A Practical Guide To A Good Nights Sleep:

Sleep.

Its something we all need yet never seem to get enough of even though we know how important it is for us.

So, in this blog we’re going to discus some easy and practical things you can do to sort out your sleeping habits and make sure you get the best quality sleep you can without feeling like you have to rearrange your whole life for a good nights rest.

What Is Sleep and Why Is It So Important?

Sleep in essence is the bodys rest cycle.

There are different stages to sleep with the two main stages being Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (NREM), which is dreamless sleep and makes up about 80 percent of our total sleep, and Rapid-Eye Movement sleep, where dreams occur in three to five intervals throughout the night, lasting for about one to two hours at a time.

NREM sleep is also known as deep sleep, and it is during this period where our heart beat and breathing rate are at their lowest and our muscles most relaxed allowing us get the sleep we need to wake up feeling refreshed and relaxed. REM sleep tends to be more energy consuming as our brains are making dreams, but it is still important because a lot of information from the day is processed and memories are consolidated during these sleep periods.

The benefits of sleep are pretty self-evident meaning if you’ve had a good nights sleep you’ll know how good you feel and if you didn’t you know the crappy tired feeling you carry around with you all day. But I will list some of the benefits below, but we won’t spend too long going through them because they are pretty self-explanatory:

1. Improved mood and energy levels
2. Reduced injury risk
3. Better cognitive functioning, learning and memory
4. Better performance
5. Better immune support
6. Improved metabolic health and appetite
7. Risk of heart-related diseases is reduced
8. Less brain fog

The list goes on and on. We all know how important sleep is for our daily lives and good performances in our sports. Its important and we need to get better at getting enough good quality sleep.

How Much Sleep Do We Really Need?

This is a hot topic. Some researchers say its highly individual, with some people needed as little as five hours while others say some can need ten. But as a general rule, 7-9 hours of sleep is what we should all aim for, with research showing teen athletes who chronically got less than 8 hours sleep a night being 1.7 times more likely to become injured (Milewski et al., 2014).

Getting 7-9 hours is getting increasingly harder due to increased round-the-clock entertainment from our phones and TV, and jobs where people are working later, starting earlier and having to travel longer distances.

This makes it all the more important for us to make a concscious effort to get better sleep, knowing how hard it actually can. Getting better sleep takes effort and is a habit just like eating healthy or exercise. Theres no magic formula or trick that’ll solve everything. Its the accumulation of good habits that lead to acheiving the end goal, a good nights sleep.

Small, Simple Steps To Improving Your Sleeping Habits:

It is worth noting that if you apply some of these strategies your not going to wake up tomorrow feeling charged up, it wil take time. You’ll actually probably wake up more tired for a while as your body adjust to changes and is trying to adapt, but in a week or two you’ll start to see the positive effects. So stick with it, its just like exercise. You don’t see the results straight away, it can take weeks or months and then all of a sudden your flying.

So, lets get into it:

1. Sort out your circadian rhythm:

Our bodies have an internal clock that controls our energy levels throughout the day. This is called our circadian rhythm. It controls when we feel tired and when we feel energised and its hugely influenced by daylight. It is what creates a sleep pattern for us, making our bodies do the same things at the same times everyday to make controlling our energy levels easier.

So, we need to make a sleep schedule for ourselves. If you want to get up at 8 every morning and you know you need about 8 or 9 hours sleep to feel refreshed, then you need to get to be by 11. Its really that simple. Theres no magic secret. You just have to get up and go to bed at the same time consistently to make your body make it a habit.

2. Use An Alarm Clock To Get Up and Go To Bed:

We all use an alarm clock to tell us when to get up, but set one to remind you when to go to bed aswell. If you’ve an iPhone you’ve a whole section in the Health App to help you set a sleep schedule.

You will have to be cruel to be kind. If your like me and your a fan of just hitting snooze from the comfort of your bed, put your alarm across the room out of reach so you have to get up and turn it off. It is horrible but trust me its effective.

3. Make a Bed Time Routine and a Morning Routine:

Having routines are a great way to tell your body its time to wind down for bed, and to tell your body its time to get up and get going.

Before Bed:

A good routine should start 45 minutes to an hour before bed. You want to start to wean yourself off your phone and limit screen time and get away from the blue light. The reason being blue light is thought to act like an artificial sun as is emits the same types of frequencies as the sun, telling your eyes to stay awake even when its dark. Apart from that all the information we’re fed from social media can drive our brains into overdrive making it hard to relax, so just put it away.

Again, ironically your phone can be great for helping get off your phone. Use app limits, night mode and all those tools to help you get away from it. Or even better just turn it off.

Then theres the obvious things like brushing your teeth and all that, but another underutilsied tool is finding some way to actually help you relax before going to sleep.

