Why You're Always Tired

Today I'm going to tell you about the six habits that are wrecking your sleep. High quality sleep has changed my life. There is literally nothing I do in my life that changes my conscious experience more than sleep. Now, I came from a place of really bad sleep. Three little babies, being a full time entrepreneur, grinding at work, having some challenges on the home front. I know what it feels like to have really bad sleep for a very long time. It's miserable. So today I'm going to tell you the six habits that are wrecking your sleep and what you can do about it. Number one is eating food too late. Now, for example, let's say Your bedtime is 10:00pm and at 9:00pm in the middle of your favorite episode, you decide that eating a piece of pizza is a good idea. And then one piece of pizza turns into the whole pizza. In that moment, several bad things happen. One is your body has to spin up all kinds of metabolic activity to address this food. It must digest. That's challenging. You have a blood glucose spike when that happens and then once you have that, it drops. So you have this blood glucose fluctuation. You also have a disruption of melatonin production where your body says, I want to get ready for bed. And now that's off the rails. So it disrupts the entire process the body is expecting as you ready yourself for sleep. So don't do that. I'll tell you from my experience. I wanted to test, I wanted to find what is the very best time to eat my final meal of the day. So I did a few hundred experiments. I would test one hour before bed and two and three and four, all the way back to 11am My bedtime is 8:30. And I also tested types of foods. So I'd say what happens when you eat a salad, you know, three hours before bed, or a piece of bread or some pasta. So I was testing my, my metabolic response to these foods at these times of day. And I found that my best time of day was 11, 11:30am of my final meal. Now you may say that's crazy. It probably is according to current standards. Also, when I did that, my body was able to complete digestion by the time I went to bed. Now there's a few markers that I looked at to see what was happening. First, my resting heart rate became my best predictor of how well I would sleep. So when it was between 46 and 50, I was almost guaranteed a perfect night's sleep when I ate later in the day, my resting heart rate would be increased to 55, 56, 57. And when I saw that it was guaranteed to about 30% less quality, it is absolutely predictable. So the takeaway here is the time you eat matters a lot now you are different, you're unique. Your body type, your metabolism, your genetics. So what I'm going to encourage, encourage you is not to do what I do at 11am but to experiment two hours before bed and then three and then four. Expect momentary discomfort, but your body absolutely adapts to it. Number two is not having a wind down routine. Now this is something that is so important in my life. I know if I work up until five minutes before my head hits a pillow, I'm going to have a wrecked night sleep, just guaranteed. Because I will go to sleep thinking about the day. Like the conversations I had, the things I should be doing, these things I forgot to do, the people I should have contacted, all these thoughts like your brain's trying to keep track of all the things to make sure you're on top of it. Or other people may have ruminations of anxieties or things like that. My bedtime is 8:30pm When 7:30 arrives, nighttime Brian is now in charge. So when 7:31 happens and a thought comes into my brain, you forgot to contact someone. And so today I can say thank you, work Brian. We have all day tomorrow to address this need. And that really helps me calm myself to say, you know what, I'm not at work mode. I don't own that responsibility. If you want you can write it down so you don't forget about it. But it's really important to say that you are now in sleep mode and you're doing the things to prepare yourself for that. So you want to be mindful before you go to bed. You want to avoid arousal activities, so you want to avoid, you know, arguments. You want to avoid any kind of like hard exercise, Anything that's really stimulating your nervous system. I'm not sure I can recall an evening as stimulating. So during the day our sympathetic nervous systems get us ready to take on the world and tackle all the challenges. But when we get to the evening, your parasympathetic nervous system is going to calm you down and get you ready for bed. So you want to do parasympathetic activating activities. So I'm going to give you a few examples. One, and this is my favorite is read a book before bed, like in hand or if you have a Kindle, I guess that's fine too. But in hand and read a book. So no screens, no tablets, no Television screens, no mobile phone, but a book in hand. It is my favorite and it calms me the very most. You could also journal. You can meditate, you can take a bath, you can go for a walk. These activities will calm your body down and get you ready for sleep. You will find the things that you like, but you definitely want to give yourself at least 60 minutes before bed to prepare yourself. Number three is having stimulants too late in the day. So let's just say, for example, you have a cup of coffee at 4pm and your bedtime is 10pm Caffeine has a half life of six hours. So that means at 10pm when