How To Optimize Your Sleep

Summary
In this episode of the Do Live podcast, host Layla Evans discusses the critical role of sleep in overall well-being. She emphasizes the importance of establishing consistent sleep routines, incorporating morning sunlight, and creating a calming wind down routine before bed. Layla also shares tips on optimizing the sleep environment, including temperature control and minimizing distractions, as well as the potential benefits of sleep supplements like magnesium. The conversation highlights practical strategies for improving sleep quality and the significance of self-care in achieving restful nights.

Takeaways

• Sleep is integral to having a good morning.
• Consistency is key for your sleep routine.
• Get 10 minutes of sunlight in the morning.
• Don't eat three hours before going to bed.
• Set a wind down alarm before bed.
• Create a relaxing bedtime routine.
• Sleep in cooler temperatures for better rest.
• Use white noise to block distractions at night.
• Track your sleep to understand your patterns.
• Magnesium can significantly improve sleep quality.

Links

Lumivitae Buy

https://layla7859158384984.lumivitae.com 

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https://layla7859158384984.lumivitae.com/register

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Website

Certified Life and Business Coaching

Chapters

00:00

The Importance of Sleep

01:37

Morning Routines for Better Sleep

09:01

Evening Wind Down Rituals

18:16

Creating a Sleep-Friendly Environment

23:22

Overcoming Sleep Challenges and Supplements

Transcript

0:01

Hi friends, welcome to the Do Live podcast. I'm your host, Life Coach Leila, and today we're going to talk about sleep and why it's important and how to do it efficiently. Last week We kind of briefly skimmed across how having a good night's sleep was integral to having a good morning. So it only makes sense that in talking about how to have a good night's sleep, we start with how to have a good morning. Basically, your morning is going to affect the rest of your day, including your sleep. and it's a big cycle. So how your sleep goes is going to affect your morning. So with that being said, consistency is key. In a nutshell, you want to make sure that you're going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time. Set an alarm for when you wake up until you can wake up on a regular basis, including the weekends. That is one thing I kind of skimmed over last week's conversation too was You know, we get up every morning, every day to go to work, to make breakfast, to get the kids to school, to do whatever, and then we want to sleep on the weekends. And I don't think that's fair. You show up for everybody else all week long, and on the weekends, you need to show up for yourself. your body and your brain wants consistency. It wants the same sleep routine, wake up routine. It doesn't understand that weekends are days off. So, go to bed and wake up at the same time, even on weekends. Anyway, we're going to talk about what to do in the morning for the most part. consistent sleep times and wake times first and foremost. Second of all, when you wake up, go outside and get 10 minutes of sunlight in your eyes and try to incorporate your movement. If you want to do any kind of exercise, it's recommended that you do like heavy strenuous exercises earlier in the day. That doesn't mean you have to do them first thing in the morning, but you know sometime before a few hours before going to bed because when you're exercising if you're doing like high cardio or something along those lines, you're going to elevate your body temperature and your heart rate and the opposite needs to happen when you go to sleep. So if you're going to do those things, do them early. The 10 minutes of sunlight in your eyes helps regulate your cortisol levels. It helps regulate your circadian rhythm, helps your body wake up and go to sleep at the same time. So eventually you won't need to set those alarms. You'll just be on a regular schedule if, you know, that's the thing that you can do. I've been diagnosed with a million different sleep disorders since I was two months old. So I understand that all of these things don't work for everybody and that's okay. Just take what you can. Whatever resonates with you, whatever you can implement, please do and leave the rest for somebody else that it might benefit. Again, I understand that some of this is just a pipe dream for a lot of people and that's okay. Like I said, just take what you can. so the 10 minutes of sunlight helps regulate all of those things. There's the hormone adisone, ad, adnisone, adib, mmm, adenosine. I don't remember. You know what? I got most of my information from the Huberman, podcast. He's a brilliant man and I highly highly suggest you go binge watch his material. He has several episodes out on sleep and health and routines that I've taken majority of these things amongst many other surveys and researches and things along those lines, but he can give you the