Hi everyone, hope you’re all having a good day. When I first started up a common request for me to cover in a post was the benefits of rest & sleep. The importance of it and how it can effect your diet, training and mental health. If you’ve not already I recommend reading my first blog post on the subject (here).
The last post was really about identifying the importance sleep can have and some of the effects not getting enough sleep can have. Not everyone find’s getting to sleep the easiest of tasks for myself as soon as my head hits the pillow my brain becomes alive and I start thinking of the 101 tasks I need to do the next day. Anxiety can have a large part in playing struggling to get to sleep so personally I think it’s best we do all in our power in order to try and make getting to sleep as easy as possible.
To do this we firstly need to understand what happens when we sleep. Sleep is dictated by two hormones:
Cortisol - Is the hormone that wakes us up & keeps us moving throughout the day. The get out of bed hormone. It’s responsible for other things such as coping with stress & maintaining blood glucose. There’s ways we can keep awake during the day with caffeine, moving & being out in the sunlight. To boost out cortisol levels and keep up awake.
Melatonin - The opposite to cortisol, melatonin is the sleep hormone. During the later hours of the day the levels of this hormone will slowly rise until you fall asleep.
Both these hormones create your sleep pattern, as one hormone rises the other falls. Helping you keep awake and fall asleep when you need to, and this creates your body clock.
Now that’s covered onto how to get to sleep. Honestly not as easy as it sounds for a lot of people, restless nights and the effects of a bad night the next morning can severely effect someones motivation, mood & fat loss.
Caffeine - I covered it briefly that in this blog with regards Cortisol. Caffeine is great for keeping awake and is used in many preworkouts to make sure you get the most out of your training. But as a lot of you can already guess it’s not great for getting to sleep. Something to note is even decaf coffee isn’t zero percent caffeine it’s actually got 30% of the caffeine a regular coffee has. Don’t just automatically pair caffeine and coffee together remember many drinks can contain caffeine. Therefore cut off your caffeine intake a good couple of hours before you go to bed.
Screens - Electrical devices emit an artificial blue light which suppresses the release of melatonin. So cutting those devices off 1-2 hours before you sleep allows your body to prep itself for getting to sleep. Read a book, perfect time to expand your knowledge on a few things.
I know there’s more tips and tricks people swear by and follow in order they get a good nights sleep, but personally these are the two that I’ve found most beneficial. And somethings are personal preference, like for me the room needs to be pitch black, nice and cool and practically zero noise.
Hope you all enjoyed the blog post for today, I’ve put a post on Instagram asking for people’s best tips on falling asleep so head over to my IG @cmcg.fitness to see what everyone else wrote.
Have a good day.
Cam