your head hits a pillow, it's equal to having a half a cup of coffee. So you want to be mindful. Now some people metabolize coffee in a way where they can drink caffeine at any time and they're fine. But others are much more sensitive, including myself. So I personally, I stopped caffeine and alcohol entirely because one, because they disrupted my mood. They would take me up and then push me down and I'd have this problem on my hands. Now, with no caffeine and no alcohol, I'm very stable throughout the entire day. If you're going to drink caffeine, try to have it earlier in the day. But again, experiment on the right time. That's not going to disrupt your sleep. Number four is not properly regulating evening light. Now in the morning light is great. Getting sunlight in the eyes for the first 15 to 30 minutes of the day, it sets the circadian rhythm, it improves mood. There's all kinds of health benefits. That's great. When the evening comes or two hours before bedtime, you want to start slowly dimming your lights. You want to hang out in the warm spectra colors. That's between 2700 and 3500 kelvin. So you want to be mindful of lessening light. If you want have red light, you also want to eliminate blue light. So you can do a few things on this front, you can use flux F Lux on your screens. It washes out blue light. You can also use blue light blocking glasses. And then this is a big one is if you can eliminate screens entirely. So you could say one hour before bed, no screens, books or your walk only. So that is the rule of my house is I really try to stay off screens entirely. Number five is your bedroom being too hot or too cold. Now we all know what it's like. You're laying in bed, you're sweating, you're tossing and Turning your body needs to cool down for you to be in the right place to go to sleep. And if you're too hot, you're not going to be able to fall asleep. And so there are some basic things you can do like open a window and let air come in. You can also have blinds that block the light during the day so your room doesn't get as hot. You can also do more advanced things like have a temperature controlled mattress. Now I use eight Sleep. I think it's a fantastic product. It definitely dramatically improve my sleep when doing it. My settings are I go to bed at 73 degrees Fahrenheit when I fall asleep and I dip out into my first stage of deep sleep, it's 69 Fahrenheit. When I come back up into REM, it's around 71, 72. And then when I wake up it's 73. And so the body's going to follow a rhythm where you have a certain temp. When you go to bed, your body's decreasing in temperature. You drop down even further and deep sleep and come back up for REM and then a little warmer when you wake up. Now eight Sleep has a cool feature where it's their autopilot where they automatically regulate the temperature in the mattress. I find that really cool. Now just note here, once you get accustomed to a sleep, to a, to a temperature controlled mattress, when you travel, it's a little unwelcome where it's challenging. So I'll go to a hotel room and I'll cool the room as much as possible. Down to 64 degrees is usually how low they go. But just be mindful when you create systems in your life, they're wonderful to create the effects at home when you travel it can be challenging, which is okay. It's okay to experience these difficulties when we're out and about. We're trying to build systems at home and about and we can be adaptive wherever we go. Number six is regulating noise. Now we all know how annoying it is when our neighbors are arguing. The dog's barking, cars are honking, it's painful, you want it to stop and you have no control over it. Now I have a personal experience with this. My neighbor's dogs were barking when I moved into this house and I said, hey, my bedtime is at 8:30. And when I go to bed and the dogs bark, I wake up and it's hard for me to go back to sleep. Would you be okay if you did the dog's nighttime routine and got them in their kettles before 8:30. She said, sure, no problem. I have not had a problem since now. Not all neighbors are as nice. I would encourage you to talk to them, even though sometimes that feels scary. And just nicely ask, would you please turn your music down or I can hear you walk around. I know those are uncomfortable conversations. Also, they're really important and maybe you can do something nice for them as well to show a good faith gesture. You can. Also, if there's a lot of noise in your environment, you can use a noise machine. Brown, white or pink. Good evidence to show that it actually is helpful to lessen the number of disruptions. You're trying to lessen the number of times where noise wakes you up and disrupts your sleep. Sometimes you're aware of it, sometimes you're not. But just be mindful of the environment in its entirety. Friends, I know it's culturally fashionable to not get high quality sleep. That people talk about their bravery and staying up all night, they somehow think they're falling behind, they're missing out, that people are going to think less of them because they don't work hard enough if they get sleep. And, and I'm here to tell you that getting eight hours of sleep, you're being a hero to yourself, to your family, to your friends, your loved ones. Get a great night's sleep. I promise you, you will feel better and have a better life if you do. So I believe in you.