7 Simple Steps To Optimizing Your Sleep For Better Performance | Ronan Oliveira

In this video, I want to give you a step by step process that comprises of seven steps that you can use to optimize your sleep, to raise your energy. And it comes from a reflection that is, why don't we sleep enough? Well, we all know we should. Sometimes I think it's because there's a little bit of pride that we learn to build in not sleeping. You know, when I say I can perform well at work and I sleep four hours a night, you know, people just fill up their chest to say things like this. But when we start working, caring a bit more about sleep, about quantity and quality of sleep, you see that there's a whole shift that happens in your entire life. And this is something that is also sometimes complicated, that is to sell the benefits of sleep because they are so broad and fundamental that it just improves your entire life. You know, if sleep was had one benefit, you know, if you sleep more, you burn fat, or if you sleep more, you are smarter, or if you sleep more, you are happier, it will be very easy to grasp it and to care more about it. But sleep does all these things. And what we see from research is that it is connected to your brain, mood and cognition, is connected to your body, is connected to your mood, and it improves everything that you do. You do better, a lot better when you sleep. And sleep deprivation is some of the things that are shortening your life, increasing your stress levels, and is an indirect probable cause for most of the problems that we face later on in life. There are different ways to optimize our sleep, but usually when I work with someone, there is a step by step process that I go through that I learned by tracking my sleep. So this is a device that is called the Oura ring. It's not the only one, but it's a really good device that tracks quantity and quality of sleep in your nervous system the next day. That I used to study and master my sleeping habits based on what we have from science and what we know that works and what doesn't. But I found out that the first step that makes the most difference when you want to start optimizing is having a fixed time that you wake up every day, including weekends. And when I am working with someone, I know that this is a very sensitive topic and this has to do with your circadian rhythm. And we know that a lot of internal processes inside our bodies, like hormones or the way the organs work in things like our mood and energy, they have a biological clock. They have a time to start and they have a time to Finish. And amongst all of these things are our levels of cortisol and melatonin that are hormones managing our energy through the day and our ability to fall asleep and have quality sleep at night. Cortisol raises in the morning. This is when you wake up or is supposed to raise in the morning and it starts to decrease throughout the day when it follows a natural pattern when it starts to fall. This is when you get a raise in melatonin in the evening that makes you sleepy and gives you quality sleep. This happens when everything is regular. But if you are sleeping or waking up every day at different times, you dysregulate the pattern of cortisol and melatonin. It can get to a point that it turns the opposite. You know you are feeling sleepy when you should be alert and you feeling alert in the evening when you should be sleepy. It's more or less like jet lag without really moving locations. But if you wake up in different times during the week, including the weekend, two or three hours is already enough to cause you this little jet lag effect. So the first step is putting an alarm clock for the time you need to wake up. And you figure this out based on your weekdays because you have a time that probably you need to get to work. And before that time between waking up and getting to work, you have a morning routine. Maybe you have breakfast, maybe you do some exercise. It takes some amount of time. So you count that and you figure out what should be your wake up time every day. And then you put an alarm clock for every day of the week and weekends. The second step will be a consequence to that. You know, let's say that my wake up time is 7:30 every morning. If I go to bed in the weekend at 2am, but I still have my alarm clock at 7:30, I'll be pretty tired the next day. So at some point I'll need to work backwards to give my body enough time to sleep. So the second step is to find out how many hours of sleep I need so that I can wake up at the right time without an alarm clock. I just start counting seven hours before the wake up time and go to bed at that time and see if I wake up with the alarm clock or not. If I did, that means that I probably need a little bit more sleep. So I count three 15 minutes back now seven hours and 15 minutes in the next night or seven hours and a half, eight hours. And eventually if I start working backwards, there will be a time that I will wake up right at 7:30 without an alarm clock. I will keep this for a couple of days to figure out how much time of sleep I need. It's different. Not everyone needs eight hours or eight and a half or seven and a half. There's a range of time that is different from person to person. Working backwards now gives me the time that I should go to bed so that I can sleep enough and wake up every day at the same time. So this is the second step. The third step is now building an evening routine because you can set a goal for yourself. Okay, I find out that I need seven and a half hours of sleep. I wake up every day at 7:30, so I need to go to bed at 12. I will put my alarm clock at 12am so then I can go to bed at the right time. It sounds like an amazing idea. It's just that it doesn't work. Because if you're doing something, if you're working or watching TV or whatever you're doing at night and then alarm goes off 12am you should be to bed. You cannot just instantly go to bed and fall asleep instantly. So what you need to do is to have an evening routine. And your alarm clock that reminds you when you should stop anything that you are doing and go to bed is not your bedtime, but your evening routine time. This evening routine can take as long as you wish. It can be something short, like just 15 minutes, you know, having a shower, brush your teeth, maybe doing a few stretches. It can be something longer, a whole routine. I have my tea and then I read a book and it takes a whole half an hour or one hour. I do my journaling and things like that. Whatever it is that prepares you to sleep, it should be like a ritual. Every day should be the same thing. And as you start doing it, you already feel falling into that state of sleepiness state that get you to a good night of sleep. And then your alarm clock in the evening will be to remind you of when your evening routine should start. So setting that alarm clock to the beginning of the evening routine is our third step. With these three steps, we cover the amount of sleep that we need. And we know, for example, from Matthew Walker in his TED Talk, he's the author of why We Sleep. He says that, you know, people who sleep five hours a night, they have 65% more chances of dying earlier. So you see how fundamental having the right amount of sleep is. Now we start working on the quality of sleep. And the first step here, which