Hi and welcome to Life Academy. Are you feeling tired? well you're not alone.
most of us today rely on so much caffeine and sugar you just barely make
it through our days we spend the rest of the day desperately wanting to go back
to bed only to finally hit the sheets and lie there rolling around frustrated at
our stupid brains for not giving it a rest and shutting off. The time we spend
in bed is probably the most critical influence to our mental and physical
well-being, but so many of us suffer from this infuriating cycle of being tired
and still not being able to sleep or even sometimes sleeping and still
feeling tired. In this video I'm gonna break down for you how your body truly
works to help you understand how you can better achieve that all-important
shut-eye and don't worry this is all based on the work on a professional sleep
coach Nick Littlehale's book called "SLEEP" so you don't need to just take my word for
it ultimately we spend probably a third of
our lives in bed so it's well worth investing some of our time and energy to
make sure we're getting the most out of it so without further ado let's get into this.
number one: circadian rhythms - our circadian rhythm is a 24-hour cycle
managed by our body clocks and it is has likely adapted and served as just fine
for the past four million years of our evolution when things were adjusting
at a pace slow enough for evolution to keep up with, but in the last few centuries
things have gone pretty much insane with the world around is changing
dramatically faster than our primitive brains can keep up with we can't change
them, but at least we have the intelligence to understand them. here's
what the average human circadian rhythm looks like. This thing evolved to match
our day and night cycle over millions of years, a cycle we've only really recently
started to mess with thanks to the advent of artificial lighting. One simple
lesson to take from all of this is that to achieve better sleep you need to
achieve closer harmony with this historic cycle programmed into us.
You really want to avoid bright light after the sun has set, in particular blue light,
which confuses your brain the most into thinking it's still daytime.
Use red and yellow shades of light if you must, more similar to a sunset, this will
trigger your brain start releasing the hormone melatonin, which is what makes
you feel sleepy and helps your brain to go to sleep. There are now night modes on
most phones that are worth using and good apps for your computer which will
dim and re-colour your screen the sun-set. I use the app FLUX myself and would
recommend it to anyone and then if you can wake up with the Sun.
If you're fortunate enough not to live in a big city
where you need blackout curtains to block out all of the artificial light then you could
try leaving the curtains open slightly so that the sun wakes you up more naturally,
if not, you could invest in a light alarm, this will bring you out of sleep much
more naturally and stop you from waking up during deep sleep, which can leave you
feeling like crap to the rest of the day. Number Two: Know Your Chronotype -
Have ever been called a "night owl" or an "early bird", well the truth is there is
some science to back these up, and the scientists refer to this characteristic
as your Chronotype, you can probably guess which one of these you are already and
in fact most people lie somewhere in between, but if you're watching this video
there's a good chance that you're more of a night owl because the frustrating
thing is that our society is set up much more favorably for the early birds.
For these guys, getting up early is fine as they likely went to bed much earlier
and had a good night's sleep, but for the night owl
they likely find themselves to be much more creative and engaged at night and
are then forced by their alarms to wake up in the middle of their sleep cycles and
rush to work or school and it's these guys who tend to depend most heavily on
caffeine, to get them through their days and to keep up with the early birds
this caffeine is likely making it even harder for them they get sleep at night.
As a rule you should try and limit your caffeine to 400 milligrams a day and
avoid drinking any after our midday, as caffeine has a half-life of 6 hours
meaning if you drink 400 milligrams at 10 a.m. you'll still have 200
milligrams in your system at 4 p.m. and 100 milligrams at 10 p.m. and just
because you get enough sleep with caffeine in your system doesn't mean
you've won, the actual quality and amount of time spent in deep sleep will be
severely affected by the amount of caffeine in your system, meaning you can
get nine hours of sleep and still feel like shit... sound familiar?
personally I have swapped to decaf tea, but be warned that even decaffeinated drinks,
especially some coffees may still contain a high amount of caffeine, so
it's worth doing some research to check. Now in an ideal world, where we could all
work flexibly we'd be able to start and finish to suit our Chronotypes but
unfortunately for most of us this is not the case and it just wouldn't work.
If you consider yourself to be one of these night owls, you should try to get some
more sunlight in the morning to help you speed up the process of waking up and
get your body into a better wake sleep cycle. Try and get yourself a window seat
at work if possible, especially in the mornings, and I know it's hard but you need to avoid
those weekend lie-ins, they only reset your circadian rhythm and make it harder to get
up again on time on Monday. If you recognize one of these traits in yourself
you can take advantage of this by planning important meetings and
decisions for either the mornings or the evenings, when you'll be feeling most alert.
Number 3: It's About Cycles and Not Hours - In the book Nick presents the R90 routine,
which is based on the fact the sleep cycles lasts for more or less
ninety minutes, and it's the average number of sleep cycles you get that
should be considered more important than the number of hours you sleep each night.
Each sleep cycle con sists of four phase: Non-REM Stage 1, this is where you've just dozed off,
but could be easily awakened... if you've ever jerked awake whilst
imagining you're falling, well this happens here. This is followed by Non-REM Stage 2
or light sleep here your heart rate slows down, your body temperature
drops, but you can still be woken fairly easily by a loud bang or some movement.
