The top 11 tips for improving your sleep - how to sleep your way through lockdown

Supporting your sleep cycle.

This article is for anyone who needs to address how they are sleeping, want’s to feel more rested or are looking for the best thing they can do for themselves to make the most of our new lockdown. 

I have written about sleep on this blog before but when I was asked to speak about this topic in a webinar last week I realised that this topic is too important to leave further down the list of blog posts we have accumulated thus far. Also, for reasons that will become clear shortly, this is actually a perfect time for all of us (especially Melburnians) to be assessing their sleep habits. 

I wish I were writing this under better circumstances, but unfortunately we have all found ourselves back were we were several months ago. 

Lockdown 2.0 - This time it's frustrating. 

Obviously Victoria’s current situation is less than ideal but it has actually highlighted to me the importance of today’s topic. 

This could not be coming at a better time for us all, who among you reading this found during the lock down that days just rolled together and that it was hard to find any real rhythm? 

I want to set a challenge to all of you during this lock down period, and that is, I want you to genuinely and honestly re-appraise your sleep habits and find ways that you could improve them, then set yourself the goal to make the most of your lock down by creating new habits that WILL change your life. 

I don’t often use this term, but in terms of habits or activities you undertake to improve your health and your life, sleep is like a magic bullet. 

It has probably the largest impact of any one activity you can undertake. 

Speaking of undertakings, the research indicates that it takes just 3 weeks to set a new habit. People in Melbourne have been given 2 rounds of that time to set new habits up and really hone them before hopefully getting to enter the world a little more normally again. Make the most of it!

So now, having said all that, I want to come clean to you.

I come from a bit of a weird back ground with sleep.

If I am really honest, I was always known amongst my friends as someone who just flat out doesn’t sleep. This was until just over 2 years ago Martin the other chiropractor that I work with exposed me to some information that TERRIFIED ME. 

The information was an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast with Professor Matthew walker who is the author of a book called “Why we sleep”.

Now academically, I was already aware that sleep was good for me, I was convinced that I was just one of those people who didn't need as much sleep as everyone else. I just genuinely believed that lack of sleep obviously didn't affect me as much as it seemed to affect everyone else.

The reason we became interested in sleep in our practice is that we take care of a lot of people with stress related issues. As I am sure many of you are aware and especially if you have ever read my blog posts or spoken with me in the practice, stress is perhaps the leading cause of illness in Australia and as it turns out, poor sleep and lack of sleep is one of the leading causes of increased daily stress.

Reducing stress is actually soo important to spinal health that in our practice we have a special interest in stress management. 

Martin and I have completed courses on adjusting and management techniques aimed specifically at stress reduction and sleep promotion.

So today, I wanted to break down for you, what exactly IS sleep? How much do we need? I want to discuss what happens to us when we don’t get it sleep and finally, my 11 best tips to improve your sleep.

The Background 

It has taken millions of years to develop into homo sapiens. We came into anatomical being at least 315,000 years ago, with our modern behavioural and mental capacities being at least 60-80 thousand years old. 

We have only had a reliable and controllable ability to erase the night using electric light for - give or take - 150 years. Since that time, humans have become the first and only known species that actively and persistently forgo sleep.

Think about that, no other species will choose any activity over sleep outside of a survival situation. 

For us, far from being a survival situation, it means, to stay up and watch Netflix, scroll Instagram, or generally to just get a few jobs done without anyone interrupting us. 

Think about that...why is it that WE choose to avoid rest, when no other mammal will do this naturally? 

And apparently this is incredibly common, according to Matthew Walker, 1 out of every 2 people are sleep deprived, and almost 1/3 of those people are sleep deprived on 6 hours sleep or less. But let’s face it, have you ever heard any person say to you “you know what, I am just getting soo much good sleep at the moment!”

SO the first thing to ask ourselves is;

HOW MUCH SLEEP ARE WE MEANT TO GET?

As humans we need between 7 and 9 hours of good QUALITY sleep for our body to operate the way it is intended to.

Thats not just physical time in bed, 

Quality in this sense refers to our biological imperative to get through all of the stages of sleep for an appropriate amount of time, in order for our brain to recharge. 

What are the 4 stages of quality sleep?

stage of sleep:

1. Awake,

2. light sleep,

3. deep sleep,

4. REM (Rapid Eye Movement), and repeat.

Awake time is the time spent in bed before and after falling asleep. It also includes brief awakenings during the night.

As I said earlier, quality sleep contains appropriate time spent in each of 4 stages of sleep. 

Although all 4 stages of sleep are essential to the quality of your sleep, I wont get into the nitty gritty of how sleep works specifically, it can be more complicated than my level of specific understanding and that would involve MANY blogs about that topic alone, so just to hit the high notes here today, I am going to GROSSLY oversimplify everything.

