Sachin Patel, a metabolic coach, breaks down how sleep fuels hormonal balance and healing. Get morning sunlight, ditch overhead lights at night, stop screens hours before bed, keep your bedroom cool, and consider mouth taping to breathe through your nose while you sleep.
Questions this video answers
November 27, 2021.
89.
About 1500 Kelvin or about 800 Kelvin (very warm/red zone).
Around 8:00 PM (a couple hours before bedtime).
Chapters
Hello, my friend, it's Sachin. I hope you're doing awesome today. In this video, I want to talk about one of the most important things that you do for your metabolic health and that is sleep. So sleep is something that is so overlooked, it's something that is now becoming more sexy thanks to Kim Kardashian, who's tracking her Oura ring scores on a daily basis. It's something that is so overlooked when it comes to somebody's healing, because many people are in fact, ironically up all night looking for answers, when instead they'll be far better off getting a good night's sleep or doing something to get a good night's sleep instead of being on their computers. So a couple things I want to talk about when it comes to sleep. One is you probably already know this, so this is a gentle reminder. I'm not here to blow your mind away. I'm here to remind you of the things that deep inside you, you probably already know. But I know you still need to hear it. So I'm going to share with you some really simple tips that you can do and maybe some things that you haven't heard of before. So one thing that's important is our exposure to sunlight. The best way to get a good night's sleep is to make sure you get sunlight first thing in the morning. Even if it's cloudy. Just get outside for a few minutes and that's going to signal to your brain what time of day it is. Midday, you want to get outside. That's going to signal to your brain what time of day it is. But that's also going to help you make more serotonin, which later on in the evening turns into melatonin. And then at some point in the evening, it's great to go for an evening walk or a sunset stroll so that you can watch the sun go down. And as the sun goes down, the beautiful thing about that is that's going to be a little night cap to your day and it's going to tell your brain it's time to start winding down. After the sun goes down, I'm going to encourage you to turn off all overhead lighting. Overhead lighting tells your brain it's the middle of the day. I want you to use up lighting instead, which comes from the ground up, so below the horizon, any lighting is going to be fine. Ideally, you want that lighting to be a warmer color temperature. So you can choose like a 1500 Kelvin temperature bulb, or you can choose a 800 Kelvin temperature bulb, which is more in the Red zone. And these bulbs are going to be able to light up your space. However, they are not going to decrease melatonin production. If you're really looking for enhanced sleep, one of the things I recommend is a lights out challenge where, where you turn off all the lights after the sun goes down. Only candlelight and red light and no TVs, no screens. You can read books and things like that, old school if you want. And that's gonna be your fastest, most effective way of getting a good night's rest, is to realign your circadian rhythm and your biological clock with the sun and watch the magic unfold. In fact, many of my clients wear an OURA ring like I do. And so we're able to track what happens when they do a sleep challenge. And, and the difference in their sleep and health is profound within just the first night of doing this. So I challenge you to do this if you're struggling with sleep or you're not finding that your sleep is restful. A couple other things about sleep is just like you want to stop eating a few hours before bedtime, it's a good idea to stop exposure to artificial lighting a couple hours before bedtime as well. So that means screens off about, you know, 8 o' clock at night for a 10 o' clock bedtime. I'm not perfect. I'm not pretending to be. But I'm here to tell you what absolutely works. So go to books, go to candlelight, go to red light, play some board games, hang out with your family, have a conversation and watch what happens. You will feel amazing. Put on some relaxing music, you know, really get your body in the mood of going to bed. Another thing with sleep is you want to make sure that you have a consistent sleep and wake time. So even if it's the weekend, you want to wake up at the same time and you want to go to bed at the same time as much as you possibly can. Again, I have a life too. I'm not perfect. But we're talking about how to optimize your sleep. That's important and it's sometimes easier to follow. And now that we're in our homes a lot more than we used to be, it's a little bit easier to manage that. All right. Another thing with sleep is you want to lower the temperature in your room so you want to actually cool the room down. Maybe open the windows or you can turn the air conditioning on. You can get something like a chili pad when you get colder at night, when your core temperature drops at night, you're going to get deeper, more restful sleep and better healing and regeneration and repair. So your body temperature should not go up in the evening. It should actually go down in the evening. Okay. Another thing that you want to do, we've discussed this already, is mouth taping. So gently taping your mouth closed at night is going to allow you to breathe through your nose. And by breathing through your nose, you're going to get more deep, restful sleep. Another tool that can help you with sleep is tracking your scores. So I wear a ring, and every morning I get to see what my sleep score is. So this morning my sleep score was 89. And I can see what I could have done better, what I could have done differently in order for me to sleep deeper or sleep better. I can also play around with my meal timing or what I ate before I went to bed or what I did before I went to bed and see how that affects my sleep. I also love essential oils. One of them is lavender. So lavender is a great way for us to get into a state of relaxation. So you can diffuse some lavender oil along with your red light bulbs, along with soft music, along with turning off all overhead lighting and having conversations at, you know, in front of candlelight or whatever the case may be, you can already start to feel how your evening could go much better in order to prepare you for sleep. Sleep is one of the most important things that we do in order to heal our muscles, in order to heal our cardiovascular system, in order to heal our immune system, our digestive organs, and also, more importantly, to heal our brain and cognitive function. How you're sleeping determines how well you're going to heal, and it determines the hormones you're going to release. It determines the cravings you're going to have tomorrow. It's going to determine how satiated you are after you eat. It's going to determine how sharp you are, how creative you are, and how cognitive you are the next day. And so many other things. So many things rest on how well you sleep. And so I want to make sure that that's a priority for you if metabolic health is a priority for you. And one thing to keep in mind is when you're sleeping at night, what's cool is that your body has shifted gears and it's in the most parasympathetic state that it's going to be in the most relaxed, most healing, most regenerative state that it's going to be in. So I want you to try to see if you can increase the amount of time you sleep. Adding an hour a day will probably add about two more hours of productivity in your day. So it's not about time as you probably know. It's about productivity. So if you could sleep an hour longer but get two more hours of productivity, that's a pretty huge win. So make sure you get some good rest tonight. Starting tomorrow morning, get some sunlight, more in the morning, midday sunset, turn off all the overhead lighting and as I said, watch the magic unfold. You can thank me later. This is one of the most simplest, most profound things that you can do when you sleep better and your entire family will sleep better and you'll be thankful for that as well because it is literally one of the most important things we do for our health and healing. All right, that's all I got for you now. Happy sleeping and here's to a healthy and amazing metabolic system. Bye for now.
