Simple strategies to reduce stress and sleep better

Feeling fatigued, a little bit over it all or just in need of a few strategies to wake up feeling a bit more energised? Then this post is for you.

For those of you who have been following this blog, you’ll know that we have been posting a lot about what you can be doing to keep your body moving well to stay healthy and more comfortable while you’re having this time at home, but what about the other things our body has to do well to keep us going?

One of the first casualties during periods of stress, especially prolonged stress is the quality of our sleep. We find it harder to nod off, we wake more easily through the night or sometimes we just notice the quality of our sleep has dropped off and we are waking feeling tired despite having gotten our normal amount of sleep.

It makes sense, when under “threat” your body doesn’t want to let it’s guard down completely so that you can remain alert to danger. Its the reason you never sleep as well in a hotel as you do at home no matter how many stars it has because its a new environment so your mind never fully shuts off.

Now think about how we find ourselves living in a new environment, a new routine, changes in the amount of exercise we can do in a day and dealing with stressed people all day every day.

Is it any wonder that our clients are contacting us complaining of fatigue more than ever before? Of course not.

Please enjoy this little video Martin has filmed to help you get your sleep back on track, as always the transcript is below.

Hi, Martin Harvey from Align Chiropractic. So, today’s video is a really simple routine that I think will help you in terms of managing stress and improving your sleep. I’m recording this during the whole COVID-19 lockdown here in Melbourne, and one of the things that I’ve become super aware of when talking to people is that stress is having a bigger impact than ever because of the current circumstance. There’s not always a lot we can do about the circumstances- that applies right now, but it also applies to life generally. Often the things that are stressing us are not the things that we can immediately resolve. So, it’s really useful to have tools that you can use to reduce the physiological impact, reduce the health impact of stress and or issues with sleep so that they’re less likely to cause your immune system to work more poorly, less likely to cause a buildup of tension that is often a driver of spinal problems, and all the other things like headaches and so on that we know are very strongly stress related. 

So, when we talk about stress from a physiological perspective, there’s a whole lot of hormones that are involved. The number one hormone is a hormone called cortisol, but all of our hormones are sort of interlinked. When we talk about sleep and stress, the hormone that also becomes really important for us to consider is melatonin. This is the hormone that really triggers us to feel sleepy at the time we want to go to sleep, and so there’s often a very strong-tie between higher than normal levels of stress and having more difficulty sleeping. So, I sort of wanted to combine a routine that allows you to essentially use really easy triggers to try and normalize your melatonin levels and your cortisol levels.

Melatonin 2:00

So, the first thing that I’m going to suggest that you do is to wherever possible get outside early in the morning- whatever is early for you, but get outside because we get unfiltered light- even if it’s cloudy, and that goes through our eyes and stimulates in our brain the production of melatonin. So, if we do that early in the morning, it’s much more likely that it sets our circadian rhythm in a way that we’re going to feel nice and sleepy when it’s time to go to bed later that night. The advantage of doing a walk is, one- it’s one of the things we are able to do with our current stage 4 code lockdown, but it also triggers a thing called optic flow. 

Optic flow: 2:49

An optic flow is essentially a stimulation of certain brain circuits by having things going past us, by having things going through our visual field. So, it triggers a series of changes in our brain that also helps to kind of relax us and reset cortisol levels in a way that’s really healthy. If it’s raining outside and you can’t get that, the next best way of doing it is to move around the house a bit. If we’re restricted to our homes, we’re not moving as much as we might normally, so make a conscious effort to sort of almost do laps of the house. 

You also want to get near a window. Now, the window will have light slightly filtered- some of the UV radiation doesn’t come through the window, so it’s not quite as good as the melatonin effect that you get being out in direct sunlight (but almost as good).  One little thing to add to the getting out for your morning walk, is that it’s important that you don’t wear sunglasses unless it’s so bright that you almost have to squint, because the light coming in gets filtered and altered by the sunglasses. So, particularly in the morning, you’re generally not going to need it unless you’re walking directly into the sun. 

Physiological sigh- 4:07

The other thing that I’ve mentioned on other videos but I just want to go into a little bit more detail is the power of the physiological sigh. So, when we talk about cortisol and stress, often the strategy that comes up is learning and developing a meditation practice, and it’s very well established, evidence-based way of improving our health, improving our cognitive function, and reducing stress levels. It is a bit time consuming, and for a lot of people it’s a tough habit to get into.

The beauty of the physiological sigh is that it’s very neurologically triggered. You don’t have to develop a skill, it’s just using your breathing in a very specific way. You get the effect immediately, whereas meditation is a skill and a practice that you have to develop over a period of time. So, physiological sigh essentially is a way of breathing where you take one deep breath, which expands the little alveoli in your lungs and triggers certain neural pathways, then you take a second breath over the top of that, and then you relax as you let your breath out. So, it’s a really powerful way of triggering a direct neural pathway that changes you from being into what you might think of as a nervous system that’s all wound up and ready to go- which is called a sympathetic state, to a parasympathetic state- which is the neurological way that our bodies get us into the right state to rest, relax and repair any damage that’s happened to our body. 

So, physiological sigh in terms of routine, I’d be suggesting go for your walk to get the optic flow and get the melatonin. After that, sit down and do 5 of these physiological sigh breaths. Really really simple, you just breathe in through the nose. Just relax your shoulders as you’re doing it. 

Conclusion: 6:59

So, there we have it. A really simple routine to help manage sleep and to help improve stress or lower stress levels. It’s based on research that’s done by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford in the US. He’s doing some really exciting work that I think can really help us live a healthier, happier, more active life.