126: A Year of Optimizing Sleep

The people in my life know that I love sleep. I have always loved sleep. And when someone asks me if I am a night owl or a morning person, I say neither. And so I have been a big believer in getting enough sleep for a really long time. About a year ago, I transitioned my goal from getting enough sleep to getting quality sleep. And I've learned so much. And so I wanted to do a little episode with you where I shared with you some of the things that I've learned around sleep quality and what I've done to completely transform my sleep quality over the last year. But I do also want to say that I have tested some things, but I'm not a doctor. You know this. And so please do your own research. I'm going to share with you what has worked for me, but do please do your own research and talk to

your doctor if you're thinking about trying

some of this as well.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today.

I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you. You spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

For many, many years, I have always felt like I needed at least nine hours of sleep. And if I could get, I would get 10. So I love a good 10 hours of sleep. I just love sleep. I love everything about it. But about a year ago I was getting still enough sleep. So at minimum nine hours a night and I would still be tired in the late afternoon or I would feel like a heavy lack of focus. And so this prompted me to just kind of dig in and see what I could figure out. So the first thing that I did was I got an OURA ring. So an OURA ring is a ring that you wear and it tracks all of this data for you, tracks your activity and your readiness score and your menstrual cycle and your sleep. And so I started to wear the OURA Ring to track my sleep. Now, just a side note here is that I wanted to wear it around the clock, but as I began to wear it kind of around the clock, what I realized was that I actually couldn't work out with the ring on. And I think that's because I do a CrossFit style workout. So I'm having to grip a bar like a barbell or a rig or a dumbbell or a kettlebell all the time. And the ring was just thick enough to where it really bothered me to have to grasp a bar with the ring on. And it would also get scratched. So I was finding that I was taking it off to work. I wasn't meeting any of my, like, activity metrics for the day, which I just found really upsetting. So I don't actually wear it during the day. I'm a big fan of the OURA ring, but I don't wear it to track my activity. I do wear it, however, to track my sleep. And sure enough, what I discovered was that I was getting minimal deep sleep. So I'm looking at some of my scores from about a year ago, and they were always in the red zone. So less than an hour of deep sleep. And most of the time it was like 25 to 27 minutes of deep sleep. Now, deep sleep is when you do the deepest restoration, when your mind and your body gets the deepest rejuvenation. And so this is how you can sleep for a long time and still wake up tired. It's when you didn't get enough deep sleep. So that kind of spun me into this world of trying learn how to better get deep sleep and how to better also optimize my REM sleep. REM sleep. So I tried doing all of these things, and I'll share with you that for a long time I would take a little bit of melatonin right before I would go to sleep. And I loved this because it really helped just kind of help me fall asleep. I don't know if you're like me, but oftentimes I get to thinking when I lay down, and it's about nothing bad. It's about exciting things, though. I would have business ideas and think about team stuff and just think about things that would actually almost wake me up. I would get so revved up about them. And so I found that melatonin would just help me kind of fall asleep more quickly. But what I learned is that the melatonin will actually kind of keep me out of that deep sleep. Now, this is just for me and not be for you. So again, just sharing my own experience. But one thing that I did was actually stop taking melatonin and I started taking a couple of other things. So I started taking magnesium and I also started taking this supplement at night called Sleep Breakthrough by Bio Optimizers. Now I'm not associated with bio optimizers at all. I had someone else share something similar with me how this like transformed their sleep. And so I dove into it from a recommendation and so we'll link all of this up in the replay if you're interested. But I started taking their magnesium breakthrough as well as their Sleep breakthrough which is vitamin B6, zinc, potassium, taurine, L theanine, a bunch of natural things. And what it is supposed to help you do is increase your deep, your high quality sleep and also wake up refreshed. So I've been taking these two things for about a year now and then I've also just started to pay attention to many other things as well. I use a sleep mask if it is, if there's any light noise at all, if there's a light on, or if the moon is fully bright, or if the sun is coming up and I'm not done sleeping, I will just slip on a sleep mask. Now I have a favorite sleep mask, it's by Lunya or Lunya. Not sure how you say it, but we'll link that as well. It's a washable silk, super nice on your eyes and so I love that. We also make sure to keep it pretty cold. So this optimal kind of sleep temperature is somewhere between 60 and 68 degrees for you to be able to get into your deepest sleep. So we typically keep ours at around 6465 with like a heavy blanket. Feels so good.

Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers spam folders? I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open, but also love. They have a drag and drop email editor that makes it easy to design emails that look and feel professional without any coding. Plus their powerful automation tools make it easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time. But that's really not all. ConvertKit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send target targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and behaviors. So for example, you can imagine that on my email list I have people who are interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric. And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those two different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn subscribers into customers. So you know that we always want you to be growing your email list. And I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within

a day of focused effort.

It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in in and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head over to BonnieCristine.comResources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today. You can go ahead and dive in and get familiar with the program. Their support is amazing and see what you think. This is truly an email service provider who can grow with you from one subscriber to 500,000. So again, head on over to bonniecristine.com resources and check out ConvertKit today.

I've also been really careful about what I consume before sleep as well. So I don't consume any social media, anything that could get my eyes, you know, really wide eyed or awake. It has to be something calm like reading or something like that for at least an hour before bed. And so by doing all of this, let me tell you how everything has changed. So my deep sleep has gone up to oftentimes nearly two hours now. You're aiming for between, let's say 15 and 25% of your total sleep time to be deep sleep. So if you get eight hours of sleep, 25% of that would be two hours. And so two hours of deep sleep is generally considered really, really good. And I'm getting close to two hours, somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours every night since I've just started to really pay attention to what helps me get into that, that high quality sleep. And so what I found is that I don't need as much sleep. And so now I'm naturally waking up after seven And a half or eight hours waking up before my al and feeling completely refreshed and rejuvenated and ready to hit the floor. Like my feet are ready to hit the floor, I'm ready to hit the ground running. That is new for me. Within the last year. That is a new feeling for me. It wasn't so much that I needed as much sleep or more sleep, it was that I needed higher quality sleep. And so I've mentioned a couple of supplements here today, but that's not really what this is about. What I, what I really want your takeaway to be is to dive into the quality of your sleep and start doing some research on how can you improve the quality of your sleep. And maybe do something to start tracking your sleep so that you can see how many REM cycles you're having and how different things affect it. So if you eat right before bed, how does that affect your deep sleep or your REM cycles? And if you have a drink, let's say you have one drink that has alcohol in it, how does that affect your REM cycles, the number of them, the quality of them, or the percentage of your deep sleep? Just start paying attention to this and see if you can tweak things and play with them and come out the other side with higher quality sleep and see how it changes how you feel. We know that there are so many benefits to high quality sleep. First of all, physical recovery, cardiovascular health improvement. So if you are exercising and working out, your muscles do its deepest recovery and deep sleep. This also enhances your immune system and so you're likely to stay healthier. It improves your mood, your mental health, your brain function, it helps prevent burnout, it helps memory formation and actually increases your cognitive ability to take on more and more. So it actually improves your memory, it improves your creativity, it is associated with reducing inflammation, helps you have better stamina, helps you have better weight management. And so my focus is to always be the best version of myself. And so how can I make sure that I'm setting myself up for success with my health, my mind, my body to be more creative and productive and present in my day. So productivity and literal cognitive function such a big part of our life as a creative entrepreneur that I think it deserves every ounce of energy that we can give it to make sure that we're optimizing, optimizing our sleep, optimizing our nutrition, optimizing our mind, optimizing our body so that we can show up and do the best that we possibly can with our life and the impact that we want to have as a leader and an entrepreneur. So if you have any tips, if you have been studying your own sleep, if you figured out a way to increase your deep sleep, your rest, fall asleep easier, quiet your mind. I would love to hear about it. So we're planning to post on social media over on Instagram about this episode and I would love for you, if you hear it, come find me, tell me, send me a DM or comment on that post and let me know how you're optimizing your sleep and how you're feeling as well. This has been just one of the best things that I've done over the past year to optimize. That's what I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it again. We'll link up all these resources and things that I mentioned over on the show notes for today's episode. You can find that@PropriationalCreative.com My friends, create the beauty and the sleep that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.