HH526: Prioritize Quality Sleep!

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue my series on 12 easy hacks to better health. And today I want to talk to you about sleep, because sleep is so important, and too often we take it for granted. And I hear sayings like, oh, sleep when I'm dead or sleep is overrated. No. Sleep can never be overrated. It is so foundational to your optimal health and well being poor, sleep impacts your hormones, your metabolism and your mood and your ability to manage stress. Sleep is when your body heals, detoxes, restores energy and many, many people are simply not getting enough sleep, or they're in bed for enough hours, they're not getting quality sleep. So ideally, adults, we want to be aiming for seven to nine hours of sleep every night. Nine hours if you feel like you're coming down with something, seven hours if you're feeling good and healthy, and in order to achieve that, you really need a bedtime routine. We all have bedtime routines for our children when they were little. We adults need them too, because we need our brain to know when we are getting ready for bed, because we do things in the same order every night in order to start producing melatonin. Since the advent of electricity, it doesn't have the cue of dusk to start doing that on its own. And we also need to be using other tools to help minimize the impact of blue light on our body after dark, the blue light is actually preventing your body from making melatonin, which you need for a good restorative sleep 30 minutes after you get off the device, for every hour you are on your devices. So if you're on devices for three hours in the evening, and then you get off your device and expect to just fall asleep. The body doesn't work that way. It doesn't actually sleep on demand, and your body isn't going to be able to produce melatonin for another third hour and a half after that three hours that you were on your devices. So having a bedtime routine is really important, and then also setting up your sleep, sanctuary, looking at your mattress, comfort your pillow, the temperature of your room. So often I have to go into hotels and I turn down the temperature in the room because it's too hot for me to sleep. Well, ideally I like to sleep when it's between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius. Sorry, I don't know what that is. In Fahrenheit, and I sleep with an eye mask in the summer months because I want to sleep for longer than the Sun does in summer time, it wakes up way before I want to wake up, and that helps me extend my sleep time. So when it comes to sleep support, there is a great app that I use called Newcom. I'll drop a link into the show notes for it, along with a code to get 15% off. And it plays tracks all night long. It's either like a rainforest sound or music or just white nose all night long in the background, and it is designed to literally drop your brain into the theta brain wave, which is our healing brain wave, and have us get a deeper, more restorative sleep. So if that's something that, if sleep is something you struggle with, I highly recommend you try this. They have a free seven day trial so that you can experience it and then decide if that helps you with your sleep. There's many things that we can do to enhance our sleep. I also have a training program called Six steps to better sleep. If people, if you'd like to know about that, please let me know, as well as just calming our nervous system deep breathing magnesium is a supplement that many of us are deficient in, and it is very calming on the nervous system. Or drinking herbal teas like chamomile before bed, making sure we're stopping drinking caffeine early enough in the day, so that it's not running around in our veins and preventing us from getting to sleep in the evening. So those are just a few of the many, many things that we can do to support our sleep. And again, pick one and notice how that helps you enjoy a more restful and restorative sleep every night. And notice how you feel when you wake up in terms of your energy, your mood and your ability to manage the stresses of the day, good sleep is worth it.