JJ Virgin walks through a complete bedtime routine: a hot bath or sauna followed by a cool bedroom at 60-67°F, red-dimmed lights, no screens, and a sleep supplement with magnesium and 5-HTP taken an hour before bed. She recommends starting a power-down hour at least 60 minutes before sleep and adding one change at a time to make it stick.
Let's talk about your actual sleep routine because this really matters. And the first thing I'm going to say about this is that you have to actually prioritize sleep and make time for it. What I find for a lot of people is they don't plan. You know, fail to plan, plan to fail. It's the same with sleep. So if you know that you want to be asleep at 10 PM, that does not mean you are sliding into bed at 10 PM. That means that you're starting to prepare for sleep at least an hour before and getting into bed 30 minutes before you want to fall asleep. Now, ideally you're falling asleep sooner than that, like 5 to 10 minutes after you get in bed. But give yourself that time, that little treasure trove of time. So here's what you want to be doing in the evening. Heat can be amazing. So one of the things that I love to do is either take a hot Epsom salts bath or take a sauna. This can be fabulous because what you're going to be doing is you're going to heat yourself up, and then your body is going to jump in and start to work to cool you down. And that actually is a sign to your body that we're getting ready for sleep. Alongside that, you want to take the temperature in your room and put it somewhere between 60 65 and 67 degrees, because then you're going to slide into those cool sheets and get yourself some really great high thread count natural sheets. You're going to slide into those cool sheets. Now, a couple important things in that hour, that power down hour, as my buddy the sleep doctor Michael Breus calls it. You have gotten rid of technology. I don't know about you, but any email that I read after in that power down hour always seems to be the email that I can't do anything about till the morning, and now it's going to keep me up. So no tech. And you've changed the lighting, you've dropped it into more of a red hue. My hack for this is something called a Philips Hue light. We've got those light bulbs in all of our bedroom lights, and we can, with our iPhone, just program it so that in the evening everything goes to red. We dim all the lights in the, in the other rooms, and then we make our bedroom is now red lights. We've cooled it down dramatically. If you do want to have something. It could be like some sleepy time, you know, some chamomile, some caffeine-free tea. If you're hungry, you can have a glass of water, shuts down your hunger pangs, but you're really doing the things to help prepare you for sleep and you're getting a routine down. I travel all the time. My sleep routine is the same wherever I am because that helps keep me consistent. I take my sleep candy, which has got 5-HTP and B6 and L-theanine and melatonin. I take it about an hour before I wanna go to bed. And that's what I would suggest with melatonin is taking it an hour or more before you want to go to bed, because you're really trying to bolster up that melatonin, which means you also need to get the cortisol down. If you're in that wired stage, something like doing a great guided evening meditation or some tapping can be super helpful too. The other thing that I do is I sleep with a sleep mask. Now, I used to only do this when I traveled, if I was in a place where there was more lights on, um, you know, all the blinky lights they have in hotel rooms. But now I do it everywhere because it just gives me complete blackout, and that really is important for helping you with sleep. I travel with my earplugs too, cuz you just never know, so I always have those handy. But again, I'm taking a melatonin-based supplement. That's what I have in my sleep candy, along with inositol, B6, L-theanine, and 5-HTP to help get my body prepared for sleep. I also take extra magnesium in the evening. I take a little in the morning, but I take my biggest dose of magnesium at night cuz it's very calming. And that's where an Epsom salts bath, which is rich in magnesium, can be super helpful as well. So again, it's really important to have this great sleep routine. I will say one thing too on the sleep routine. There's two other things that I love. I don't get to do this all the time because sometimes it gets just— it's just too warm in Florida with this, even with the cool air on. But I have a weighted sleep blanket that I love, and my dogs love it too. It's from Sunday Citizen, and it's this crystal weighted blanket. It's amazing. I don't travel with that, obviously, because it would take up too much weight in my luggage. But the thing I do travel with is something called an Omnia Glo pillow because I'm obsessed with it. I've actually— I'm on to my third one. I keep one at home and I travel with one, and I, of course, forgot it at the hotel room. But this one helps you not get creases in your skin. So it keeps me in position so that I'm actually able to sleep better and not get kind of funky with my neck. So I love my Omnia Glo sleep pillow. Pillow. So there's, there's a big plug for Omnia, literally. I travel with it everywhere I go. So those are some easy things that you can incorporate in. I know they might seem overwhelming as you're hearing about them for the first time, but the reality is these really are simple little things. Pick one at a time and just start to make it your process that you do.
