In this solo health‑advice video, Nick Howarth (Best Body Health Coach) outlines a comprehensive set of practical strategies to improve sleep quality and address chronic insomnia. He begins by identifying common culprits—excess caffeine, other stimulants, stress, and over‑thinking—that elevate cortisol, and recommends lifestyle tweaks such as limiting negative news, watching comedy, and using ashwagandha to lower cortisol. He then delves into nutritional factors, emphasizing the importance of adequate vitamin D (30,000‑40,000 IU) paired with K2, calcium‑magnesium balance (2 : 1 ratio) supported by boron, and a high potassium intake (≈4,700 mg) with a 2 : 1 potassium‑to‑sodium ratio using quality sea salts. He highlights the calming effects of potassium on the nervous system and its role in blood‑pressure regulation. Next, Howarth discusses sleep‑environment optimization: a cool room temperature (22‑23 °C), a supportive pillow with a ridge‑dip design, and minimizing noise and light. He cautions against melatonin supplements, arguing they can suppress the pineal gland, and instead suggests natural melatonin production via sunlight exposure or short infrared light sessions. Blue light and electromagnetic fields are flagged as sleep disruptors, with recommendations for blue‑light filters on phones and glasses. He further recommends specific micronutrients—methylcobalamin B12, benfotiamine (natural B1) over synthetic thiamine, zinc, and nutritional yeast—to address common deficiencies that impair sleep. He advises eliminating all stimulants, including coffee and diet pills. For immediate relaxation, he teaches a 3‑breath technique (5‑second inhales/exhales) and a visualization exercise (imagining winning the lottery) to calm the mind. Throughout, the tone remains conversational, supportive, and action‑oriented, aiming to give viewers concrete, evidence‑informed steps they can implement tonight for better rest.
Chapters
Hey, Nick Howarth here from Best Body Health Coach. So in this video, I want to have a quick chat to you about sleeping and helping you to sleep better. So there are various things which can cause lack of sleep, and obviously too much coffee is one of them, too many stimulants, and there's, you know, stress, worry, and thinking about, you know, overthinking things and so on. But here are some things that can help you get to sleep and have a good night's rest, because you don't really appreciate a good night's rest until you're not getting it, you know. And I mean, everybody from time to time has had a night where they're like, what? You either get to sleep and then wake up or don't get to sleep, you know. So, um, that, that's a horrible feeling. And there's some people that go night after night. I've had some clients that for 15 years that haven't had more than 3 hours sleep a night. I mean, that's— I can't believe it. It's like, that must be, it must be horrible. It's like torture, you know. So anyway, cortisol is an adrenal hormone which gets created when the body is under stress, when you're sick or when you're thinking about stressful situations. So the way to lower cortisol is to take something called ashwagandha. It actually removes that cortisol hormone from the blood. But one of the major things is to stop watching the news and stop watching things on Facebook which are like, you know, just not very nice, you know, and they make you feel bad and they're negative, you know, negativity stuff, you know. Try to watch better things like comedies. That's what I do before I go to bed at night. If I feel like I'm a bit hyped or a bit wired, I find a good comedian and I watch a good stand-up comic for about 15 to 20 minutes and have a good laugh and I go to sleep. Laughter is a great remedy for handling cortisol and it really is a valid therapy for that. Low vitamin D. So if you're in an area of the world where you don't have a lot of sun, you'll need to take vitamin D and then also K2 at the same time. But if you are not having enough vitamin D Yeah. You'll struggle to get to sleep. Vitamin D will also handle things like jet lag. So if you travel a lot and you find that you're always jet lagged, take a lot of vitamin D. You should be taking 30,000 to 40,000 IU of vitamin D, where, you know, the— I don't even want to tell you what the FDA says, it's like something like 600 or something like that, something ridiculous, you know. So, you know, have a lot of vitamin D. Low on calcium, you know, being low on calcium is also another thing. So you could be low on calcium not because you're not eating enough calcium, but you might be missing some other kind of mineral which helps calcium be absorbed in the body, and one of those minerals is boron. So boron is very good for helping you absorb calcium, so make sure that you're getting enough of everything. You also don't want your balance to go out because magnesium is another thing that can cause— magnesium deficiency is another thing that can cause a lack of sleep. So if you can— so your ratio of calcium and magnesium should be 2 calciums for every 1 magnesium. So if you're having 100 milligrams of magnesium, it should be 200 milligrams of calcium. So those things work in tandem. If you don't put them in tandem, you'll start to create problems like calcium buildup in the body and all of that kind of thing. And then potassium. Potassium, It's such a good calming mineral for the nervous system and the nervous system loves it and you'll lower blood pressure, you'll lower your heart rate, it's just so good for you, you know, and it should be so abundant in the body. It really is what gets— it's so underspoken about on the news. Social media and in medical journals is the value of potassium. So you've got to have lots and lots of potassium, and your potassium works in tandem with sodium, in other words, like salt. So if you're having— not table salt, I'm talking about good