Kwik Tips to Sleep Better

GUEST 1: DR MICHAEL BREUS

5 STEPS TO BETTER SLEEP

• Consistent schedule: our circadian rhythms love consistency. Your wake-up time is more important than your going to sleep time!
• Caffeine: small dosages only and stop by 2pm. Caffeine has a half-life of 6-8 hours
• Alcohol: be careful. One alcoholic beverage takes one hour to process, stop drinking 3 hours before bed
• Exercise: there’s nothing more effective than exercise to improve the quality of your sleep, even if it’s just 20 minutes. Do your exercise at least 4 hours before bed
• Sunlight: Get 15 minutes of sunlight when you wake up to reset your clock, inhibit melatonin production and get more energy

GUEST 2: SHAWN STEVENSON

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP

• Appalachian State University study: the time we exercise can affect our sleep quality. The study split participants into groups doing exercises in the morning, afternoon and evening
• People who exercised in the morning tended to spend more time in deep sleep, have more efficient sleep cycles, and experienced a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night
• You can still take advantage of this benefit by doing even just 4 minutes of exercise in the morning to get a cortisol boost—it should be higher in the morning and drop as the day goes on

EATING & SLEEP

• Melatonin and sleep: more melatonin is located in your gut than in your brain
• Vitamin C: important for regenerating tissues and regulating your sleep, individuals who are deficient in Vitamin C were more likely to have interrupted sleep
• Magnesium: responsible for 325 biochemical processes we’re aware of, many of them involving sleep and recovery. Ensure you have optimal magnesium in your diet

BRAIN TRAINING MEDITATION

• Equally effective as some of the best sleep medications
• It’s free and comes without some of the dangerous side effects
• Having a meditation practice each day can help your sleep, especially meditating each morning

GUEST 3: DR GREG WELLS

IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP

• Sleep is when you learn: your brain encodes information from the day in the first 4.5 hours of sleep
• When you eat healthy foods (organic, minimal sugars, no processed foods) your brain releases the neurotransmitters to improve concentration and focus
• Exercise (especially walking) activates creativity, assists you to improve problem-solving abilities, focus, and concentration
• One single bout of exercise improves mental function for 15 hours

WHERE TO START

• Four components: eat, sleep, move, think
• Sleep is the foundation for everything
• Defend your last hour before sleep: an hour to relax, get away from devices, meditate
• Meditation: Greg uses the Headspace app, helps to transition into different brain waves: beta down to alpha waves, then into delta waves for sleep
• Read: Greg reads fiction, doesn’t read anything that’s a learning opportunity
• Environment—sleep cave with blackout blinds, as any light filtering inactivates the photoreceptors on the body and stops the production of melatonin
• Set a bedtime alarm, not just a morning alarm, so your body knows when to fall asleep consistently
• Maintain your regular sleep schedule on weekends too
• People who say they are too busy to meditate are the people who need to meditate most
• Avoid screens for an hour before sleep: unless you’re a night owl you’re unlikely to be doing productive work anyway
• Analogy: athletes used to be focused on doing the most work and whoever didn’t get injured won, but today’s athletes are focused on rest and recovery and as a result are having multiple standout performances throughout their careers, living completely different lives
• We can adopt this in our everyday lives: if we want to win a marathon we have to work smart not hard

FOOD

• “Nutrition is the foundation for human health and performance”
• Food can be used to treat chronic illnesses, mental illnesses—but the system is set up to feed us awful food so companies can make money
• Eat real food you recognize as food: avoid anything processed, anything ‘from a box’
• Invest in making food yourself if possible: Greg uses food prep nights to make mealtimes quick and easy (chopping vegetables, cooking protein, store it all in Tupperware)
• When you’re tired you don’t make good decisions—if it’s in your house someone will eventually eat it, so make your house a food sanctuary (idea from John Berardi at Precision Nutrition)