Sleep: How to Enhance Your Zzz's
When life gets crazy, why is sleep always the first thing to go? While sleep might seem like the one part of our day that is “flexible,” the impact of poor sleep extends into many aspects of health. For example, a rough night of sleep can wreck havoc on our hunger and fullness cues and lead to afternoon sugar cravings. It can compromise our athletic performance and impair our ability to focus. Whether you’re looking to overhaul or optimize your sleep, I hope my tips below bring you some extra Zzz’s.
Light- Keep it to a minimum.
Blue light emitted by daylight serves to suppress our sleepy hormone, melatonin. This plays a crucial role in driving our circadian rhythms and telling the body it’s wake time. Many of our electronic devices emit this same blue light. However, it serves that same purpose of keeping us awake and alert regardless of the time of day. For this reason, I recommend limiting screen exposure in the hour preceding bedtime. There are some other ways you can get around this:
- Place any devices that have the option into “night shift” mode
- Consider wearing blue light filtering glasses
Note- a Kindle does not emit blue light.
Relax- the mind.
In my experience, the mind can have the most profound impact on sleep. During times of stress, many of us our plagued with a racing mind and frequent night wakings. To make matters worse, when we struggle sleep we become anxious about sleep itself- will I get enough sleep? How is it going to ruin my day tomorrow? To cope with the overactive mind, I recommend employing two strategies:
1) Sleep meditation.
No meditation experience required- this simply involves turning on a soothing recording to guide your body and mind into a state of relaxation. My husband, a busy physician, relies on this to quiet his mind and optimize the time he has to sleep. This can also be a fantastic tool to use if you find yourself waking and unable to fall back asleep. I highly recommend Insight Timer’s sleep category (it’s completely free!). If you share a bed with someone else, it can be valuable to use a pair of comfortable sleep headphones.
2) Sleep promoting thoughts.
Instead of dwelling on how poor sleep may impact the next day, let go. Remind yourself of prior sleepless nights and how you ultimately survived the next day. It seems simple, but relinquishing this control can be incredibly impactful.
Beverages- choose wisely.
We all know that caffeine consumption has a correlation to sleep; however, this is highly individual. My general recommendation is avoiding caffeine after noon, but like anything, I recommend you experiment with both the quantity you consume along with the timing.
Alcohol is more confusing. Many of us have noted that a drink can put us right to sleep. While this is true, alcohol is known to negatively impact sleep quality. If you have access to a sleep tracking device such as a Fitbit, this can be very interesting to observe. While you may not notice it, most find that a night where they’ve consumed alcohol leads to more irregular and less deep sleep.
Many clients I’ve worked with report bathroom breaks as a hinderance to their sleep, especially if they struggle to fall back asleep. If you’ve noticed this, consider limiting liquid in the last couple hours prior to bedtime. If you’re waking more than once to use the bathroom, it might be worth a conversation with your primary healthcare provider.
Temperature- optimize it.
Did you know that the optimal temperature for sleep is 60-68°F? Most of our bedrooms run warmer than this. While AC can be helpful, it isn’t necessary. I have a whole post on how to keep you and your bedroom cool.
A drop in temperature can also be a powerful driver of sleep. To achieve this, consider taking a relaxing bath or shower to create a rise and then decline in your core body temperature. This is a personal favorite of my wind down routine.