Stages 1 and 2 are your “set up” stages of sleep, they are the period where your body begins to turn off your monitoring systems and relax the “awake” portion of sleep, changing your heart rate and breathing to eventually get into stage 2 and eventually into deeper levels. This is also the stage where you can have a power nap as long as you don't doze for more than 20 minutes.

Stages 3 and 4 are where you get down into deeper levels of sleep.

In Stage 3, your brain waves become very long and slow and become much less responsive and harder to wake up, while your brain “paralyzes” your body in a type of muscular incarceration so that during stage 4, otherwise known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you don't get up and start acting out your dreams…it sounds scary but its a handy survival mechanism. You have probably experienced this lock down first hand if you have ever suddenly felt awake at night time but been unable to move your body.  

Stages 3 and 4 are where most body replenishment occurs. This type of sleep is excellent for cardiovascular health, metabolism, and most importantly, removal of waste products that accumulate in your brain throughout the day. 

SO...WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DON'T GET ENOUGH SLEEP?

Think honestly about how many hours you spend sleeping and if you are honest, what sort of quality do you believe you actually achieve?

When we sleep for fewer than 7 hours, our performance, both physically and mentally dimities by 10%. 

When the hours we sleep are fewer than 6, our performance is decreased by 30%. 

30%.

That means if you average fewer hours than that, like I did over a 15 year period from year 11 onwards, my ability to work, to remember, to drive, to study or even enjoy downtime with my friends and family was down by 10-30%. 

Equally as scary, the research suggests that people who are sleep deprived are actually incapable of measuring the negative effects of lack of sleep on themselves. It's like knowing your exact blood alcohol while drinking (a comparison that will become more relevant in Part 2 of this post). We know we have been drinking but have no actual way to know if we are .05 or not until its measured externally. 

Imagine the compound interest of life lost over 15 years of being 30% less of yourself. I am certain I would likely still be at Align, and I know I would still be a chiropractor, but who knows how much further I would be in my career, how much more I could have given to my clients or how much more I could have enjoyed those years? 

WHAT HEALTH ISSUES DOES IT CAUSE? 

Short answer? Heaps. Almost everything in fact.

According to more recent research, the shorter you sleep, the shorter your life. 

Fewer hours of sleep predicts all cause mortality. Put simply, you’ll be dead sooner and the quality of your life will be worse.

Fewer than 6 hours of sleep leads to a decrease of physical endurance and function of 30% due to lactic acid build up as well as the bodies ability to expire our breath, but anything below 7 hours has been shown to impair us, with decreases in our peak muscle strength, peak running speed and our vertical jump. 

Coupled with this fact is that it has been shown that sleep and frequency of injury has a linear relationship, stating that 9 hours of sleep Vs 5 hours of sleep leads to a 60% increase in the probability of injury.

Another more functional element to sleep is that it has been shown to improve learning performance (in rats at least) by 20-30% as it is thought to be the time when our brain strengthens its connections when learning something new. 

Have you ever been trying to learn something new or studying and come to a point where you are just stuck so you give up for the night? 

If your anything like me, I know that you found that the next morning it just clicked. Things you were struggling to learn just came to you, or you could remember the whole piece of information correctly. 

It appears that while we sleep the brain literally prunes away the unnecessary elements of the pathways and streamlines your new skill. 

Another health issue lack of sleep causes, is weight gain. Sleep doesn't just help you lose weight, it actually helps you keep it away! 

Lack of sleep decreases the body’s levels of a hormone called Leptin, who causes the sensation of satiation (aka - feeling full). At the same time, the hormone ghrelin (the guy responsible for NOT feeling full, and making you hungry), is ramped up. 

It has been shown that people who sleep between 5-6 hours a night will eat 200-300 MORE calories a day, equalling roughly 70,000 calories a year, leading to 10-15 pounds (or 4.5-6.8kgs) of obese mass a year. 

Worse, you eat more of the WRONG THINGS, going for heavy hitting carbs and heavy processed food, while simultaneously staying away from leafy greens etc. 

So just to clarify…on average, if you slept more than 7 hours a night, you would eat fewer calories, crave better quality food and with no extra effort or will power necissary, you would have to manage up to 7kgs of fat FEWER, each year. 

Do you know any other “magic” weight loss solution that can offer all that with zero negative side effects and at zero cost?

More importantly, insufficient sleep according to the podcast, degrades our DNA.

Specifically it has a negative effect on immune response genes, decreasing their reproduction. At the same time, we get increased chronic inflammation, increased stress response leading to cardiovascular disease and an increase in the expression of genes related to the promotion of tumour growth.

Apparently this is most exemplified by people who do shift work. Night shift workers suffer from higher rates of obesity, diabetes and cancers, most notably bowel, prostate and breast cancer. 

This is apparently so prevalent Matthew Walker states, that the World Health Organisation now classifies night shift work as possible carcinogen in and of itself as 4 hours of sleep even for just one night, causes a remarkable state of immune deficiency, a significant drop in anti cancer cells in our immune system.

