Sleep Tips - How to get a Good Night’s Sleep

What to do during the day/night to help optimise your sleep.

Part 1: What to do during the day to help you sleep

• Get outside and grab some sunshine - early exposure is important
• Moderate caffeine consumption and enjoy before midday - 2mg/kg body weight
• Move - get active during the day - aim for 10,000 steps or do some exercise

Part 2: What to do at night to help you sleep

• Eat 2 hours before bed - not too much and not too little
• Minimise fluid consumption
  • Only 1 standard drink of alcohol
• Minimise blue light exposure from screens and dim lights - 2 hours before bed
• Empty the brain onto paper - thoughts, feelings, to do list. Finish with a gratitude journal
• Relax

Material referred to during recording:

Here is the link to the estimated caffeine content in various food/drinks:

https://druginfo.sl.nsw.gov.au/drugs-z-drugs/caffeine

About the Podcast & Host

me&my Health Up seeks to enhance and enlighten the wellbeing of others. Host Anthony Hartcher is the founder and CEO of me&my wellness which provides holistic health solutions using food is medicine, combined with a holistic, balanced, lifestyle approach. Anthony holds three bachelor degrees in Complementary Medicine; Nutrition and Dietetic Medicine; and Chemical Engineering. https://meandmywellness.com.au/

Podcast Disclaimer
Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more

Transcript

Anthony Hartcher: 0:00

Welcome to everyone that follows me on me&my wellness. And for those that listen to my podcast health up, so this episode is on Health Tips. I'm Anthony Hartcher, clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist seeking to enhance enlighten your well being. Today's topic is on sleep tips, and how to optimise your sleep. So with sleep, it requires us to do things right well throughout the day and at night. So it's not just the night time thing. It's you know, we need to do the right things during the day to help us to be in the best state to sleep. So let's start with the day. What do you need to do? It starts with you getting outside getting some sunshine. So early morning, get out, get that early morning sun. And that early morning sun is telling themselves telling me Oregon, hey, it's daytime, it's time to do daytime functions. And so it will set your body up for doing functions around digestion and creating energy so that you can be productive. And so those sorts of things will be switched on by just getting sunlight. So making sure you're getting out getting some early morning sunlight to let the body know to reset its clock internal clock to daylight functions. The next thing that is very important is to limit caffeine consumption. So you don't want to have too much caffeine if you're going to consume caffeine consumed in the morning and not too much. So it's recommended to have a only around about two milligrammes per kilogramme of body weight. So, if you weigh around 70 kilogrammes, that's 114 milligrammes of caffeine, before midday, and that essentially, depending on the type of coffee, you're drinking, or Coca Cola, it's, you know, it's going to be around, you know, a cup or two cups of coffee maximum, but they'll put in some helpful resources around how much coffee is contained in certain items. In the links below in the comments below where I post this. The other thing is movement, so being active throughout the day, so that entails just getting up and about moving throughout the day. And you know, increasing its discount. So a good proxy to getting a good night's sleep is getting around those 10,000 steps per day. Ideally, you want to be above that seven and a half 1000. And, you know, doing some exercise is also also going to help beyond the movement. So, being active creates, this is what we call sleep pressure. So that helps us to help somebody to think well, I'm quite exhausted by the end of the day, and helps us fall asleep. And you know, I guess, recuperate and do the things that we our body does when it's sleeping. So let's get on to the things you need to do in the evening, I've covered the morning, or the day. And then in the evening, it's very much, eating two hours before bedtime, at least two hours. So you don't want to be going to bed on a full stomach, or on an empty stomach, you want to be going to bed just right. So that's the happy medium that you need to find. And so therefore, it's not having a late meal just before bed, and it's obviously not going to bed starving. We don't want to be drinking too much. And I'm staying here because any liquids, because those liquids will put pressure on our bladder, in terms of that we need to go and urinate during the night and so that can impede or affect our good quality night's sleep. So minimising your liquid consumption in the evening. Now lets me talk about alcohol because I'm sure that's on your mind. So alcohol may help you get to sleep but it will actually affect your quality of sleep, it will income create you to wake up more frequently in the night and will affect the ability to get deep sleep. So minimise alcohol consumption, I recommend on the one standard drink a nice if you feel the you know you like that as a social thing to have with your family or with your partner. So yeah, keep it to one standard drink per night. And the other important activity that research shows this is very important activity. There's studies that have been done around it is to empty your brain. So you know we can be very busy during the day doing lots of things in the evening. We want to unload that busyness and put it on a bit of paper so it's you know journaling your thoughts what's going on your mind your to do list, getting that down getting it out of your brain onto paper how you're feeling. You know the tough parts you need to tackle the next day and a bit of positive journaling such as you know a gratitude journal. What are you grateful for the test that day that, or what are you excited about next in our life, just sort of finishing that journaling activity, not with just all these tasks and all these unfinished to do lists, but it's also finishing up with something that's nice and something that you appreciate that appreciation relaxes and tells the brain that everything's okay. The other important thing to do, you know, two hours before bed is to minimise blue light, light exposure. So this is, you know, our devices, our screens, things like that. So we really want to dim the lights have minimal lighting, and that also is telling the cells that signal that, hey, Sandra, do nighttime functions, it's time to produce the hormones that, you know, we need to sleep such as melatonin, and we need darkness to induce that. So starting that earlier, so starting that two hours before bed is really helpful. And to relax in the evening, you certainly want to be relaxed. You don't want to be winding up by doing work or having tough conversations in the evening. Because that will just switch that nervous system on to that fight or flight response, which we don't want. We don't want that adrenaline running through our body. We don't want high cortisol, cortisol will reduce the amount of sleep hormone that we can produce. So we want to be relaxing, doing things we love things we enjoy. Okay, so I hope that really helps. If you've got any comments, questions about what I've mentioned, if you want more clarity, or if you want me to cover in more detail, a particular topic around sleep, please put it in the comments below where I post this. I hope it was insightful for you. That's my hot tips for the day around getting a good night's sleep and implement. You'll get great results. Okay,