Optimising your sleep means optimising your recovery!
A good nights sleep contributes to your workout performance, awareness, mood, ability to handle stress, capability to learn new things, immune system, fat cell metabolism, hormone production, appetite hormone regulation and maintaining general wellbeing. If exercise was a pill, it would be the 2nd most powerful health booster, 2nd only to good sleep quality.
“A SUCCESSFUL DAY starts the NIGHT BEFORE”
I won’t go too in-depth into the benefits of sleep (in this post), but rather keep it short but sweet and talk about the 4 main steps to focus on to optimise your sleep.
Drum roll…
Here are 4 main steps for optimising your sleep
1. Optimise your bedroom
- A Dark room is important for deep sleep – block out led lights, gaps in curtains etc
- Set temperature of the room to 15-19* C – this helps you fall asleep and stay asleep
- Make sure your mattress is high quality and comfortable
- Make sure there is good air quality and ventilation (get an air purifier if possible)
- Turn off WLAN and phones before sleeping to reduce electromagnetic pollution
2. Optimise your Circadian Rhythms
- Try to fall asleep at the same time each night (maximum 1 hour window)
- Wake up at the same time each morning (maximum 1 hour window)
- Avoid bright lights after sundown
- Seek bright lights when you wake
3. Get your body into a relaxed state
- Try not to exercise late in the afternoon
- Get rid of muscle tension (massage, stretch, epson salt bath, sauna etc.)
- Eat to support melatonin production in the night and/or take sleep supporting supplements – magnesium, zinc, tryptophan, taurine, vitamin B6
- Have hot shower, bath or sauna late in the day. This will relax you and the increased blood flow to your extremities helps your body cool and fall asleep. Here is a list of other recovery tactics
- Limit stimulant intake 6+ hours before sleep (such as coffee or preworkout)
- Meditate before bed – this has been shown to decrease the time it takes to fall asleep and increase restorative benefits from sleep
4. Have a solid wake-up routine!
- Impose ’18 seconds of discipline’ – drag your head away from the pillow at FIRST alarm. Do not repeat snooze or have multiple alarms
- Seek bright lights or sunrises
- Rehydrate – 1 cup of water as soon as you wake
- Move – perform 20 reps of a compound movement or bounce on a mini-trampoline (Tony Robins style)
- Cold Shower for 3 minutes for fill the brain with epinephrine (neurotransmitter)
- Wim Hoff Breathing method for 5 minutes (Link)
- Meditate to get your mindset right for the day – I personally use insight timer or follow my own 8 stage meditation routine
- Caffeinate your bloodstream and write down tasks for the day
The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day – Henry Ward Beecher
Sleep tracking may also be useful – I use an app called “sleep” has a range of features, but most notably the sensors can detect when you are moving (light sleep) and wake you up (with the alarm) during that light sleep window. This is useful because you wake up more refreshed instead of feeling sluggish.
Debunking a few sleep myths:
- Alcohol and weed do not actually help you get quality deep sleep – they diminish recovery
- Although it seems CBD (non-psychoactive chemical in marijuana) may help
- You can’t ‘catch up’ on missed sleep; i.e, deprive sleep during week and binge on the weekend – it just doesn’t work that way
- Caffeine DOES affect your sleep quality, just because you can fall asleep doesn’t mean your sleep quality was not effected
- ‘I can survive on 6 hours sleep’ – less that 0.4% of the population are able to sleep for less than 6 hours and not suffer negative health consequences
I hope you found my sleep hacking guide useful, if you think i have missed anything of importance feel free to leave a comment below! Share it with friends if you found this useful!
Happy Zzzzz’s
Stay Frosty,
Simon
