Lifestyle Tweaks For Better Sleep

Stress reduction can be a huge sleep aid. Practice some mindfulness and see for yourself.

*Adapted from my upcoming ebook: How to Feel Good

Nutrition, exercise, stress, pharmaceuticals, caffeine, alcohol, hydration. All of these things can influence our sleep in powerful ways! Let's get to it:

Nutrition

Don’t eat before bed. Try to finish eating three hours prior to sleeping. This gives you plenty of time to digest. Aim to eat more complex carbohydrates at dinner from whole grains and legumes. These can help regulate blood sugar levels and promote serotonin production. Aim or magnesium rich foods throughout the day: nuts, seeds, avocado, and leafy greens. Other foods that may have some benefit for sleep are kiwi, cherries, and I hypothesize that parsley would be beneficial as well, as it contains more apigenin than chamomile. Reduce saturated fat and added sugars, these have both been shown to interfere with sleep. I always notice when I get more saturated fat than usual. It’s super inflammatory and typically interferes with my sleep.

Exercise

Movement is great for sleep. Just make sure you don’t do it too soon before bed. By all means, definitely hit the gym and hit it hard but try to get your workout in earlier in the day. Doing a hard workout right before bed is going to elevate your cortisol and make it hard to drop into sleep. Doing that chronically will interfere with your circadian rhythm in a big way. I do my workouts in the morning or afternoon and almost never in the evenings.

That being said, getting purposeful movement during the day will help you get to sleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up feeling more refreshed. So hit the gym or hit the streets, whatever works for you, but remember to do it earlier in the day.

Sunlight

Getting morning sunlight is important for sleep wake rhythms. It’s important to try to spend at least twenty or thirty minutes outside a day in natural light and it’s even more important to get sunlight in the morning. Try to get outside soon after you wake up for at least a few minutes to get natural light in your face. Don’t stare directly at the sun but definitely let some indirect sunlight get in your eyes. I like to face away from the sun and look at the sky. If it’s cloudy out, I’ll try to spend more time outside, something like 10-15 minutes, if it’s bright, 3-5 will probably do. This helps your body start to produce wakefulness hormones like cortisol and serotonin, ensuring that as those hormones decline later in the day, sleep hormones will start to elevate and you’ll end up tired at the appropriate time.

Stress

Stress is hugely impactful on sleep. Have you ever struggled to go to sleep because your mind is racing? Wake up in the middle of the night with a sharp spike of anxiety? Both of these experiences really suck. Trust me, I’ve been there. There’s a lot you can do to reduce stress in your life, like exercise, eat well, spend time in nature and with friends, pet dogs, etc. All of those are great and you should pursue them, but when it comes to sleep I have some specific things I like to do to manage stress. Here’s my toolkit:

Journaling or a brain dump before bed. I journal most nights before bed, and many times I do what you might call a brain dump, this is my “Worry List to Worry Less”. I do these during the day too if I’m feeling overwhelmed. Here’s how it works: I sit down with a pen and paper and I give myself one page or a time limit (maybe 10 minutes), then I just stream of consciousness style write down every single thing I can think of that I need to do. These are small things and large things. It might look like ‘take out the trash’, ‘message my clients’, or it might look like ‘build my own house’, ‘run an ultramarathon’. I write down everything that comes to mind immediately as it comes to mind. Then when the timer goes off or I finish the page I stop. When I stop I either write down or say aloud to myself, “I give myself permission to put these down for the rest of the night, I can pick them back up in the morning.” There, that’s it. Not so bad right? It’s important to really focus on that intention of giving yourself permission to put it down. I find that I sleep much better when I do this, especially if I’ve been overwhelmed by stress recently.

Meditation. During the day, before sleep, whenever is clever. I would say any type of meditation is good but that’s a little too broad. Maybe choose a meditation that allows you to slow your breathing and soften your focus. Open awareness meditations are great for this. Or even just breathing awareness meditations. When I get in bed I often spend a few minutes with my eyes closed, purposefully pay attention to my breathing, and try to slow it down without too much effort. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, calms us down, and gets us ready for bed. Sometimes I fall asleep doing this even though I mean to read after. If that happens I just let it happen and go to sleep. It’s okay, I can always read tomorrow night.