science behind all of the things and the big words and the hormones that I can't remember how to say properly. So don't hate me. Go watch his. podcast. Speaking of cortisol levels and hormone regulations, don't hate me, coffee. Coffee should not be consumed within the first hour of waking up. And I know so many people are like, you can't talk to me, I can't function until I have my coffee. Well, that's why. Because your body's not regulating, it sleeps in ups and downs on its own, so you have to have that coffee to kind of jump start. And all that's doing is more damage and less regulation. So... Try not to drink your coffee within the first hour of being awake. Let your body get a chance to regulate itself before you go adding stimulants to it that kind of throw it off, if that makes sense. And since we're talking about coffee and sleep, if you would like to have a nice, peaceful, restful sleep, it's debatable on how soon you should quit drinking caffeine before bed. I would say no. less than six hours, but it's been said, 10 hours, 12 hours. So some people are saying, you can have coffee in the morning and then that's it. And some people are saying don't have it after your noon lunch. And then some people say don't drink it past two or three. And again, everybody's body and caffeine. Sensitivity is going to be different. So use your discretion there's people who can drink a cup of coffee and take a nap and go to sleep I'm one of those people but I also noticed when I do that that my sleep quality isn't as good so I can still sleep through the night but my Markers aren't where they need to be is it I don't know if I'm explaining that right. I have two different watches. have the Samsung watch and have the Whoop watch that both tell me about my sleep quality. I highly suggest you invest in some sort of sleep tracking device, whether it's an Oura Ring, Samsung, Apple, Garmin, don't know if Garmin does your sleep, Fitbit, Either way, something to track your sleep because it's so helpful when you can see what affects and what doesn't. You know, if you eat sugar, three hours before you go to bed, if you eat heavy meals versus light meals, just all the little different things. I like the Whoop because it gives me the option, it gives me surveys and I take those surveys every day and tell it what I did and what I didn't do. And then it helps me kind of see what regulates and what affects my sleep. So if you can monitor your sleep, absolutely 100 % suggest doing that. I'll leave a referral link for the Whoop in box down below somewhere. The same thing goes for your evening sunlight. So when you see the sun set, it also does the same thing with your brain and helps get into sleepy mode. So that would be, you know, the first step of getting ready for bed was, would be to look at the sun while it sets because the lower lights and the colors do something in your brain. Again, I'm not the scientist. I just remember the good stuff with the information. I remember the juicy stuff and not the mundane details that you can. can bore yourself with later. So the evening sunlight will also help regulate your circadian rhythm and cortisol levels and adrenalins and lower all the things and help get your body into sleep mode. So with that being said, you do not want to eat food more than three hours prior to going to bed. And then that means that you're not like, it's three hours before I go to bed. Let me make my dinner. No, you need to be done chewing and swallowing your last bite. three hours prior to bed. And the reason behind that is when you're sleeping, your body is repairing itself. It's rebuilding things, your mitochondria are doing its good stuff. And when you go to sleep on a full belly, your body is going to spend all that, well, not all that time, your body is going to spend a lot of energy digesting that food. When you're sleeping, everything slows down. So what would be a normal digestive process is going to take a lot longer because you're sleeping. And when that's the case, you're going to spend quality time digesting food and breaking down substances that could otherwise be used to repair your body. So that time is crucial that, you know, you're repairing your brain, your skin, your everything, your intestines. So when you're spending that quality time at night digesting food that you could have done during the day while you're awake, Now it's taking longer to do because you're sleeping and everything's in slow motion. And it's taking time away from the cells that could be doing other more productive things like, you know, making your skin pretty and growing your hair and nails. I mean, if you're into that vain stuff, work could be helping you, you know, be smarter or lose weight or all of the other bodily functions that take place at night when you're sleeping. So. Basically, don't eat three hours prior to going to sleep because your body needs that time to repair itself and not process and digest food instead. In a nutshell, that's all I'm trying to say. So that's really