Get your sleep!
If you want to make a change in your health, sleep is likely the first place to start. When you’re well-rested everything feels easier. It’s easier to stay calm, to feel happy, to make good food choices, to exercise. For women especially, you're actually more likely to have sex - probably because you have a bit more energy and interest to do so!
Getting good sleep is typically the first step on my treatment plan because it is hard to follow through on everything else without prioritizing sleep first.
Are you getting enough hours of sleep? Not just laying in your bed, but actual sleep? So many of my patients don’t, because they don’t get any time to themselves in the day and thrive on that alone time at night.
Or maybe they get to bed at a reasonable time, but aren’t accounting for interruptions during the night in terms of their total hours. There are, of course, seasons where sleep is really difficult…like babies and sickness!
But even during these times we want to prioritize as many minutes of rest as possible. Just because you have functioned perfectly fine in the past on 6 hours of sleep, doesn't mean you're thriving on that now.
During your sleep your brain is catching up on the things it can't do during the day. It's consolidating memory, it's cleaning waste (important for dementia prevention!), it is re-energizing and restoring the body.
So how do we get more sleep?
Taking a Pause: This will be different for every individual, but one thing that is helpful for most is taking that chance to pause in your day. This circles back to the topic of last week’s email, which you can read here! This allows your brain to be ready for rest when it comes time to sleep.
Bedtime Alarms: I am a big fan of a bedtime alarm and phone/computer programs set to turn things off at a certain point. It is easy to get side-tracked into tasks and social media and stay up too late by accident. It’s also important to be realistic about when this alarm goes off or it can be challenging to hold yourself accountable.
Move the Phone: The phone is stimulating, both the information you consume on it as well as the blue light itself. Keep your phone outside of your bedroom. Investing in a simple alarm clock instead of relying on your phone’s alarm clock can be extremely helpful to support sleep.
If you feel like you're getting a lot of hours of sleep but still aren't waking rested, it's important to look at other possible nutrient deficiencies or hormone imbalances; and possibly consider a sleep study as well.
We really want that rest to feel restful!