Kinobody welcomes Austin Floyd (Instagram) to share with you sleeping tips for a better life and body…
Austin, take it away!
Sleep is amazing for your body, and lack thereof leads to so many horrible symptoms.
In today’s article, I wanted to cover the agenda Greg and I talked about in our interview and share some effective sleeping tips to help you get a restful nights sleep.
SLEEP AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR QUALITY OF LIFE AND A BETTER BODY
To be brutally honest, sleep can make or break the quality of life.
Think about it this way, when you get less sleep, typically brain fog and lethargy ensues.
Someone who functions at a high capacity, goes and hit’s strong RPT styled training sessions and eats with intermittent fasting during the day, doesn’t want anything to do with brain fog, insomnia and lethargy.
Although, sadly it happens so frequently.
It seems we try to nail our nutrition, hammer down on workouts and even make sure we stay active but neglect the one thing that is used for 1/3rd of the time you are alive.
Again, during your lifetime, about 1/3rd is spent sleeping…
Which is why I always emphasize the importance of optimizing your sleep. If the ⅓ of your life during sleep isn’t optimized, then the other 2/3rd will never be.
Now if you’re just looking for some sleeping tips on how you can get better sleep tonight, let’s jump into it.
SLEEPING TIPS INFOGRAPHIC
#1: Make Sure Your Room is Cold (62-68 degree)
Humans naturally release more melatonin and create a better environment for being calm and ready to de-stress during bed when the room is cold.
After a ton of research in this field, researchers found that around 62-68 degrees during the night, helps the body optimally produce the hormones for sleep and keep the body in sleep throughout the evening.
There is even a study measuring sleep quality throughout the evening when keeping feet outside of the bed sheets.
Which I would say give a try, because it strangely seems to work.
#2: Sleep Naked For Optimal Blood Flow and Oxytocin Production
At night, nowadays we see everyone wearing pajamas, and during the winter I definitely partake in wearing them myself.
The problem is that depending on how much constriction is on the waist and what we are wearing, dictates how well we can sleep.
When we sleep naked, lymphatic fluid can flow through the body better and it ensures that we aren’t cutting off blood from anywhere that is important.
For males, sleeping in constricted boxers can even hurt testosterone production from lack of blood flow.
To add to this, when we sleep naked and are with our partner or someone close, the skin-on-skin contact helps to increase oxytocin and subsequently improve our bodies ability to be relaxed with an emotional connection to the other party.
This one simple fix can revolutionize your sleep effortlessly.
#3: 2 Kiwi’s 2 Hours Before Bed
A lesser-known food that can help both sleep latency (how quickly you fall asleep) and sleep quality is kiwis.
The compound seems to be the high anti-oxidant count paired with digestible serotonin (helping to up-regulate melatonin production before bed), make sure that you eat them 2 HOURS before bed.
And to add to this, you may notice a lower stress feeling simply by ingesting more de-stressing fructose before bed.
Here are two more “bonus” foods to eat right before bed that are recommended when you want to make sure you can stay asleep without tossing and turning or waking up:
1 Tablespoon of Honey Before Bed
Honey contains about a half and half ratio of fructose to glucose.
This means that both quick digesting sugars and beneficial sugar to replace liver glycogen are within honey.
It also means sleep will be improved because liver glycogen should stay replenished throughout the night, so you don’t wake up in the middle of the evening tossing and turning.
With the Brian “fed’ the body stays calm, and your sleep shouldn’t be interrupted at night.
Not by sudden hunger, tossing or turning, or waking to use the bathroom.
Use one tablespoon of honey 30 minutes to an hour before bed for best effect.
Salt/Sodium
If you wake up in the middle of the night to pee, odds are you have over activation of adrenals.
Maybe it is from too much water or too much stress.
Your kidneys are flushing to help activate the parasympathetic nervous system and stop adrenal hormone excretion, but on top of that, you are diluting your body of a crucial mineral.
And without that, it becomes nearly impossible to keep optimal health and sleep effortlessly.
By adding more salt to your day (even a shot of it in water during your daily fast) will allow your body to calm down, and you to sleep 10x better than before.
Without the midnight wake up to pee.
And before you worry about increasing your sodium content because of water holding and hypertension, the human body can handle up to 10g of sodium a day (about 30g of salt.)
With that much, there isn’t even a crazy spike in blood sugar or water holding that stays for more than a couple of days.
And after utilizing more salt, the body actually can calm down without the fear of burning through these minerals.
What These Sleeping Tips Ultimately Come Down To
Before we wrap up this article, I wanted to leave you with another actionable tip and something you need to avoid close to bedtime. And that’s blue light.
Blue light kills sleep, it just does. Which is why I have my room decked out in red light (Instagram picture below.)
Knowing this, we should actively aim to minimize and avoid blue light 2-3 hours before bed.
The easiest way to do this, at the start, is by utilizing a few resources:
– Blue Light Blocking Glasses If Your Are Serious
– F.lux and Twilight/iPhone settings
– Reading or something not related to electronics at night.
The easiest thing to do is forego electronics and LED lights containing blue lights at night, but here’s another viable option.
Use blue light blocking glasses around 2 hours before bed.
When you’re at home it’s easy just to put on the glasses and go about business as usual, although now with drastically enhanced sleep.
In fact, blue light before bed not only diminishes the amount of melatonin suspended in the blood stream throughout the night but the duration of it in the blood.
Making you sleep for less time and with worse quality.
Another easy solution is to add f.lux (a computer app) to devices which support it, as well as twilight to Android phones and night mode to Apple phones.
This will help to minimize brightness and blue light exposure emitted by your computer and phones before bed.
Hacking Sleep Checklist:
- Sleep Naked
- Make Sure Your Room is Between 60 and 68 Degrees Fahrenheit
- Eat Two Kiwi’s 2 hours before bed
- Eat one tablespoon of honey around bedtime
- Eat More Salt
- Use blue light blocking sunglasses, f.lux and a twilight or night mode before bed.
- Forego blue light by reading or some other non-electronic activity before bed.
- Put cell phones on airplane mode
- For busy, noisy areas use a white noise generator
I hope you put these sleep hacking techniques to use! If you do, I’m certain your sleep quality and quantity will improve drastically.
Thanks for reading,
Austin
