Is There Anything to Assist Me to Wake up Feeling Refreshed in the Morning?

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Is there anything to assist me to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning? This is JJ Virgin four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Erin King from Facebook asks. I get eight hours of sleep and I still feel sluggish in the morning. I take iron and other supplements, including vitamin D and magnesium, and work out at least four times a week. Is there anything to assist me to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning? All right, well, I have some more questions before I can do the answer, so stay with me. I'll be right back to deconstruct this.

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So whenever anyone says, how do I feel more refreshed in the morning? How do I have more energy throughout the day? There's a couple things that I'm gonna look at first. The first, most obvious elephant in the room is gonna be sleep. Because if you are not sleeping well, you will not have great energy throughout the day. Now here's the challenge is that Erin said she slept eight hours a night. But what we don't know is the quality of that sleep. That is where an Oura ring, a Fitbit, an apple watch, you can use something that's going to look at the quality of your sleep. How restless were you? How much deep sleep did you have? How quickly did you fall asleep? And here are a couple things that we want to look at is your bedroom should be for sleep and sex. That's it. All right. Or reading what I call a good but not great book. At night, you want to do a little power down hour before bed. I got that from my buddy, Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor. You take a hot bath, use some Epsom salts, then cool down and bring the temperature in the room down to it at least 68 degrees. Make sure that your room gets pitch black. No little lights from clocks or anything else that can actually trigger pineal glands so that you do not get a good night's sleep. Put on those weird looking glasses that my buddy Dave Asprey of Bulletproof makes, you know, that make you look kind of like Bono. Put those on because they're going to block out the light from your technology. Ideally, you're not looking at your technology either, but that's going to help you make that shift as well. And you can change on all your computers. Ideally, you did the power down hour, but you can change them so they go into nighttime mode as well. Take your sleep supplements if you do. I use my sleep candy every night. And then get yourself to bed now. You should fall asleep within 30 minutes of your head hitting the pillow. You should wake up without needing an alarm and feel refreshed. If that's not happening, then I'm going to question the quality of your sleep. So that's why I say let's look at the quality of your Sleep first. And it may be that you need to do some things to help. So those blue blocker glasses can help tremendously. That was a big hack that Dave gave me that made a massive change. And I was tracking my sleep with my Oura ring. So that can be a big help. Supplements can be a big help. One of the things is magnesium really helps promote restful sleep, something I take every night. And then the other thing I use product called sleep candy. And in that product there are a couple things that can help you. So I want you to think about these things. Melatonin and either GABA or L Theanine because they're both going to create the same thing. They're both going to lead to GABA. And GABA is the calming neurotransmitter 5 HTP, which then helps your body make melatonin, inositol and B6. These inositol is a calming B vitamin and B6 is the needed to make melatonin and to make GABA. It's one of the vitamins you need along that pathway, the CO factor. All right, so that's the first thing. Let's make sure your sleep is good. Next, let's make sure your thyroid is functioning well. Because if you've got low thyroid function, you'll be tired, you won't feel refreshed. Next thing to think about is stress. If you're stressed, this can make you tired and wired. You won't feel refreshed, you also won't get great sleep. So that's another important one. Then also look at what you're eating three to four hours before bed. You wanna stop eating at least three hours before bed. Four is better. But you want make sure that your evening meal is from the trifecta, what I call the satiety, blood sugar balance trifecta, that is clean protein, healthy fats, slow low carbs and non starchy vegetables. That's where you're gonna get your fiber. The reason this is so important is the fiber is gonna moderate your blood sugar response. The healthy fats are gonna tell your brain that you have eaten something. The protein and the carbs, the protein and the fiber are gonna slow down stomach emptying so that you won't have any kind of blood sugar issues throughout the night. That if you wake up in the middle of night a lot of times that can be a blood sugar issue. And if it's, if you had a couple glasses of alcohol, that's generally something that will happen there. Now couple other things. Make sure you're not over training when you are training and that you're doing that earlier in the day. And then also look at do you really need iron now? If you need iron, if you're iron deficient. I had an iron deficiency situation earlier this year and in order to get my levels up to where they needed to be, if I'd done it through supplements alone, it would have taken a long time. So if you do have real iron deficiency anemia, you may need to do iron shots or IVs to get your levels up and then you can maintain it with pills. The important thing there is that you're testing iron is not a product, especially if you are a postmenopausal or a man that you want to take unless you've got a lab test and so you look at a CBC and you look at serum ferritins and you work with your doctor to get your levels up to normal. Now here's another one, two other ones that I really love. B12. I've got a product called B12 Boost. It's sublingual and that's really how you want to take B12. Um, so two things that can, that can kind of mess with your energy that you'll feel a lot better. B12 is one and then Coq10 is another one that can make a big difference. I'm going to do a shout out to the company Designs for Health and their product duocanal. It's kind of the next generation of CoQ 10. Get your mitochondria functioning well. That's the how you produce your energy. So there you go, there's the key, most important things. And Erin, let me know how you do with shifting these things. Report in. I want to know that you're feeling refreshed.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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