True personal growth ultimately will lead to fulfillment, and it's my intention with these podcasts to connect more deeply with you. Thank you for joining me, Anne Corbin, and my guests, and welcome to this episode. In no way would I profess to be a sleep coach or a sleep guru, but you'll be aware that I'm seriously into holistic health, mental and spiritual health, in fact, general well-being so that you can get the most out of life.
In a mastermind that I was part of during this last month, the usual subjects of stress, overwhelm, and not being able to get a good night's sleep were discussed in considerable detail, and it became very apparent that many people aren't taking what I would call, basic and, well, obvious steps that will enable them to fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed every morning having had a sufficiently long sleep.
Regardless of age, it should be possible to sleep for around 7 hours or so without having to get up and use the bathroom. Much of that is down to getting your subconscious mind on side and ignoring comments which are actually a form of programming or conditioning. These comments from older people that you know and even so called experts that tell you it's a natural part of aging. Not true. I'm speaking of the situation with broadly healthy people.
I'll say again, I am not speaking as a doctor or someone with sleep coach qualifications, and, of course, I recognize that there are medical conditions which affect sleep. So I'm speaking to what I would call the averagely healthy, the sort who watch what they eat and drink and stay hydrated and take exercise, enjoy fresh air, walks in nature, and might be experiencing a few changes in their life associated with, well, growing a little older. But what's older? Aging is largely a state of mind.
Societal programming has a great deal to answer for in this respect, and what springs to mind immediately is an experiment that Joe Dispenza refers to in at least one of his books and possibly most of his trainings. He calls it the monastery experiment. In 1981, 8 men aged 70 something to 80 something spent 5 days totally cut off from everyday life in a monastery, and this was a voluntary retreat. They were asked to think and pretend that they were 22 years younger, so we're back now in 1959.
And there were copies of old magazines like life lie left lying around and old newspapers such as the Saturday Evening Post. This experiment only lasted 5 days, so there weren't masses of them, but they had the right dates on them and relevant news. And people like Perry Como and Nat King Cole, recordings of them would be playing on the internal radio.
And these men were watching movies and TV shows that were popular in 1959, and they were encouraged to talk politics, of the time, which would be the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and, the Russian premier Khrushchev. He'd just visited the USA, so that was something to talk about. Oh, and there were pictures of sportsmen of the time on the wall, so everything felt like it was 1959.
At the start of the experiment, body measurements like blood pressure and heart rate, height and weight were taken from all of the men. And only 5 days later, the same measurements were taken and noticeable improvements showed up. And then a couple of weeks later, another 8 men arrived for essentially the same experiment.
But in addition to all those environmental cues that I described, they were told in addition that they were supposed to consciously feel themselves younger, and the difference in their results was dramatic. Their body measurements were remarkably improved. They grew noticeably taller. They stood more upright. A few of them stopped using walking canes. Even the lengths of their fingers had been measured, and these physically increased. You can't fake this stuff.
Their eyesight and hearing improved. Their grip tested stronger, and some of them were even playing a sort of a knocking around with a football with the psychologist who had set up the experiment. It wasn't doctor Joe Dispenza himself, it was a colleague. Their mental ability improved by 63%. So these old men in 5 days had literally become different people, and that demonstrates the power of the subconscious. But apologies. Back to sleep.
You can tell your subconscious mind the time that you wish to wake up in the morning. And this, in truth, is less likely to work if you're exhausted or attempting to manage on insufficient sleep, but you need to trust it and give it a try. Give yourself an a a very specific time, like 17 minutes past or 11 minutes to the hour, and see where you get with it. Sleep in a dark bedroom. Now that sounds obvious. Yes. But in addition, there is science behind it.
At night, your pineal gland releases melatonin, which is the sleep hormone. And melatonin levels drop in the morning as the sun rises, and everywhere gets light. Now, we confuse our bodies by sitting in bright electric light when it's dark outside, and even worse, by working on bright computer screens in the evenings. Blackout blinds work really well, but I don't much like them myself because it doesn't feel like morning when I wake up.
But in the UK, that happens half of the year anyway in winter, and, of course, in summer, it can get very bright very early in the summer months. I have sleep shades on hand for such situations. And also, if I'm in a strange hotel room, very often there are cine lights, e g on the television set or they kindly provide those, radio clock alarms with bright figures on them. Sorry. I'm not interested. Got my own internal alarm clock. So I have my sleep shades within reach.
