31: Using Sleep To Optimise Your Brain, Energy, Productivity, Performance & Health

I know! That’s a big ol’ claim in the title of this blog post. Can sleep really have that much of an impact on your body and mind? In a nutshell… yes! And that’s exactly what I’m going to explore in this post. It’s a long one. But by the end of consuming this, I really want to have gotten across to you… Just how vital sleep is to your health and performance; what optimal sleep looks like; what happens when we’re sleep deprived; and also how you can fix any sleep issues you may be experiencing and get the best night’s sleep of your life! Don’t Buy The Badge!                             It seems there is a weird ‘badge of honour’ that exists when it comes to sleep. As if sacrificing your sleep makes you a harder worker, more driven and more deserving of success. Bollocks! A meta-analysis by the Dept. of Psychology at Bradley University suggests that sleep deprivation “strongly impairs human functioning”. And study after study that has been done supports this too. Even though you may not necessarily “feel” the effects now, I promise you that a lack of sleep is going to make you sick, tired, moody, unproductive and struggling to burn fat. Why Is Sleep Important? Your body comes under a lot of stress during the day. Even if you aren’t what most would call ‘stressed’, you are still ‘switched on’ and dealing with a whole manner of things in your day-to-day life. Now, stress is good. We need to stress the body or we simply wither away into nothingness. But we also need to balance this out by allowing our body to repair itself, regenerate cells, digest, detoxify and generally build back up from the breaking down we did through the day. If we’re not allowing the body to do this, then we are on a downward spiral of continuously breaking the body down. And this is not good. What Does Optimal Sleep Look Like? We have hormones that tell us to ‘be awake’ and hormones that tell us to ‘wind down’ and get ready to sleep. The main two involved here are cortisol (awake) and melatonin (down). These hormones should work on a 24-hour rhythm that pumps out cortisol as the sun rises in the morning and melatonin as we start to wind down in the evenings. So optimal sleep isn’t about simply ‘getting your eight hours’ at any time. Our hormones are set to ‘do their thing’ and for us to get the optimal benefit from our sleep when it gets dark. In fact, it’s been shown that we do most of our physical repair when asleep between the hours of 10pm and 2am, while doing most of our psychological repair between 2am and 6am. This means we have a sort of ‘optimal sleep window’ that leaves us able to get the best sleep between the hours of 10pm and 6am without waking up to pee or anything else. You should wake up feeling rested and not like you need to stay in bed for another hour – even at 6am! What Happens When We’re Sleep Deprived? I’m not saying that if you don’t sleep exactly between the hours of 10pm and 6am then your brain will explode and you may as well jump off a bridge. But if the constant breaking down I referred to before takes place without allowing for recovery and replenishment, then this results in a fair few negative things going on in your body: Imbalanced hormones. This is probably a blog/podcast topic all by itself, but sleep deprivation has a direct impact on healthy hormone secretion. This means all kinds of weird and wonderful negative things can happen to how you look, feel and perform!    Toxicity (including your brain!). Detoxification is a huge part of what happens during sleep. If you’re not sleeping right, you’re not detoxifying right. If you’re not detoxifying right, then you are leaving shit in your body that it would ideally like to get rid of. Plus, your brain has its own detoxification system (called the glymphatic waste system) that has been shown by the University of Rochester Medical School to be up to 10x more active during sleep. Decreased cognitive function. When you don’t sleep well, your concentration, focus and short term memory take a deep downward spiral. Essentially, you become less efficient at completing tasks and your ability to learn and store new information dissipates. Not good if you want to perform like a badass! Poor decision making. As a follow on, it’s been proven time and time again that you just do not make as good decisions when sleep deprived. Again, not good if you want that competitive advantage. Propensity for weight gain. Combine that crazy mix up of hormones with the poor decision making and you’re making it very easy to store fat. Plus, sleep and Human Growth Hormone (HGH) go hand in hand, with HGH being a muscle building, fat burning hormone. Depression. Studies have shown that even slight sleep deprivation can result in low mood and depression. Poor sleep is a huge disruptor of serotonin production, which results in us not getting that happy juice the brain needs! There are a lot more things