Hey, they're Healthy Is listeners. Thanks for joining us on this daily podcast and Body and Soul good Healthyish of course, I am your host, Felicity Harley. Ah winter canrik havoc on sleep. You're either up on the toilet more, you're freezing, you're too hot, someone's hogging the douner. Well, today we're going to help you improve your sleep quality in winter. I'm joined by clinical naturopath Tigan Marshall. She's here to share her top tips and also give her verdict on
TikTok Scandinavian sleep method. Have you heard of that one? If you do like what you hear from Tiger listening to Extra Healthy Issue, where she shares her simple tips to upgrade your health this winter, you can catch that one wherever you get your podcasts. Tike, it nice to have you on the podcast today. How are you.
I'm really well, Thank you, thanks for having me, Felicity.
Oh you're staying warm in this cold weather, but you're in of course you're warm.
Yeah, but it's only getting up to like seventeen degrees today. It's like pouring rain. It's horrible.
Yeah, it's amazing how the cold weather just impacts every like everyone talks about it. Of course we're talking about on the podcast.
Yeah, but everyone else like out.
In aboutle it's freezing, it's freezing, But let's talk about sleep when it comes to cold weather. I mean, what is quality sleep? How do you define it? And why is it so important that kind of sleep for our health?
Yeah? So quality sleep is super important because it's the time when our body and our brain are moving through all of their detox and repair mechanisms. So if we're not getting quality sleep, we're not repairing our bodies every day, which over time can become a big problem.
How do we know, I mean do we How do you know? If you Sometimes I wake up and I mean I'm a sleep track of person, but me too, How do we know if we've got good sleep? Is it just a matter of feeling? Is like, how do you qualify this for yourself?
Absolutely? Well, personally, I wear an orring so I can track my sleep with my awring and it tells me whether I'm getting enough deep sleep, light sleep, room sleep, all of that fun stuff. However, if you don't have a fitness tracker like an Apple watch on orring or any of those things, you really just have to go by how you're feeling. Right, So, are you waking up multiple times through the night? If you are, are you able to go back straight back to sleep or are
you staying awake for an hour? Are you waking up in the morning feeling refreshed? Are you tired during the day. These are all going to be signs that are going to tell you whether you're getting quality sleep.
Hey, do you like the or ring?
I love the aw ring? I am obsessed with it. I've been wearing it for a few years now, and they just keep adding amazing new features too.
Not that I need another sleep tracker, but I was just intrigued to know anyway back to improving our quality specifically, what are some ways we can do this?
Okay, oh my goodness, I know we don't have much time, sor I'm going to talk really because I'm going to give you my three biggest tips. Okay, So, breathing. Breathing. Breathing breathing is a huge one. Practice functional breathing, which I personally like four six breathing for five to ten minutes before like going to bed at night. So oh ie in bed and just drop in and focus on my breath. Calm down my mind and my nervous system
and prepare me for sleep. So four six breathing is breathing in slowly for four seconds, do a little hold at the top maybe for two seconds, and then breathing out slowly for six seconds, and just repeating that cycle for five to ten minutes will really calm our nervous system down and get us in a state that's we're prepared for sleep. That's my one of my top tips. And then you can take supplements that will really support your body to have balanced hormones and neurotransmitters, which will
then help you with your sleep quality. So taking like a good quality, be complex vitamin supplement, things like magnesium glycinate is really good for sleep. And you can also consider touring a bit of a weird one that pee people associate with energy drinks, but actually tourin helps to down regulate your brain chemicals that keep you awake and upregulate your brain chemicals that help you to go to sleep.
So it's really interesting how they put it in energy drinks because it's actually really beneficial to support our sleep.
And then a hot one, isn't it, Tori? It is? I'm hearing it being talked about a few other podcasts, and I just feel like we'll hear more about it.
I think so too, It's going to be one of those trending ones. So watch this face anyway. And then I love glycine. So glycine helps us with our melatonin production, which is our sleepy brain chemical. So melatonin starts to rise late in the afternoon and gets us ready for sleep, and it increases through the night to help us stay asleep and then starts to go down as we wake
up in the early hours of the morning. It actually turns out that I created a supplement company, Glowible, that actually has all of these ingredients in them, and it's our best selling formulation.
It's called adapt I mean, for you to create a product, you must see a lot of women in particular, and men come through with sleep issues. I mean, what are you seeing in your job?
Big time? So I'm no longer practicing as a clinician, but to sleep was a huge issue for people when I was in clinic, and that was one of the reasons why I created this product.
What about in winter, I mean, it's a lot cooler, especially if you down the bottom of Australia and you know, I mean a lot of us don't run heaters. I mean, I don't want to run the heater at night. It's so sapping, it's so dry, it makes it yea so dry. Yeah yeah, so I get worried about fires and et cetera. But it can get really cold in the room. I mean, how does this affect our sleep?
Definitely? So I don't recommend using air conditioning in the room. You are right. It dries out the air, and not only that, it blasts hot air into the room and then the room gets really hot. And if your room holds heat, then you're just going to get really un c optile and wake up. So it's counterproductive. Right. If you're going to use a heater in your room, use one of those oil column heaters that you can actually set it to turn on and off at different times
of the night. For like half an hour, it warms the room up, takes the chill off the air, and then it will switch off. It's perfect for that five am temp drop, right when it gets chilly and you're like, oh, it's called I'm waking up. You won't wake up because the room's going to get warmed up from that so yeah, that's that's my tip for heating up your room.
Now, I have to talk about this trend I came across on TikTok. I have to tell you about it. It's called the Scandinavian Sleep method, and I think it's quite genius and something I've been trying with my partner. Have you seen this one?
I have seen this one and it is actually genius. I saw this and I probably should try it as well. Partner movement in your sleep can be such a sleep disruptor, especially in winter because of the crinkly noise that the douna can make, especially if you use like a wall or a feather dona they're all crinkly, right, and or you wake up because your partner's like yanked the blankets off. Two blankets on the bed solves that problem.
Yeah, it's so good. So yeah, listeners, As Tigan said, it's you instead of having a doner one doner, if you share a bed with a partner and fighting for it, you just have two one each. And no, and especially I don't know about you, but my partner gets so hot and he just pushes it off and then it pushes off me, and then it just creates disrupted sleep definitely.
Yeah. And then some nights I'm really hot because you know, I'm hormonal or whatever, and I want to kick the blankets off, and then he's making me hot. So at least having your own blankets you can kind of control things a bit better.
Yeah, a great tip for getting more sleep in winter. Tigan, thank you for coming on healthy my pleasure. Well, may you sleep a better tonight. Why don't you try the Scandinavian sleep method If you have a partner next to you, I can match for it. It works and then you just get the doner to yourself and you can snuggle up and you're all really warm, and yeah, you can have a cuddle as well. You just kind of borrow under there, Dona. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this chat
with Tiagan. If you did enjoy it, jump on rate and review it, or we of course subscribe to this podcast. You can share the app with a friend. Anything else, head to body andsoul dot com dot you. You can grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and make sure you are following us on social media. And until next time you listen, hopefully tomorrow, stay healthy sh