I'm in the habit of checking that they are within reach before I go to sleep because the last thing I want to do should I wake up early is to get up and look for something. Because if you get out of bed and start moving around, you are signaling to your body that it's time to get up and face the day. If you find that you have to visit the bathroom at night, don't put the main light on.
In hotels, where this is most likely to happen, time zone changes have disrupted your melatonin, and I will use, in that situation, the torch on my phone rather than turn on the ceiling lights. And while on the subject of time zones, many take melatonin supplements in an attempt to jolt themselves into the new time zone. In my experience, the best plan is to sleep on the plane if you possibly can, and here sleep shades and earplugs are invaluable.
And then at your destination, don't force yourself to stay awake for hours and hours until it's local bedtime. People often expect you to do that. Allow yourself a kind of sitting up doze, or 2 or 3 of them for about an hour or so each, no longer. Try and get into that dreamy state between sleeping and waking.
But don't lie down because that signals to the body that it's bedtime and you'll go into a deep sleep and it will not do anything worthwhile towards adjusting to the new time zone that you're in. Now how many hours of sleep is ideal? Well, we sleep in 90 minute cycles, so it is not recommended to awaken mid cycle. This is what happens when your alarm clock rings having been set with no regard at all to the length of sleep intended.
Suppose you want to awaken at 6 AM, count backwards from there to decide what time you're gonna go to bed. So 6 hours is 4 cycles. That means sleep would start at midnight. 6 hours isn't really enough. 7 and a half hours is 5 cycles. So I would aim for the 5 hour or the 5 cycle option with maybe a 30 minute period to adjust and gradually drift off to sleep. So bed at 10, sleep at 10:30, wake up five cycles later, and wake up naturally.
Oh, and when I'm talking about alarm clocks, it's not because I'm a dinosaur. Phones do not belong in the bedroom. In a hotel room, okay, you have no choice. But at home, no. Charge the thing overnight in the kitchen or the living room. Stay out of the habit of checking your messages and your social media as soon as you wake up. Oh, and be particularly diligent with the kids. They'll want their phones with them in their rooms and it's genuinely dangerous.
Phones are emitting high levels of radiation. It's getting worse over time and there is a temptation, of course, to sleep with the phone under the pillow or on the nightstand, and all that radiation is much too close to your precious brain, particularly the brain of a child, which is still developing. Listeners, may I please ask you to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends? And if what I talk about resonates with you, then you might really enjoy the trainings that I run.
You can book a discovery call, just for a friendly no, no pressure chat with me using the link in the show notes. Now so many people have grown accustomed to using the snooze function on their phones. They're even in the habit, if you like, of resisting to press it again for a third time having had 2 little snoozes every morning. This is crazy. To me, it's voluntary torture. I used to do it for a while until I saw the error of my ways.
If you wake up feeling refreshed, you won't even be tempted to lie around thinking about whether to get up or not or whether you can afford to snatch a few more minutes of sleep. Here are 2 little hacks for making it easier to haul yourself out of bed in the morning if you habitually have a strong inclination to to stay there. 1, get up at broadly the same time every morning, including weekends, and then your body doesn't have to waste time adjusting on a Monday morning.
Or what's even more annoying, awaking at the early time on a Saturday when you've planned to have a lie in. Secondly, get up within 5 minutes of waking. Don't even think about sneaking an extra quick 5 minutes or 10 minutes in bed. I learned this years ago from a mentor who had some good advice about decision making. He said, make the choice to make the choice before you are confronted with the choice. Might have to think about that. I'll say it again in a minute.
But the idea is if you've made a decision before you are in a so called weakened state, that is when you're actively fighting temptation, if you know ahead of time what your choice is, then you just follow through. You don't have to think. You don't have to make a decision, and you can apply this to anything. It could be eating chocolate or having fresh fruit instead of crisps, resisting cream cakes, getting up early and going to the gym even though it's raining outside.
You can add in your own particular examples of temptation. Make the choice to make the choice before you are confronted with the choice. A small cup of warm milk before bed can be helpful. This is an Ayurvedic remedy for insomnia, and you can add a little raw honey, saffron, nutmeg, or poppy seeds to the warm milk. These are reputedly calming additions. I don't particularly recommend alcoholic additions unless it's a very small shot and your only ration for the day.