all that we need to do throughout the day to kind of make sure that we are ready for bed. So when it comes to actual bedtime, what is our routine? So like I said, setting an alarm is crucial. You have your wake up alarm and then you have your wind down alarm. I just want to preface this with saying bedtime routines are not just for children. I don't know if you had kids or if you were privileged enough to have a family that had a bedtime routine for you. had to drink water, you brushed your teeth, you put your jammies on, washed your face. Not in this order, obviously. Maybe took a warm bath with some lavender scented soaps or candles. You got a bedtime story right here. My daughter said a bed night story. You had your bedtime story read to you, a little kiss on the forehead, one last little drink of water, and then you go to bed. It was the same thing every night. It's consistent. You have your bedtime and you wake up at the same time. But as adults, we forget to do that. We think as we got older and we didn't have a bedtime anymore that we didn't need to have a bedtime routine. And that could be furthest from the truth. So you want to set an alarm for a wind down routine. It's not necessarily bedtime per se, but you know, anywhere from three hours to an hour before bed, you want to have a routine, a system, a schedule. And that includes turning off your TV and your phones and your electronic devices or at the very least putting like blue light blocker glasses on the lights from all the devices or stimulants and make it hard for your body to produce melatonin when it's got all these lights and things it doesn't think it's sleepy time. So if you wear the blue light blockers that helps minimize that. But again, you're still being stimulated by whatever it is if you're watching something suspenseful or stressful or whatever on TV. So part of your wind down should be to put your phone in do not disturb mode. You want to make sure you're setting healthy boundaries. I understand that's not realistic for everybody. Some of us have crazy jobs that require our attention on multiple occasions. I've had several jobs that I was on call like almost all the time and I would get calls at two in the morning. So I get this, that's not something realistic for everybody, but if you can put your phone in do not disturb mode and not be super stressed out about it, then do that. Set those healthy boundaries that you're unaccessible at those times unless there's an emergency situation and then there's got to be some other way that they can get ahold of you. And instead of watching TV or playing on your phone and doom scrolling, do something else relaxing. There's a lot of things that I think people have just kind of forgotten existed because they're so used to just tunnel vision into their little devices that they forget that there's all these other activities and things that they can do. Besides that, you could read an actual book. And if you have like a Kindle device or something like that with the low light, that's acceptable. But obviously paper would be better. Just for your eyeballs purposes. But again, baby steps will take what we can get. So reading, putting a puzzle together. When was the last time you did a puzzle? How fun is that? And it doesn't have to be an actual puzzle pieces puzzle. You could do word puzzles or crosswords, things like that. But some sort of brain activity. You could stretch, could do yoga, light yoga, you can journal, you can practice gratitude, reflect your day. Color, plan for your tomorrow, make your to -do list. Take a warm bath, use essential oils, aroma therapy candles, just don't do that too close to bed and fall asleep with candles going. Just don't do that. And if you have a family, do the wind down routine together as a family. You can all sit around and talk about your day. You could do a puzzle together, yoga or stretch, or pretty much almost everything that I mentioned except for maybe take a bath. Don't do that together. But you know, maybe if you have multiple baths or whatever, you know what I'm saying. But yeah, incorporate the kids, know, have some family time, sit around and make an hour of conversation. And then everybody does their routines where they wash their face, they brush their teeth, they get their jammies on. And that brings me to a couple different things. So when you're washing your face, why not do a visualization where you're washing away all the stresses and worries of the day. You can see it literally going down the drain. You're visioning that. know, some people, they do their morning affirmations while they brush their teeth. Why not do nighttime affirmations where you're just washing the day away with your face or with your toothpaste or whatever. You know, just something else to kind of relax and de -stress. a lot of things, a lot of times people have a hard time sleeping at night because they're so stressed out about the day and they're worried about what happened today and could have, would have, should have, or stressed