Personally I like to stretch. I find it helps me wind down, and stretching has been shown to increase parasympathetic fibre activity, inducing a more relax state in the body and muscles. Two other techniques can be meditation or mindfulness to still the mind or journalling to unload thoughts from the mind and get them onto paper so your not up all night thinking about them. A few deep relaxing breaths might even be all you want to do, but the main message is find some way of helping yourself relax and unwind before getting into bed and going asleep.

In The Morning:

In the morning you want to wake yourself up and going energy flowing, and get some exposure to sunlight early.

Its always a good idea to get some sort of movement in the morning to move that stagnent energy from sleeping and mobilise joints and muscles. Personally I go through a 15 minute mobility routine every morning, but stretching or yoga work either. Just get your stiff joints and muscles moving oiled up with synovial fluid and you’ll feel so much better and shake off that morning tiredness.

Focusing your mind can also help improve your energy levels in the morning and for the day. Meditation in the morning to still your mind or maybe journalling to plan your day and get out any thoughts flying about can really help focus your energy for the day.

Getting some natural daylight (actually going outside) early can also help regulate your circadian rhythm and tell your body its up and awake and its daytime. Don’t hide in your room, get outside for a quick 15-20 minute walk after breakfast and get that sunlight into your eyes, even if its cloudy.

3. Create A Good Sleep Environment:

The brightness of your room can effect your sleep. Make sure your room is dark to help improve sleep. A blackout blind or putting a blanket over your blind can be effective ways to make it darker.

Getting the temperature right can also be a factor. No one likes to sleep in an oven or a freezer, so find what is most comfortable for you to sleep in and stick with it.

4. Other Things That May Help:

Mouth Taping:

A somewhat contraversial technique, but it can be highly effective for some people. Our breathing patterns can effect a lot of things associated with our health. Mouth breathing is associated with shallower, more rapid breathing whereas breathing through our nose tends to be deeper, longer breaths which are also better filtered and purified compared to breathing through our mouth. But have their uses, but in general day to day life we want to be breathing through our nose for better quality air intake. Mouth breathing is really for things like exercise where demand and respiration is higher and we can inhale quicker and more often through our mouths to meet demand.

In terms of sleep, mouth breathing is associated with snoring, worse sleep compared to nose breathing and even sleep apnea. The idea of mouth taping is you effectively tape your mouth shut using special tape to force yourself to breath through your nose during sleep.

Evidence for its effectiveness is a lot more annecdotal then empirical. Some people online swear by it but the research doesn’t really back it up, even though its theory seems sound.

It may be worth a try if you wake up with a lot of brain fog and a dry mouth often, which are normally two tell tale signs or mouth breathing during sleep. Personally I have tried it and had mixed results. It cna be hard to adjust to sleeping with tape on your mouth and you might feel like your suffocating for a few nights but once I got the hang of it I did find my sleep improved. But gettin the hang of it is hard. The tape can come off quite easily during the night it can be an annoyance remembering to put it on. There is also the fear of swallowing it which did play on my mind. I would say theres a lot of other things to sort out first before trying this.

Blue Light Glasses:

Blue Light glasses are all the rage, with annecdotal evidence outweighing the scientific research. Like I said earlier the theory is that blue light acts as an artifical sun keeping you awake so these glasses block that making it easier to use screens at night without these effects. But unfortunately there is no scientific evidence that these glasses improve eye health, reduce eye strain and improve sleep.

I have got a pair of blue light glasses for myself and even though theres no real evidence yet, I have found they do make it easier to sit and look at screens for long periods of time. Whether its a placebo or maybe they actually work I don’t know, but it make it easier for me to sit at my laptop all day and not get sore eyes, particularly later at night which is what would keep me awake, so they might be worth a try. You can pick up a pair fairly cheap on Amazon too so it might be worth it.

Avoiding Caffeine, Nicotine and Alcohol:

Caffeine is a widely used stimulant thats effects can last for hours. Caffeine works by blocking receptors in the brain that tell you your tired, hence why you feel energised and then crash once it wears off. Try stay away from caffeine in the hours before bed, or even stay away from it altogether after two or three o’clock to really avoid caffeine effecting your sleep. The same goes for nicotine and alcohol. There stimulants and they can keep you up, so avoid them in the hours before bed where possible.

To Summarise:

Sleep i one of the most important and underutilised performance enhancing mechanisms we have to make full use of it.

• Get 7-9 hours sleep
• Set a sleep schedule
• Set a night and morning routine
• Relax before bed
• Create a good sleep environment
• Avoid stimulants
• Avoid your phone

And it goes without saying, if your having serious trouble sleeping get in touch with your doctor. Chronic tiredness and irregular sleeping patterns can almost always be effectively combatted by someone with the correct knowledge, so don’t suffer because you think it was a bad night, you could have a mineral deficiency or a breathing problem or anything keeping you up so get it check out.

As always if you’ve any questions or looking for more information just ask and I’ll try point you in the right direction.

Aaron.