your sleep position to your needs: I personally have shoulders too wide to sleep well on the side without two hard pillows. If I don’t have them, my neck gets into an uncomfortable position and the next day it’s in pain. If you are also a sleep sider and experience some lower back tightness in this position, consider using a pillow between your knees to relax the hips muscles. If you sleep on the stomach and get trouble breathing or tightness in the back, you should change position, this may hurt you in the long run. If you are a heavy snorer, avoid sleeping on the back and prefer sides.

Speaking of sleeping on the back, you should be able to relax and feel comfortable while lying on your back and without a pillow, or a very small one. If this isn’t the case, something across the spine might be too tight and a potential problem for your posture and health.

Before Going To Bed, Turn Off The Wifi And All Devices

Finishing off with the proper night ritual and sleep environment, you should shut down all your devices or at least put them in flight or silent mode. Same for the Wifi, you should deactivate it, even turn off your modem. Those devices produce electric waves that affect us, at the cellular level.

That is why we say to be careful about the usages of those devices by children and teenagers. This is also why we are starting to take a stand against high tension lines near schools or homes, and also 4G side effects (even more 5G who is experimental at the time of the writing of this article).

This should be done every single night.

Avoid Alcohol And Marijuana

Despite the rare benefits of the first and the handful of them for the second, one flaw they both have is to mess with your REM sleep.

Thus, sleeping after consuming one or the other (or both) will make your sleep restless, disrupting the REM phase. This is why you wake up feeling tired even after a very long night (9h+) the next day.

They can also trigger sleep apnea, trouble falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night without being able to get back to sleep, etc.

Don’t Train Too Late

This might be a tight one to achieve, but training too late can actually disturb you to fall asleep. Nothing too technical here, lifting weights, moving fast, sweating, going through a high-intensity workout, this is something that makes us stay awake and coupled with the post-workout meal, potentially alter our ability to fall asleep afterward.

If you can, don’t train past 8 PM. The best would be to train in the afternoon, since that’s when our ancestors were probably the most active of the day, along with the end of the morning.

But, priorities first, the most important thing is to be able to train. And if you have trouble sleeping afterward, just push hard. You will be plain tired and ready to fall into the bed.

Careful On Too Much Coffee, Energy Drinks and Pre-Workouts

Those things contain caffeine and derivates from it like theine, guarana. Too much of those stimulants will not let you relax and sleep well since they are stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and blocking the “fatigue” receptors of the brain.

Nowadays, we rely way too much on them. They have a time and place, but caffeine is a stimulant and, like with any substance, tolerance can build up, and soon you need 8 cups a day of coffee and 3 scoops of pre-workout. That is unacceptable and harmful.

Use coffee in the morning, especially useful with intermittent fasting, to boost a bit cortisol production, autophagy, lipolysis and blunt hunger. In the afternoon if energy decreases a bit, prefer something softer like green tea or rooibos infusion. Before training, get only a scoop of pre-workout and prefer those with ingredients that help with focus and pump rather than a heavy dose of caffeine that could get you anxious, nervous or completely ready to get into a fight for nothing.

Keep in mind that caffeine has a half-life of 8 hours in your body, so don’t use any of those things after 4 PM since it will be there until midnight.

Learn How To Disconnect From The Modern World

Perhaps the least obvious one, but you should be able to shut down from social media, networks, social pressure amongst other things. Humans are social creatures, but we also need our dose of quiet, peace.

Escaping from world news, last trend, non-stop stimuli of smartphones and city life to realize it’s not that vital and it’s not that important to us in most cases. Some things aren’t in our power to change, but we have power on ourselves to make the choice to change.

If you want to maximize your health and recovery capacities, consider checking my consulting services.

 

Your lightkeeper,

-Hersovyac.