Students have been known to say, but I can't get to sleep without a nightcap. Well, they probably can. It's just a question of getting your subconscious mind on the case. The big problem with alcohol is that it's both a stimulant and a relaxant. So whilst you might well drop off quickly, you're that much more likely to wake up at 3:30 or 4:30 AM and need the bathroom because alcohol is a diuretic as well.
It's particularly bad with beer, and you've got the volume of liquid involved with beer too. And many have great difficulty getting back to sleep after these night visits. So take steps to prevent them. Prevention is always better than cure. Also, if you've had several units of alcohol, especially if you aren't used to it, you might find that you're suffering from a hangover, which is essentially alcoholic poisoning, and the remedy is to rehydrate as quickly as you can. Just drink lots of water.
That's plain water, not water with anything in it, not soft drinks, not tea, not coffee, because they're all diuretics as well. But you might well have deprived yourself of a decent night's sleep, and you just have to write that off to experience. Stop using screens, even TV screens, for 90 minutes before bed if you can. If you really can't avoid them, then get some of those blue light absorbing glasses. You just put them over your own glasses if you wear glasses.
And this minimizes the effect of the blue light because the blue light mimics daylight and it upsets your melatonin and your circadian rhythms. Now, this isn't new advice. And to be honest, I find that the smaller the screen, the worse the effect. I can watch TV at a distance without, suffering any ill effects, but I don't use any kind of mobile device. If I have to, I don't look at the screen.
And, anyway, I feel that I spend enough of the day on the laptop or the PC, so I give myself the evenings off. And I rarely plan webinars to go past 9:30 PM, even that's a bit late. And if I get caught on other people's webinars, I usually make my excuses and leave if I possibly can. Yes. It's very annoying when no replays are provided. And does it matter what time you go to bed? Well, yes, it does.
8 hours of sleep between 10 PM and 6 AM are way more beneficial than 8 hours from midnight to 8 AM. Why should this be? Well, the pineal gland again produces HGH, which is human growth hormone, and it produces this at the highest rate between 10 PM and midnight, and then the production drops off a cliff.
You don't want to miss out on those first two big value hours because human growth hormone is the rejuvenating hormone, and it also enhances brain function, physical endurance, immunity, and, listen to this ladies, fat burning. Avoid sleeping pills. They don't deliver real sleep. They cause what many call the hangover effect, and people also report feeling like a zombie the next day.
Plus, these sleeping pills are habit forming, and, well, if you really can't sleep long term, there's probably an underlying issue that you really need to discuss with a professional. Oh, here are a few natural sleep aids that you can pick up from the chemist or a health food shop. Valerian root, either as a herb or more usually in pill form, passionflower, glycine, that's an amino acid, ginkgo biloba, that is it's recommended for all sorts of things as well as sleep.
Lpionine, that's an amino acid found in tea leaves, which explains why a cup of tea is quite relaxing. It's one of my emergency measures when my body clock's out of sync and I really want to sleep. A cup of tea, sometimes helps helps with concentration as well. And chamomile, that is a very well known sleep help. Also, you can spray lavender on your pillow or just use it in drop form. It's very effective. Apologies if you're expecting me to have stopped talking by now.
I'm just going on a little bit longer than usual because I want to get to the bottom of this list. It's not really worth splitting it in 2. So to continue, you know that I favor meditation and yoga as healthy habits. If you develop regular practices, then you will notice that your sleep improves noticeably. If you possibly can sleep with a window open or at least the bedroom door open, some people hate the weight of blankets and love those high tog duvets even in the summer.
I can't comprehend that. To me, it's ideal to be able to add layers or throw them off depending on the time of year or, indeed, temperature changes overnight. I think I mystify hotel staff because hotels work on one size fits all duvets. I'm not talking about dimensions here. I'm talking about togs. They usually have 13 and a half togs if I investigate, and that's heavy winter layers weight.
So my little technique is to pull the duvet out of the cover and sleep under the cover, only pulling the actual quilt over me if I should wake up cold in the small hours when the temperature usually does drop. And you notice this particularly if the window's open. Flexibility and choice is the name of my game. So finally, I hope you found all these suggestions useful.
You truly will find yourself massively more productive, less prone to overwhelm, panic attacks, and even brain fog if you just get a handle on facilitating a great night's sleep for yourself and simply expecting it to happen each night as you're right because it is. You can set yourself up to win the game of life, become familiar with the laws of the universe. You have infinite potential. You can influence reality.
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