Enjoy Optimum Health

In the 80’s the ability to live with very little sleep was held up as some kind of badge of honour. The less sleep you needed, the more intelligent you were, and the more highly regarded you were.

Modern scientific research shows that not only were those “sleep rejectors” behaving unintelligently and producing lower-grade, lower levels of work, but they were setting themselves up for serious mental and physical disease.

In fact a lack of sufficient sleep is now being seen as a modern disease, creating stress, compromising the body’s ability to regenerate, and even lowering our basic metabolic rate. Our metabolic rate plays a crucial role in weight loss and is every bit as important as the amount of food that we eat, and the amount of activity we have.

Have you heard the silly line from the diet companies that weight loss requires you to calculate the energy from the food you eat, and then deduct the energy from your activity output? If this advice weren’t so pointless and dangerous, it’d be laughable. There is a far more important factor, and that’s your resting metabolic rate.

There are many lifestyle factors that impact on metabolic rate, and sleep is one of them, so quality sleep is a crucial part of any serious weight loss program. The amount of sleep you need is unique to you, though probably it will be around 7 1/2 to 8 hours of good sleep each night. Of course kids need a lot more than that, often more like 12 or 13 hours of sleep nightly.

If you also suffer from a serious illness, like depression for example, quality sleep becomes even more important in your journey toward recovery.

9 Steps to Improve Sleep

1 Guard your sleep time like the precious commodity it is. Who cares what other people think! I’m not talking about welching out on parenting duties at the expense of someone else’s sleep, of course! What I’m saying is don’t let other people’s expectations or selfish behaviour interfere with your sleep needs.

If sleep interruption is beyond your control (for example if you have small children or a sick partner who needs care during the night) make sure you get extra sleep during the day, and also make sure you get some nights off.

2 Have a routine. A time for slowing down in the evening, a time for going to bed, a time for waking up, a time for all of the activities you need to do in the day. Although you’ll obviously vary your routine from time to time, your regular routine will help to train your brain for efficient “shut down”.

3 About the slow down time before bed. This is a time when you want to avoid stimulation, whether that’s from books or television, or from alcohol for example. This is a time for dimmed lighting, quiet music, and easy conversation.

4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they’re plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you’ll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.

5 Prepare Your Bedroom. Of course your bed and pillows etc should be comfortable! But in addition your room should be dark and on the cool side, with fresh air. Those are ideal sleeping conditions.

6 Stay in Bed. Some sleep experts advise you to get up if you can’t fall to sleep within 30 minutes, so that in your mind bed is linked only to sleeping. I find this rather silly, since bed can be linked to having sex, reading, resting, daydreaming, and even being ill. Instead I recommend staying in bed so that you train your mind that this is the correct place to be at this time.

And there’s very good evidence for my stance on this. Take the example of a baby or small child whom we’re helping to move into a good sleep routine. One thing we never do is, after a time of trying, get them up out of their bed! The idea is to provide as little stimulation as we possibly can because otherwise that would be training them to be wakeful - the exact opposite of what we’re hoping to achieve.

This means that you can be confident that staying in bed is the best thing you can do to build better sleep habits.

7 A physically active day is important to good sleep. If you don’t get enough activity through the day, your body won’t achieve the chemical state it requires to produce adequate melatonin, the “sleep hormone”.

8 Ensure you have great relationships with others: family, friends, colleagues, your neighbourhood. Quality relationships are essential to our wellbeing and we sleep so much better when our relationships are in a good state.

9 Enjoy good nutrition. In the end it’s the nutrients we take into our body that allow us to produce the hormones that allow good sleep.

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