out about something that's going on tomorrow and It's always nighttime when those pop into your brain because it's the first chance that you've given yourself to like actually think and have that quiet time. Like I have shower thoughts because I give myself quiet time and usually I come up with something brilliant or I don't want to say brilliant. Let's not give myself too much credit there. But, you know, I'll come up with some solution to a problem that I've had forever that I never really would have thought of because there's so much noise going on throughout the day that you don't really You don't really allow your brain that time that it needs to think and process. So at night when you go to sleep is your brain's opportunity to shine and it's like, hey, here I am. Remember me? Here's all these things. Let's think about them. And so when you're doing your wind down routine, give yourself a chance to reflect and think about the things that happen throughout the day, process them and remove them. So when it is sleepy time, actual go to sleep time, they're not chirping in the back of your mind. you've already dealt with them and processed them and they're not as loud and you can quiet them on a lot easier scale. Speaking of togetherness, family time, partner time, if you don't have kids and you're doing wind down time, do it with a partner. You guys could exchange essential massages, you can make out a little cuddle, or have some mommy daddy time. What I'm saying is that all of these things release oxytocin. Oxytocin? I don't know how you say it. Again, I'm not the scientist here. But it's basically a substance that your brain produces that helps you relax and can put you in a more peaceful state and make it easier for you to fall asleep. however that looks like to you, no judgment, even if you're a solo, there's things that can be done to produce that same results. how about be your own turndown service? If you've ever stayed at a bougie hotel, you know what I'm talking about. Why not do that for yourself at home? Make sure your bed's nice and crisp and clean. Make sure your sheets and your bed linens are clean and cold. If you turn the air down in the house or your room or you have a fan or however you like to cool, It's definitely a good thing to sleep in cooler temperatures. Your body automatically lowers its temperature. So if you take a warm bath at night before you go to sleep, it cools your body temperatures down. So when you're ready to go to sleep, you're already lowered. Sleeping in cooler sheets and cooler rooms will help that deeper sleep happen. So, turn down the temperatures, turn down your bed sheets, make sure everything's clean and comfortable. Make sure your pajamas are comfortable. I know some of us are guilty of wearing jammies just because they're cute. And that's not always the greatest thing when you wake up at three in the morning and your jammy shorts are up to your neck or your tits are hanging out your tank top. any. female on this show that has slept in a tank top knows 100 % what I'm talking about. That's not comfortable. As cute as it is and as flowy and comfy as it is, don't wear that. If it's not going to be comfortable throughout the entire night's sleep, don't, don't. Just don't. Don't wear it. So make sure your jammies are comfortable. And if jammies aren't comfortable, don't wear them. I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. I'm just here to give you helpful tips on how to do things. Anyway. make sure your bed's comfy, make sure your jammies are comfy. And when we talk making sure the room temperature is comfy, incorporating a fan is super helpful because it usually produces some sort of white noise. And if you live in a loud city, you've got a lot of outside noises. If you live with a partner who snores or maybe even you're guilty of snoring, you would like to have that white noise just to have something else for your ears to fixate on while you're sleeping so the other distractions aren't so prominent in your sleep state and they don't disturb you as much. So having some sort of white noise whether it's the fan going or a machine or some people turn on YouTube or Spotify and have frequencies, solfoggio frequencies or whatever other sound frequencies or guided meditations or something along those lines. having a white noise in the background is always going to help with better sleep. Try not to use your bedroom for things other than sleep. And I know that's not always realistic. Sometimes, we have to use our room for office or we do our makeup or our hair or, whatever the situation is. We share a room and there's no safe space outside of our room, whatever it is. Try not to use your bed if that's the case for anything other than sleep. So if you got to, get a little beanbag chair or create a corner or something where you do your homework or your work, or makeup or something. Create a space that's not your bed when you're not sleeping to do those things. Just so your brain gets used to the thought of, I'm in bed, that