that poor sleep results in. But, in a nutshell, it’s important to remember that sleep screws up your hormones and therefore moves you in a direction of over-toxicity, depression, disease, storing fat and performing poorly in all aspects of life. How Do We Sleep Better Then? It’s all well and good telling you how important sleep is. But many of us would struggle to actually go ahead and get good quality sleep, even if we wanted to. So here are my best strategies for getting the best night’s sleep of your life: Set yourself a sleep and wake up time. Getting as close to the ‘optimal sleep window’ as possible means setting a ‘rule’ in your life around valuing sleep. Aiming to get to bed between 10-11pm and waking up between 6-7am most of the time allows you to train an optimal sleep pattern. Have a caffeine cut off time. If you’re a caffeine consumer, then be aware that it stays in your blood for longer than you think. So don’t be doing Starbucks at 9pm! For me, I rarely have anything heavily caffeinated after 3pm. Get more sunlight in the daytime. Melatonin (that wind down hormone I mentioned earlier) is regulated by light exposure. So getting your dose of sunlight during the day can really help to promote melatonin production after sunset. But minimise that light at night! Once the sun does set, it’s common to then simply wack on a giant 100 watt bulb for the rest of the night. But the body still thinks the sun is up and doesn’t secrete that lovely melatonin. Dimming the lights, or going by candlelight is a great idea. Minimise screen time at night. Again, your body can’t tell the difference between sunlight and the light on your computer. So TVs, laptops and anything pumping out that blue light can hugely disrupt sleep. Try switching it off at least an hour before sleepy time. lux it up, if you have to. I know it’s not always realistic to expect a complete screen ban. So the next best thing is minimising that blue light, which has been shown to be the light colour that disrupts sleep monumentally more than any other. A great app for your computer is f.lux, which dims your screen of blue light according to when the sun sets in your location. Get rid of the electrics! You know those electronic devices we tend to keep and charge in the bedroom each night? They transmit mass amounts of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) that create havoc with our ability to sleep optimally. Seriously, get rid of the electronics from the room and unplug everything you possibly can. Have a bed time routine. Creating a little ‘wind down’ routine can do wonders for your sleep. Rather than smashing through 10 episodes of Family Guy, try an hour of things like yoga, stretching, meditations, journaling and even a warm bath with magnesium flakes or Epsom salts. If you’re going to eat, eat protein and fat. Some people need a little snack before bed. But going for the carb-dense foods like fruit or desserts can create a blood sugar crash that wakes you up and disrupts your sleep. Stick to protein and healthy fats for balanced blood sugar and good sleep. Beast out the magnesium. Magnesium is involved in hundreds of biochemical processes and helps us, among many other things, deal with stress. But it gets depleted pretty quickly, so a good quality supplement can do wonders for sleep. It’s best using a transdermal (via the skin) spray supplement though as it’s the easiest way for the body to take it in. Black out your room. Get rid of any and all light. Any light that even touches your skin will raise a question mark in your body as to whether it’s morning and, therefore, time to wake up. Black out the room and allow the sunrise to dictate when it’s time to wake! Meditate. If I ever don’t sleep, it’s because my mind is going a mile a minute worrying or thinking things through. Since I started regularly mediating a couple years ago, I am rarely sat staring at the ceiling worrying that I’m wasting my life. Numerous studies have shown that just 10 minutes of meditation per day can help calm that inner douchebag talking shit to you. And that be by sleep masterclass for thee. Now, I imagine over the coming weeks, months and (hopefully) years, I’ll be going into more depth in various different areas here. But this is a pretty beastly overview to the whole sleep world that I hope helps you to appreciate the value of sleep in being an Enlightened Entrepreneurial Badass. And also to help you in your quest to fix sleeping issues and optimise this area of your life so you can look, feel and perform at your very best in all areas of your life. Take a listen to the podcast episode for this blog post via the player at the top. Or head over to iTunes and subscribe there for Apple lovers, and over on Stitcher for non-Apple peeps. Love, Laughter & Light, Mike P.S. If you haven’t done so already, click here to join my Facebook group and engage with all the other dudes and dudettes in the Enlightened Entrepreneurial Badasses tribe!