is our fourth step of our process, is to cut stimulants in the afternoon. So that means we have no caffeine after 2pm and we have no alcohol in the evening. Because you say, ah, but if I drink a bottle of vodka, I fall asleep like a rock. Yes you do. But the next day, the way that you wake up tells you that it was not really good quality sleep. What happens during the time that you sleep really matters? You usually go through cycles that alternate between light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep. And all of them, they have different functions to restore your physical body, restore yourself. That's what usually happens in the deep sleep. Restore your emotions and go through all the events and the learning points that you have in the day, filter what matters and throw away what doesn't so your mind can focus and is available to learn more the next day. That's usually what happens on REM sleep and also all the maintenance of the body, they depend on having more or less five cycles of this sleep. And something that disturbs these five cycles is the use of stimulants during the day. We talked in more detail about caffeine in our previous video. So if you haven't watched that one, I really recommend that you do. You can go right here and there. We talk about stopping caffeine after 2pm so it doesn't wake you up earlier, it doesn't disrupt your cycles of sleep. And for example, if you miss a cycle of sleep because you woke up earlier than you should, you may lose up to 1/3% of your cognitive abilities of the next day. So cutting this simulant is one of the things that gives you a bit more quality of sleep. The fifth step is cutting another thing that also disrupts the quality of sleep at night. That is the amount of light that you get, especially blue light. You know, how does your brain knows when is day or when is night, when you should be awake and when you should be sleepy? Usually is because when you are, when the sun is out there, that is the frequency of light that touches our retina. And 200,000 years ago, when we lived in the wild and there were no artificial lights, that was the only signal that we got to know that we should run all the daily process, all the awake and alert processes of the body. The light hits our retina, retina sends a signal to the brain saying I'm receiving this, this blue frequency of light. That means that the sun is up because the sun is the one who sends a lot of the light. That means that it's day and that means that we need to run all of the processes that makes us feel alert. When the sun goes down, that light is not no longer touching the retina. So the retina is sending the message to the brain that says, I'm not receiving that frequency of light, the blue light anymore. So that means that the sun is down. And that means that we should now stop to run the process that makes us feel alert and start running the process that makes us feel sleepy and to recover the body. And this is how the brain knows. But today, with artificial light, we can still get a significant amount of the frequency of blue light touching our retina in the evening. So then it usually comes from artificial light, especially from the screen of our devices. I'm talking about phone or tablets or a computer or tv, which is a lot of things that we use in the evening while we are working or watching Netflix. So the eyes are still communicating to the body. I'm receiving this blue light frequency. It must be day out there. Keep running the processes that makes us alert. So you can still fall asleep if you are on your phone up until the time that you go to bed. But you're not giving time for the melatonin raise. And the melatonin is the hormone that takes you by the hand and gives you quality sleeping. It goes through all the cycles of sleep. Melatonin is only released in the absence of light. So removing the usage of electronic devices in the evening is one of the best strategies to give time for melatonin to rays. So this is one of the things now that you have an evening routine. Instead of watching tv, using your phone, using your laptop, two things that you can do. One, shut them off for one hour at least before going to bed. Or wear a blue light blocking glass because it blocks that frequency of light that tells your brain that it's day. Or just focus on activities that avoid artificial light. To begin with. I love to spend half an hour reading a book before going to bed. Or sometimes people like to journal or just to have conversation with their family. Focus on something that you can do that avoids the artificial light. And there you go, now you're having more quality of sleep. This leads to our sixth step that also has to do with light. But instead of removing light in the evening, now it has to do with giving ourselves more exposure to light in the morning. Because now in modern life, we sometimes stay indoors all the time and we're not getting as much blue light from the sun when we should have to tell our bodies that is now day. And we should run the process to make us feel alert. So the main action here is when you wake up, right after you wake up, get some sunlight shining on your eyes, you know, go outside for a five minute walk. The more you can spend under the sun or with the exposure to sunlight during the morning, from the time you wake up all the way to 12pm, the better your sleep quality will be at night. But at least if it cannot be working by a window or, you know, outside or in the balcony, at least take five minutes walk after you wake up because it already gives your body some blood flow and expose you to that blue light that signals to your brain, it's day. Let's run the alert processes so that we can run the sleepy processes in the evening. And finally we go to the seventh step that makes a lot of difference, that is not eating anything up until three hours of going to bed. Because if you eat too close to going to bed, you are digesting food still. And digestion takes a lot of energy and it raises your body temperature and the quality of sleep. All those five cycles, they depend on your ability to decrease your body temperature. So if you have a heavy meal and go to bed, you are also sacrificing a bit of your sleep quality because of all the internal temperature that you are building because of digestion. These are some of the steps and there are a lot more than you can do and you can even go deeper and master the art of sleep. If this is something that you are interested about, then I want to point you out to a course that we have with Dr. Michael Bruce, also known as the Sleep Doctor. He has a program called the Mastery of Sleep that takes you by the hand to apply all these behaviors and more. So all these, these different areas of life that get uplifted with better sleep can be expressed as you go through this transformational course. If you have any questions or comments about this process of optimizing your sleep, please leave them in the comment below. We can keep a conversation there. If you like this type of videos, please subscribe these past videos, they were a buffer between season one and season two and I'll be back in a couple of weeks with season two and it will be all about nutrition and food. So if you like videos like this, you're going to enjoy season two that I'm preparing for you. I see you in the next video.