Secrets for a Good Night Sleep

Did you have a good night’s sleep last night? 

Did you wake up refreshed, or did you struggle to get quality sleep, struggle to stay asleep, and find that you woke up unrefreshed, thinking it was Groundhog Day again?

I’ve got another day where I’m just feeling like I can’t get through, wishing that I could stay in bed. 

It seems to be more common these days for many people not to get good quality sleep. Whether it’s that you wake up having trouble going to sleep, that you wake up several times during the night and struggle to get back to sleep, or that you’re not getting the deep, good-quality sleep that allows you to feel refreshed and ready to wake up the next day.

Do you feel any of these? Because if you do, you’re not alone. 

Many people are finding this to be happening, and also some of my clients are coming to me and saying, “I’m just not sleeping. I’m tired. I’m waking up unrefreshed. I’m struggling to stay asleep, and I’m waking up for a couple of hours during the night.”

We spend about a third of our lifetime asleep, and it should be something that we invest a little bit more in to get good quality sleep to help us out through the rest of the day. Because if you’re missing out on good quality sleep, you might be struggling with your mental health, your moods, and stress. 

Stress response increases when you’re not getting good quality sleep. You might find that you pour it into your decision-making and that you are struggling to stay energized each and every day because sleep is also involved, where we just go to sleep and everything shuts down. It’s not like when you turn a light off or turn your phone off, everything just shuts down.

Sleeping is an active process and our memories are consolidated. We create cellular repairs, and our brain also does a lot of repair processes. We create new neurons that we can repair and fix damaged areas, but they also grow during the night. There is a part of the night where we actually create growth hormone to help our body repair and rejuvenate, and that’s what we want: longevity. 

Part of my mission in life is to have that longevity right to the end and not suffer from ill health toward the end of my life. It’s all about getting good sleep. Most of my life, I’ve been a great sleeper, much to the dismay of those around me who can’t sleep very well. I have enjoyed the ability to sleep well.

But I will say there has been a time recently in my life where stress increased. There were a lot of personal demands. Personal issues were going on that robbed me of my sleep and my ability to sleep. There were a couple of nights where I would go to sleep for an hour, wake up, be awake for several hours, and then maybe go back to sleep half an hour to an hour before I was due to wake up to start my day and start my work.

During the night, you get angry at yourself because you’re not going to sleep or frustrated because everyone else in the house seems to be asleep. Why can’t you? That frustration and that anger, and telling yourself you must go to sleep right now, doesn’t quite work. It just makes the situation worse.

You might also find that the to-do list is going round and round in your head. I know mine was; I had a massive to-do list that would go round, things that I had to get done for the next day, and I would create solutions to problems that may or may not ever eventuate, or I would have these grandiose ideas about changes that I was going to make in my life. When I got up the next day and looked at what I was thinking about and my to-do list, those worries and concerns didn’t seem quite as big, or they didn’t seem even relevant.

I remember there were several times that I’d wake up and my to-do list was next to my bed. I’d wake up and look at it and think, “That’s not important”.

Why did I lose sleep about that?

Do you find that you’re being robbed of your sleep because things are going on in your mind or because your body’s not relaxing enough?

If you ever have, and you are looking for some other way to fix it, here are some of my tips for myself that I also use for my clients.

Tips to get good quality sleep

• Have a set regular bedtime and a regular set of wake-up time.

Pick a time that is best for you to go to sleep, and then pick a time for you to wake up at the same time every day. Get up and start the day, and the body will get into a circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm supports you through your quality of sleep. If your body’s creating a cycle and then all of a sudden you change the cycle, it can’t create the hormones it needs to help you get into your best sleep patterns.

• Write out your to-do list before you go to bed.

Plan out your next day before you even get into bed. Clear your head. Get all of those round and round and circle thoughts onto some paper. So that you don’t have to constantly remember it during the night, thinking, Will I forget that? Will I forget to do X, Y, and Z?

• Journal your thoughts and your feelings. 

Journal your gratitude for the day and what’s happened so far. Take some time to do it, journaling, and to release all of those thoughts so that the brain can go into the next phase in a much calmer manner.

• Meditation

Meditation works really fantastic. It is a way to clear the head and stop all of those excessive thoughts that have been going on from the day to create a calm, relaxed environment for bed. 

• Reading

Many of my clients also find that reading a novel, reading a book, something that’s light, not heavy and educational, but light and fun, helps them relax.

• Practice deep breathing exercises

You also might find that some deep breathing exercises, where you just concentrate on your breath for a short period of time, can help to calm the body down and calm the stress response so that you can get to sleep as well.