Mindset shift. There was a period of time in my life after a bad prolonged break-up where I woke up every night in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. My anxiety would acutely spike and my breathing would speed up uncontrollably. Having this happen for a few weeks and missing a ton of sleep exponentially worsened the problem. My sleep tracker started to warn me every day that I was in a bad way and my fears escalated. My new anxiety was about not being able to sleep, about being awake in the middle of the night, enduring that anxiety and discomfort. It was intensely unpleasant. Maybe you can relate. I’ve spoken to plenty of clients who have struggled with a similar situation. The one thing that I’ve found that helped me was shifting my mindset. I needed to get rid of that fear and anxiety of being awake at night. So I started to think differently. Small things at first, “Wow, how nice to sit here in bed and just rest without needing to do anything, I never do this” or “Man, my sheets are so soft and comfortable. I never focus on how good they feel. This is really nice!” or “It’s so peaceful at night, I’m just going to enjoy the peacefulness” or “I’m going to read until I fall asleep again, I love reading, how awesome to get a couple more hours of reading in, I never get this much time to read during the day”. You can come up with your own relaxing, peaceful thoughts, but I suggest focusing on pleasant physical sensations. The feel of your sheets on your skin, the sound of the fan or air conditioner, things like that. Try it out, it helped me and I’m willing to bet it might help you too.

Pharmaceuticals

Certain pharmaceuticals can interfere with sleep. In fact, sleeping pills interfere with sleep! They can make your sleep quality worse even if they’re helping you sleep more. Obviously amphetamines and other uppers can interfere with sleep and should be discussed with a practitioner to figure out when during your day you can take them to interrupt sleep the least.

This is highly personal, but talk with your doctor to see what might work for you if you’re taking pharmaceuticals that either enhance or disrupt sleep.

Caffeine and Alcohol

Caffeine makes you feel awake by blocking a neurotransmitter called adenosine. Adenosine makes you tired and reduces arousal, but caffeine competes with adenosine receptors, preventing adenosine’s effects and making you feel more awake. Everyone metabolizes caffeine differently and for some people caffeine leaves their bloodstream much more quickly. I’m sure you’ve known a few people who drink coffee at night with no deleterious effects. Pure psychotic behavior in my opinion. But the reverse is also true, there’s people who metabolize caffeine incredibly slow, so that even if they drink their coffee at 7:00 am they’ll still feel it’s effects when trying to go to sleep. Generally speaking, it takes an adult human 10-12 hours to clear caffeine from their body. So if you drink caffeinated beverages, make sure you finish drinking them at least 12 hours before bed. For me this means no caffeine after 10:00 am. Consider switching to decaf for a week and see how that affects your sleep quality. If it’s massively improved maybe it’s time to change your caffeine habits.

Alcohol sucks, straight up. Some might say that some amount of alcohol is okay or even good when you consider that it’s an important component in certain social elements and those social elements are important for our health and they’re not wrong! But if those same social elements existed without alcohol they would be healthier.

But I digress, alcohol massively interferes with your sleep. If you have a sleep tracker and you also drink alcohol then you’ve probably noticed this already. Alcohol can cause fragmented sleep, decreased sleep duration, reduced REM sleep, it’s a diuretic so it increases nighttime urination, and something called the rebound effect can make the downer effects of alcohol have the exact opposite effect during the second half the night, making you more awake and restless. Basically all bad. Do what you can to drink less alcohol, drink less often, or drink earlier in the day if you must. But consider cutting out alcohol completely. I haven’t drank alcohol in twenty years, and I credit a lot of my health and slow aging to this fact.

Hydration

Hydration is important but being overly hydrated at night can cause you to wake up to go to the bathroom. Waking up like this interrupts the sleep cycle and you may end up getting less deep sleep. You could also end up awake in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep! This is really common for many folks so taking easy steps to avoid it is important. 

I try not to drink any liquids an hour before bed, so if I’m going to sleep at 10:00 pm I will aim to be done drinking all liquids by 9:00pm, but I don’t want to be dehydrated, so I’ll make sure to down plenty of water between 8:00 and 9:00pm. There’s no wrong way to do this, just do what works for you. Maybe taking sips instead of gulps of water leading up to bed will work for you. Just experiment! And be sure to hydrate as soon as you wake up. I keep at least 16 ounces of water next to my bed and immediately drink it upon waking.