This stage is where you spend most your time, and is actually really important for
improved motor skills during the day, After this if you're lucky you'll enter
Deep Sleep, if you've ever been shaken awake and feel extremely dazed and
confused and you're probably in the state, now this is where we want to spend
most of our time, as the physiological payoffs here are huge. You may have heard
of the band drug in sport called HGH or Human Growth Hormone... well your body
actually produces this naturally when you're in this deep sleep stage, and if
you're trying to put on muscle or just get fitter physically and mentally this
is where you want spend as much time as possible, and in between these stages of
light and deep sleep you have the notorious REM sleep, where all of our
Dreaming happens; typically our bodies prioritize deep sleep early on in the
night as it's the most important and then REM sleep towards the end of the
night, but if you're consistently losing sleep your body will actually start to
go into REM sleep sooner to try and make up for this, but that means you're actually
losing more of that precious deep sleep you need. Now to get a high quality of sleep
it is crucial for us to experience adequate amounts of all three of these
later stages. But this can be severely hindered by things such as: caffeine,
lighting, movement and getting up to use the bathroom in the night
just to name a few. One key piece of advice is to set a wake-up time for
sleep time that you stick with, and this is where the R90 routine comes in. Once
you've chosen your wake-up time, which ideally aligns with the sunrise, count
back seven and a half hours or five sleep cycles to figure out when you need
to be a sleep by, so say you want to wake up at 7:30 a.m. each day, based on
R90 you need to be asleep by midnight to fit five sleep cycles in. Now ideally
we would all do this and get five sleeps per night which would be incredible,
but of course life is going to get in the way and when it does you
need to stick to the R90 plan. If you miss your 12 a.m. slot, don't stress out..
do something calming, read a relaxing book or find a chilled-out hobby and aim
for the next 90 minute slot at 1:30 a.m. and then go for 4 cycles instead, and if you
missed that, aim for the 3:00 a.m. slot. The key is to stick with the same wakeup
time each day and ensure that it aligns with the end of one of your sleep cycles,
as this will leave you feeling much more refreshed when you wake up.
By forcing yourself to go to sleep you're more likely to stress and not sleep and then
when the alarm goes off it's much more likely to wake you up during one of
these deeper sleep stages, which can have a negative knock-on effect to the rest
of your day. Nick recommends aiming to get the ideal number of cycles at least
four nights a week as a minimum. Number 4: Find Yourself a Pre-Sleep Routine That Works -
now you can't control what you do in your sleep but you can control
what you do throughout the day to give yourself a better chance of hitting that
sleep cycle goal, with the aim of being as efficient as you can with that time
you have to sleep each night. If you get in at 12 a.m. and needed to be asleep by
then to get your 5 cycles in before 7:30, don't stress and jump in bed because
you'll likely just wind yourself up and set yourself up for failure, it's far
better to aim for the next sleep cycle at 1:30 to give yourself time to carry
out your pre-sleep routine so that you have a solid chance to actually get some sleep
when you try to. Ideally you want to use a 90-minute window for this pre sleep
process, this will give you a comfortable amount of time in which to wind down and
de-stress. This routine should include a technology shutdown, in which you turn
off all of your devices or at least make sure they don't disturb you in any
stressful ways, you also want to use temperature to your advantage...
in the same way that your body perceives light to darkness as a sleep signal, it
has evolved to recognize that a shift down in temperature is a signal that it is
night time and time to sleep, so aim to experience this shift as you attempt to
sleep. You could take a warm shower or do some light exercise or stretching to
increase your body temperature so you gradually cool down once you get into
bed, and make sure your bedroom is at a comfortably cool temperature but not
uncomfortably cold. As I mentioned before dim all the lights in your home if
possible to signal to your brain that is time to start producing that Melatonin.
Avoid having too much to drink so you're not waking up throughout the night for
obvious reasons, and if you're hungry stick to only light snacks if
possible, you don't want to be stuffed with food right before bed as this will
interfere with the circadian rhythm's urge to suppress the digestive system from
around 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. and for some people the stomach acid can actually cause
the sinuses to become inflamed, which then affects their ability to breathe
through their nose, not to mention the heat that your body generates in digesting
the food, which will mess with that temperature factor we just discussed,
also make sure you feel secure, get into the habit of doing a final check of all
the locks before going to bed, this will put your mind at ease so you don't lie there
wondering if you forgot to lock something. Another thing we've touched upon but
often neglect is the way that you breathe when you're asleep, you want to avoid
breathing through your mouth and get into the habit of breathing through your nose
if you don't already, this will avoid snoring and sleep apnea issues that can severely
disrupt our sleep cycles; this can be difficult, especially if you suffer from
allergies so I recommend investing in good anti-allergy bedding and
antihistamines. If these don't help then it might be worth considering nasal
strips or speaking with your doctor for advice, and finally we need to process
our thoughts before we go to be; If you have ever experienced laying there with
your brain frantically worrying and thinking through things, then this is
because you probably haven't given it a chance to digest those thoughts all day.
There are many ways you can do this, and it deserves its own video, but some people
use meditation or breathing exercises or Nick even suggest taking some time to
write down your thoughts in an informal way to address them and take them off
your mind or set them aside for another day.
Once you have all this down, you'll find falling asleep and staying asleep so
much easier. Number 5: Finally Nick suggests we
look at sleep as not just something that we do at night, and throw out that
preconceived notion that day time breaks are lazy.
"If you don't snooze, you lose". We can use the day time to actually supplement our
night time recovery. If you're not a napper don't worry, it turns out that just
the act of trying to sleep and switching off for half an hour or even meditating
can be just as beneficial as sleeping, because it gives your brain more of this
time to process and de-clutter it's thoughts so that it's not all bottled up
when you finally want to go to sleep.
Now if I bored you to sleep with that... you're welcome! But seriously, thank you so much
if you made this far. If you have any other tips for getting more sleep
that you've either discovered yourself or learnt about, please leave them in the
comments. The book is well worth reading if you want to fully understand some of these
concepts and there's plenty more to be learned from the book. Please give this
video a like subscribe and hit that Bell button if you want to see more videos
like this it really encourages me to make more. Thank you!
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