means it's sleepy time. Again, creatures of habit, routine, that's just something else that you can do to ensure that your brain's like, okay, this is what we're doing. Okay, so now that we've covered what to do in the morning to ensure you have a good night's sleep, we've covered what to do in the evening to have a good night's sleep, your wind down time, let's go to your actual sleep. And again, I'm going to reiterate this one more time. Go to sleep on a consistent schedule. You've set an alarm for your wake up time, you've set an alarm for your wind down time, now set another alarm that lets you know it's time to actually go to sleep. Get in bed, close your eyes. So once you're in bed, you should have already done the things where we've talked about eliminating the background noises. I have these little like sleepy headphones. They're amazing. I just got them on Amazon and they just, they go on, you put them on and they've got little controls up here. They have little ear things on the insides that line up to your ears and They're quiet, so like your spouse, your partner won't hear them. If you're sleeping next to somebody, they're nice and quiet. And you can have, like I said, your white noise or guided meditation or whatever it is that you need to help you wind down and relax at night. These are perfect. So there's a lot of other things that you can do to kind of help put your body in a relaxed state. You can do box breathing. If you don't know what that is, that's where you breathe in four seconds, hold four seconds, out four seconds, hold four seconds, or three, or however long you can do that in a peaceful manner. I don't want you to feel like you're choking or struggling because it's not relaxing. So when you're doing your box breaths, if it's, you know, breathing two or three or whatever, but it's just you in hold, out hold for the same consistent time frame. That's the idea of the box breath. There's all kinds of other breath works that you can do that will help sleep. There's somatic breath work. There's a million options out there. can find them on YouTube or whatever. So you've got your box breathing, could do your guided meditations that help fall asleep. You can do visualizations. lot of people that are trying to manifest things will visualize, their nice happy life. And that's such an amazing thing to fall asleep to. A lot of people will practice gratitude and that's also an amazing thing to sleep to because that puts your mind in a happy blissful state at night while it's sleeping instead of worrying and stressing like a lot of us do. So if you can be mindful and do those visualizations and think about happy things, think happy thoughts. If you could think of those happy things and visualizations at night before you go to bed. If that doesn't work, I know a lot of our ADD brains are all over the place. The next thing you know, we're thinking of worst case scenario things. I understand. Maybe do something like a body scan where you relax every appendage, every part of your body individually on its own. You start with individual toes, your individual... knuckles on the toes or something along those lines. But you start with your pinky toe and you work your way up your toes and you relax each item individually until you get up. I've never gotten all the way up to my brain. Well, I think maybe one time. But again, my ADD, that's another fun thing is every time your ADD kicks in and you start thinking of something else, start over. Which leads me to if you get really, really frustrated at night when you're trying to sleep, and you've laid there forever and you're angry because you're not sleeping, don't, don't, don't. Try not to let that get to you to the point where you're angry about it because all you're gonna do is stress yourself out and rise your levels and then it's gonna be harder for you to fall asleep. So give yourself some grace if you've laid in bed for over half an hour and you can't sleep instead of getting angry, get up, grab a glass of water. do one of your bedtime rituals, if that's, re -wash your face or, maybe massage some serums in or put some sleepy time lotion on or take a drink of water, just something relaxed, just get up and stretch a little bit, do something for, maybe a half an hour or so and see if that doesn't re -relax you. Take your brain away from being frustrated at the ability that you at the inability to sleep and start over. The average adult needs about seven to nine hours of sleep. So when you're, there's a thing called sleep anxiety where you get super stressed out because, my gosh, it's already one in the morning. I have to be up by five. If I don't fall asleep now, it's this amount of time, it's this. And that's what starts that whole snowball where you get so frustrated and angry that you can't. don't let that happen. Just give yourself that grace. If you're laying there awake and you can't sleep, why? Did you have too much caffeine? Did you have too much too late? Do you have a full belly? what are what are some