Sleep deprivation affects your sex hormones too, in fact, Men who sleep 5-6 hours a night will have testosterone levels 10 years their senior, a critical element of health, strength, muscular performance etc, in short, it ages you a DECADE (apologies for not having the data for women too but you can safely assume similar effects can be found).

Consider how you are when you're deprived of sleep; reduced alertness, impulsive, lack of ability to concentrate, difficulties with learning and memory.

What do you think happens to your brain when you are like this for weeks, months or even YEARS on end? 

While we are awake our brain builds up toxicity, especially a protein called ‘Beta Amyloid’. You may have hear of this protein before as it is the main mechanism in the  development of Alzheimer’s Disease. When we sleep properly, the process of sleep wipes our brain, reducing build up of Beta Amyloid.

Insufficient sleep across lifespan now appears to be one of THE most significant lifestyle factors in determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Simply put: wakefulness causes low level brain damage and sleep offers reparatory function.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have arguably had a huge effect on our world today. They were both known as having strong wills with sharp minds. They were both also famous for getting around 4-5 hours of sleep a night. They both died with Alzheimer’s. 

This anecdotal evidence is hardly proof of the research but it raises a few questions about the concept, two people with very active minds and social lives (two factors previously thought to be predictive of the disease) got it anyway.

Now you might be saying to yourself:

“I’M ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO DOESN’T NEED THAT MUCH SLEEP…SO I’M ALL GOOD RIGHT?” 

Wrong. 

Well…at least its a safe bet that you're wrong anyway. 

You’ll remember that Matthew’s research has shown that people are completely incapable of determining how much they are affected by sleep deprivation. 

I was convinced of my own ability to get things done when I was working off lower levels of sleep, but it turns out, like you, I am completely unqualified to make that assessment. 

Negative effects of your lack of sleep can ONLY be assessed by external sources and measurements. 

Although studies show us that there is a population of humans that can function as normal from just 5 hours of sleep, but those same genetic studies show that is a group of less than 1% of the population. 

In fact, you're MORE likely to be struck by lightening in your life time than to be one of those people, so you should probably assume that you aren't one of them. 

SO…WHAT CAN I DO THEN? 

Get to sleep. Seriously, its as simple and as difficult as that. 

The minimum you should aim for is 7 hours! 7-9 hours appears to be our sweet spot as humans. 

11. WAYS TO IMPROVE SLEEP:

1. Consciously think about sleep hygiene. Make it something you factor into your health routine like you do exercise. 

2. Regularity; try go to bed at same time.

3. Decrease light; Try away from screens for at least an hour before bed or at LEAST have your screens on night mode. Think of circadian rhythm, no blue light, black out curtains, eye masks.

4. Halve the number of lights on in your home in an evening. Apparently, if you are in an environment with no lights at all, we fall asleep 2 hours earlier.

5. Keep it cool, brain decreases temp by 2-3 deg fahrenheit to initiate sleep. always easier to sleep in a room thats too cold rather than too hot. We fall asleep faster and deeper in cold. 

6. Wear fewer clothes to bed. Again, its a heat thing.  

7. Try to have warm feet and hands. It helps keep your brain cool as it stakes blood away from your core. You could also try having a hot bath or shower before bed, it brings blood to the surface then your core body temp plummets when you get out of the water and you're more ready to sleep. The reverse is true for waking up, studies have shown that its the rise in temperature in the morning not just the light that wakes you.

8. Time your exercise, try to exercise earlier in the day, hormonally exercising earlier sets you up to sleep whereas later in the day it can wake you up. 

9. Eat earlier and go for a short walk, help your body digest so it isn’t working soo hard when you are trying to settle down to rest. 

10. Decrease stress in other areas of your life, meditate, work on your posture, breathing exercise, plan opening your emails etc, decreasing stress chemicals will allow your body to relax faster and more fully, letting you get to sleep. 

11. Watch the Joe Rogan podcast I talked about a lot of my information coming from here. It goes into a lot more detail if you are that way inclined, but it is worth the watch. It is also available as a traditional podcast.

AND REMEMBER

Sedation is NOT the same as normal sleep, pills and alcohol might help you nod off but they do not allow you to go through the full normal stages of sleep and so you will miss out on a lot of it’s benefits. Be sure to discuss your inability to sleep with a health practitioner about improving your sleep hygiene as Matthew Walker states in the podcast that sedatives are an absolute last resort.

Sleep is NOT like a bank, you cant accumulate debt during the week and then make it up on the weekend.

Lastly NO ONE tells you to stay awake on a problem. “Sleep on it” so that you can have a fresh perspective is a suggestion with no cultural boundaries. 

Accumulated wisdom for centuries has promoted sleep as a way of better tackling your problems, getting things done and improving your life.