pink Himalayan salt or Celtic sea salt or just general nice clean sea salt— so if you can do that, then you do 2 potassiums for every 1 sodium. So that's how you should be taking your potassiums, and you should be having a lot of potassium, like 4,700 mg per day. I can guarantee you're probably not getting that, probably getting about 500 mg per day. So if you— and potassium, if you have high blood pressure, you just take a ton of potassium and you'll probably find your blood pressure will be handled in a very short space of time. And then a bad sleeping environment, so obviously noisy, too light and the wrong temperature, the wrong pillow. So find a pillow that's comfortable, not a pillow that is going to make your neck uncomfortable. I've got a pillow that's got a bit of a ridge on the edges and then it's a dip in the middle and my neck lies nicely on that, on that ridge and it takes the curvature of my neck and I sleep like a baby with that pillow. And since I've been using that pillow, which is probably about 15 years now, I'd actually changed my sleep. That was probably one of the major things that changed my sleep pattern was my pillow. So make sure your pillow's right, make sure your temperature in your room— and I'm talking degrees Celsius here, so you'll have to work it out in Fahrenheit— is about 22, 23 degrees, maybe even less. So when the room's slightly colder and you've got to put a blanket over, people sleep better that way in general. And then you could take melatonin, but melatonin is created by the pineal gland in the brain, and if you take too much melatonin, it's going to start damaging that gland and it's not going to produce it. So sunlight or infrared light produces melatonin, so if you spend time in the sun, you should be producing enough melatonin. If you don't have a lot of time in the sun, you could get yourself an infrared light and put it on your skin for 15 minutes before you go to bed and you'll have enough melatonin to get to sleep, but your pineal gland will be producing melatonin, you won't be actually putting it in. If you're taking— because it's a hormone replacement, if you're taking melatonin, it's a hormone replacement which means the gland that's supposed to produce it gets lazy and doesn't produce it anymore. So you can imagine where that goes. Alright, and then blue light or electromagnetic fields. So, you know, you've got wiring in your walls and electricity going through your walls and electricity cables outside. All these things play a role in lack of sleep, and especially blue light. So sitting on your phone specifically, not necessarily so much the TV, but screen time on your phone, before you go to bed, it's deadly. So, you know, put that blue light filter on your phone or get yourself some blue light filter glasses or something like that if you have to sit on your phone before you go to bed. I'm like that, I have to, I'm on my phone all the time. I'm always answering people on different messenger services and I spend all day on it and that's right up until like 11 PM. So sometimes I do lie in bed and I have to do that, but I have these blue light filters on my phone. so it doesn't mess with me too much. And then low vitamin B12, you must have a good vitamin B12, the methylcobalamin. Methylcobalamin is the one that you want. If you get the other one, you may as well just not buy it. So vitamin B12 is a very, very good B vitamin for helping you sleep. Nutritional yeast, just have lots of nutritional yeast and that'll help you sleep. And then vitamin B1, Try to get the benfotiamine, which is a naturally occurring vitamin B1. Try to stay away from thiamine. Thiamine is a synthetic version of vitamin B1, either made from corn or petroleum products, so it's not good for you. But lots of vitamin B1. Vitamin B1 will— screen time will reduce your B1, stress will reduce your B1. There's so many things that reduce B1, and lots of people have a lack of vitamin B1. Yeah. It would probably, even if you weren't sleeping badly, take vitamin B1. You're probably deficient in it. And then low zinc, so make sure that you're having enough zinc. You can get it from your food, but if you don't think you are, get it from a supplement. And then stop any stimulants like I said before, coffee, you know, all of these types of things. If you're taking any like diet pills, or any kind of stimulant like that, just knock that off. That's not going to work at all. And then there's a good little trick that I always try, is a breathing trick where you take 3 long breaths in and obviously 3 long breaths out, but you breathe in for 5 seconds like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And you do 3 of those, and then if you can't fall asleep after that, try it again. But that'll just slow everything down, because if you find that you're lying there panting like a dog, like, like that, then you're probably lacking in some kind of mineral. Probably potassium or magnesium, but in order to just slow that breathing down, just force yourself to breathe in for 5 seconds, breathe out for 5 seconds, breathe in— you'll see it's very, very calming. So there's that. And also then, um, you know, somebody gave me this very, very simple solution to sleep many, many years ago, probably about 20, 25 years ago, and they said, Imagine what you would do if you won the lotto, what you would spend your money on. And you start imagining what you would spend your money on if you won the lotto, and it works. It actually works. You're like, hey, I'll do this. And for me, it's like, I'll get that bike and, you know, that motorcycle, and I'd pay for this and this charity, and, you know, all of these things. And it starts to make you feel better, and you fall asleep. It's actually Valid. It will work. So you can try that out. Like, anyway, I hope you got something from this, and I hope you sleep better tonight as a result. Cool.