things? And again, that's why the trackers are important, because you can kind of see what the patterns are when you have a hard time sleeping. Did you have a super stressful day? Maybe take a cold shower at night to help kind of wind down or something along those lines. But just give yourself grace and. know that laying there and being in a relaxed state is going to be beneficial for your body more so than being worried or stressed that you're not going to get enough sleep. And some of us have a difficult time sleeping, regardless of what kind of routine we've created. We've had the same bedtime for years, whatever it is, we just can't sleep on a consistent basis. There's also supplements, and I'm not going to get into the whole rabbit hole list of supplements. That's a whole nother episode that we can do on what supplements do what. I'm just going to give you a couple of my quick favorites. I love the magnesium breakthrough. from Bioptimizers. It's been one of my favorites for the past few years. And with my sleep trackers, I can see the amount of sleep that I get when I take the magnesium breakthrough is ridiculous. And I liked this one because I think there's like seven different types of magnesium in here and they all do amazing things. But when I take that, an hour or so before sleep, I sleep so hard. and I sleep so long and I sleep so good and I wake up like, man, who is she? This is a whole new person. So I love the magnesium breakthrough to help with the sleep. And again, with the trackers, I can see the difference that it makes. get better quality sleep. There's a glutathione, I don't know how to say it. I've tried a couple different brands. That usually helps me sleep really well if I'm... having a particular, like if I know I drank too much caffeine or something and I'm going to need some time, some help to sleep, I love taking that. then I have my Luma Vitae hydrogen water I have been drinking this for several months now and I again with the trackers I've had more REM sleep and better deep sleep since drinking hydrogen water Than I ever have before at least since I've been tracking So I will leave a link in the description box below if you would like to buy one from me or join my team Those are both options for you But I will say if you think you're going to get just like a cheap knockoff hydrogen bottle off at Amazon, please don't. Most of them will produce harmful carcinogens, arsenic, all kinds of crazy stuff. So if you're not going to buy one for me, please, please, please just do your research first and make sure I think there's only like two bottles on the market that are actually backed by the American Hydrogen Association or American Association of Hydrogens. I forget the acronym, the letters, the orders, whatever. Again, I love the Lumavita hydrogen water for sleep purposes is definitely one of the first things that I noticed that I had a big impact when I started drinking and amongst other things, but I'm not going to get into that today because we're talking about sleep specifically. Okay, so to recap, sleep consistency is key. This will be the last time I say it, I promise. consistency, consistency, consistency. Okay, now I'm done. Wake up and get ready for bed and go to bed at the same time every day. Again, this is not a perfect world and not everybody lives perfect little lives and that's not always going to happen and I don't care. It's okay. If you miss a day, if you stay out late with friends one night, if you absolutely just mad at the world and you want to sleep in today, nobody's gonna arrest you for that. Take your time. Do what resonates. Do what feels right for you. Don't beat yourself up if you don't do everything perfectly. The idea here is to try to maintain consistency. If you can't, that's okay. If you just do one or two things that we've talked about today, then that's great. If you do a complete overhaul and redo your entire system and schedules, and now all of a sudden you're doing all of the things, that's great, amazing. If one day, two months later, you forget one thing, it's okay. Move on. Just continue with your life, it's not the end of the world. So don't ever, ever, ever beat yourself up or give yourself a hard time if you're not consistent or you can't follow everything. Again, anything that you can do is better than not doing any of it. So if you can just take one thing and try to implement it and make it better, amazing. If you do all the things, amazing. If you do none of the things, amazing. Whatever. So I think that's really all I had for today. I want to thank you again for watching and being here. I really appreciate your support. Like, comment, share, subscribe. Go to my website. I'll also link it down below and you can sign up to the newsletter to get all the juicy details on what the new episode is going to be about or any new upcoming events. I post new videos every Wednesday, so thank you again for joining me on the Do Live podcast. And now let's go to sleep. Wait, I mean, let's go do life. Yeah, that's it.