• Avoid intense conversations or arguments or looking at your emails, particularly work emails.

Avoiding emails, intense conversations, text messages, and those kinds of things before you go to bed is important because your body and brain can still be thinking about them while you’re trying to sleep. Schedule a time to have those conversations or respond to those emails at a time when you’re not about to go to bed or shut down for the day.

• Indulge in a darkened room for one hour before bed.

Bright lights and artificial lights stop our body from producing melatonin, which is our sleep hormone. Dimming the lights and turning off your electronic devices that emit blue light will help your body create melatonin so that you can blend into a beautiful sleep pattern a lot easier because you’ve got good quality melatonin in your body to help with your sleeping.

• Look at what you eat during the day.

It is different for everyone in terms of the number of meals or the time meals are eaten, but it is important to avoid eating two hours before bed so that your digestion has time to break down all that food and move it through. It’s not just sitting there and keeping you from sleeping, but also looking at regular eating patterns during the day to help balance your blood sugar.

I have had one client who came in and was waking up at 12:23 every night. And then, looking at what was going on in her life, we saw that her blood sugar levels were plummeting a little bit at that time of the morning and getting quite low. That was her body’s way of waking her up to go, and that’s an issue. I looked at what she was eating the day before, and particularly after dinner in that hour or two before she went to bed, she was on the blood sugar rollercoaster, as I call it. She was eating a lot of foods that were elevating her blood sugar levels quickly, which then caused the drop later on. 

Eating a good, balanced, quality diet will help support your sleeping program. 

• Regular exercise

There are a lot of studies that show exercise during the day can help support the quality of sleep as well as the onset of sleep. Find an exercise that you love to do—whatever it is that you love to do—and put it into your routine regularly, because on the days that you exercise, you’ll find that your sleep patterns are a little bit better.

Whether you exercise in the morning or the afternoon after work, it doesn’t really matter which way you go as long as you’re getting some exercise throughout the day. Some of the studies have shown that exercise is lighter in the evening. Not intense exercise, but lighter exercise in the evening helps the body relax a little bit easier into sleep, and that onset of sleep comes quicker with that deeper sleep as well.

• Herbs

If you’re still finding trouble sleeping, there are a lot of herbs and nutrients that can help to support relaxation and support sleep. 

• Passionflower
• Valerian
• California Poppy
• Skullcap
• Oats
• Ziziphus
• Magnolia

They’re all beautiful herbs that help to support the sleeping pattern and the relaxation into sleep. But it is always important to get some advice on which herbs are right for you and to support your sleep because some of these herbs aren’t right for everyone. It is a great way to support you in getting into that pattern of deeper sleep and creating that circadian rhythm.

• Foods and Nutrients 

There are foods and nutrients that help support the body while it sleeps. If you’re getting restless legs and struggling to relax into sleep, look at some of the nutritional deficiencies: iron, magnesium, and vitamin D.

It’s about having a look at what it is that your body needs, and then other nutrients or other foods that are really high in natural melatonin—things like pistachio nuts and tart or sour cherry juice can also help your body create the melatonin, the sleep hormone, that it needs.

There are also some tests and some ideal nutrients that we can use to create the neurotransmitters to help create GABA and to create those neurotransmitters that help you relax into sleep and to balance the cortisol-serotonin response. These are some nutrients that you could use, but getting advice on which one’s right for you is highly advised.

• Hormones and Imbalances

If you are still having trouble sleeping, maybe get some testing done to see what’s creating the imbalance for you. Like I said before, women’s hormones can have an imbalance; particularly around the premenopausal and menopausal stage, women find it a little bit more difficult, or even at the time of the period, where a couple of days before or during the period, sleep doesn’t come as easily.

It can be that there’s a hormonal imbalance. We’re looking at getting some testing done to find out the balance of your hormones and have a look at the thyroid balance as well. The thyroid hormones, are they in balance? Is everything going okay, like your nutrition levels of iron, vitamin D, and magnesium?

Look at your cortisol response; your stress response is that you are constantly and perpetually stressed, and it’s creating a cortisol storm, so we can test your cortisol on waking to see and then a few hours later to see your response for your cortisol.

If you’re looking for more answers to why you can’t sleep, there are definitely a lot of techniques we can use and a lot of testing we can do to find out what is going on for you. If you’d like some more information, I’d love to be able to help.

Book a free clarity call.

It’s a 15-minute free clarity call where we can discuss what’s going on and see what avenues you can take to move forward with your health. 

To health and happiness,

Teressa