by Christine Sutherland
Up until recently we used to admire people who claimed they needed very little sleep. There was even a view that a need for little sleep was related to higher intelligence!
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.
For instance many diet companies will tell you that weight loss is simple, just a matter of “energy in/energy out”. This is a particularly stupid lie, because the state of your metabolism is more important than either.
Although there are an array of lifestyle factors that also affect metabolism and therefore affect weight loss, sleep is one of the most important, is crucial to your weight loss program, and crucial for permanent weight loss. Everyone has slightly different sleep needs, but most adults need between 7 and 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, while children (including older teenagers, no matter how loudly they protest) need more like 12 or 13.
When it comes to recovery from serious illness, quality sleep becomes even more important.
9 Tips to a Better Night’s Sleep
1 Protect your sleep time. Don’t allow the expectations of others to detract from your sleep. If you need to go to bed early in order to get your sleep, do it. If you need to stop people from interrupting your sleep, do it.
If the situation is one that simply has to be tolerated, for example with a baby waking through the night, or sick children who need to be cared for through the night, make sure you catch up on your sleep the next day.
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 Getting calm before going to bed. This means avoiding things that are stimulating to your body or brain, like loud or stressful television or music, arguments, caffeine or alcohol. Conversely you should use dimmed lighting, quiet background music, and laid-back conversation as a way to slow down and get ready for sleep.
4 Dump stress. When people tolerate unacceptable levels of stress in their lives, they can then suffer from intrusive, worried thoughts when they should be sleeping and this can be very distressing. Two powerful techniques, Logotherapy and NeuroStim, can stop these thoughts in their tracks and allow a quick path to the land of nod. You can learn more about these on TopLifeSolutions.com.
5 Is your bedroom actually conducive to good sleep? Is it quiet? Is it dark enough? Is there fresh air? Are your pillows, bed, and coverings, all comfortable and cosy? Do you feel safe and secure?
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.
There is quite good evidence for my recommendation to stay in your bed. For example if we’re helping a new baby to get into a good sleep routine, one of the things we do is try to keep them in their cot and provide as little stimulation as possible even if we have to give an extra bottle or change a nappy. The last thing we’d do is pick them up and go and sit in a bright room with a television on. That’d be teaching them to wake up!
This means that you can be confident that staying in bed is the best thing you can do to build better sleep habits.
7 You must be physically active during the day. Your body needs vigorous physical activity in order to properly produce sleep hormones. Mornings or early afternoons are the best times for you to play a sport, or go for that really brisk walk or bike ride.
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 Ensure your nutrition is adequate. Our body can produce the right hormones at the right time only if we take in the right nutrients. For example the extre low-carb diet that is being touted around the internet (and unfortunately even by some doctors who should know better!) is a recipe for lousy sleep, because it interferes with the production of melatonin. Enjoy a good, healthy diet with lots of variety and you’ll increase your ability to sleep well.
About the Author:
There are approximately 17 lifestyle factors which have a important impact on
weight loss, and quality sleep is just one of them. The free book “17 Solutions” spells out each of them and tells you how to get them right! Sponsored by the globally-launched Kind Communities Initiative.