Get everyone.
Sam, we're here with your motivational moment, and we are going to talk about sleep hygiene. Sleep is so important for our overall health, our weight loss, our mental health. But people just don't listen when it comes to the importance of sleep. And I'm a bit fed up with the amount of conversations that I'm having with people.
They're not sleeping very.
Well and they are acknowledging that, but then when you give them the key advice, they ignore it or they go, no, I'm just one of these people who doesn't I'm fine on three and a half hours a night, and clearly they're not fine.
It's absolutely debilitating them in some way.
First of all, if you don't think you need very much sleep, less than ten percent of us are in that sort of category that needs very little sleep, you know, sort of the five or six hours. Ninety percent of us need seven or eight hours a night to be functioning at our best, So you are highly likely to be in that no. Twenty percent hole, So please stop telling yourself that. The second thing is there's sort of two tiers of this. So the big picture stuff is try and go to bed at a similar time of
night each day. Our body loves rhythm, circadian rhythm. Our body loves consistency when it comes to sleep, so you know, and this is where we tend to undo a lot of good work on the weekends.
We tend to go to bed at.
Eleven o'clock and up at six o'clock during the week and then on the weekends we throw that routine.
Out of whack and it really messes with our sleep rhythm.
So try and go to bed as consistently as you can and get up as consistently as you can.
At the other end, aim for seven to eight hours. That's the other big one.
Get some daylight as soon as you wake up. It's really good for us to expose ourselves to natural light as soon as we wake up. It's another way of keeping our rhythm inflow by getting daylight when we wake up.
Have a dark room. Have a cool room.
Again, we sleep better at a nice low temperature around nineteen to twenty two degrees is what they recommend.
And nice and dark. You don't want any.
Artificial or natural lights that are coming in and interfering with our sleep quality.
That's the big picture stuff.
Now, As promised, many of you might be listening and going you know what, I do those or I do most of those?
What else do you got for me? So we're really going to deep.
Dive into sleep hygiene and how you can maybe go from a seven out of ten to a nine out of ten. All right, you will reap benefits everywhere in your life if you start to sleep better, because it's not just about the amount of sleep, it's about the quality of sleep, and all of these things help the quality.
Of our sleep. The first one, try meditation. Calming your mind.
Before you go to bed will allow you to get into a deeper rem sleep sooner and for longer, so you are getting better quality sleep for bigger periods of time within that seven to eight hour window, and meditation is a wonderful way to do that. One of my favorite apps is Smiling Mind.
It's free.
It's got brilliant meditations for stress for anxiety, so make sure you check that out.
The next one's an interesting one.
Journal right down, just on a single page for a few minutes at the end of each day, what you're thinking about. It's like taking files off your computer so your computer functions better, and it's a great way to take a load off your mind. It's going to impact the quality of your sleep.
One that I have.
Been doing recently stretch and I again I'm not saying to do a yoga class in the bedroom fifty minutes before you get to sleep, but do some very simple, gentle stretches on the floor in your bed, or even long on your bed, if you've got a nice firm bed and have a little stretch of the lower back and the hips and the neck and the shoulders before you maybe do your meditation practice. It's a really nice
thing to do. Now, this is an interesting one. This is the one that Seeds introduced me to good leavenercents on your pillows. It actually creates a really nice association between a smell and HM bedtime. It's like Pavlov's dogs. It's the psychological approach, the Pavlov's dogs, the positive reinforcement. But all of a sudden, you have created a wonderful association between it. You know, and it might be your
favorite scent. Doesn't have to be lavin, or you can do something that maybe you love, but a really nice scent that effectively tells your brain it's time to start winding down for bed, have a shower. Research shows that having a warm shower one hour before bed improves our sleep quality. And this is the big one, because I think you've all probably gone, oh, that's all good. No blue light, that's phones, that's iPads, that's laptops, watching Netflix.
In bed, whatever it is. I'm going to be realistic here.
Thirty minutes before bed, it's very hard to switch off if you've had blue light right in your face and stimulating your brain just before you go to bed.
And if you've got your.
Phone and you're scrolling through social media and checking text message and checking emails just before you go to bed, it's going to be very hard to empty out the mind, like we spoke about. So if you can introduce all of those things, I guarantee you this is not waffully it might help. I guarantee you the quality of your sleep will improve, and even more so, the quality of your life.
Will improve because of that.
So what I want you to do is I want you to identify which of these hacks you are doing, which of these hacks you're not doing, And across the next week, you're going to choose the three that you think could help you the most, and you're going to introduce use them to your routine every day for the next seven days, and I promise you, even in such a short seven day window, you'll already start to feel the benefits