How's your sleep hygiene?
Sleep hygiene is the secret to a good, consistent sleep routine!
Hello and welcome to this edition of The NeuroNinja Newsletter!
Action Your Potential (AYP) is all about helping people unlock the gift of themselves – through the transformative power of neuroscience.
If you missed last week’s edition, you can catch up here!
In this edition we’re going to discuss the secret to a good sleep – and no it’s not the blue light filter on your phone!!!
You need more sleep.
You know this, I know this. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
I meet a lot of people in my job, and across the years I’ve now been doing this work I could count on just one hand how many people have told be they are getting enough sleep.
Genuinely.
Now you know that sleep is important and don’t want to belabour that point – but it is crucial to discuss just one of the ways sleep is super dang vital.
Memory and that
Every day you learn things. It may not feel like it, but your brain is a learning machine. Constantly firing, growing and refiring neural connections. What we spend our time thinking about and doing is what our brain diligently helps us get better at.
Memory is just the re-firing of neurons in certain sequences, and through some mad process which we don’t entirely understand that translates into a vision of a lived experience.
However, sleep is a vital part of the memory process!
At night, your hippocampus (it does this during the day as well but to a lesser extent) coordinates long term memory formation. It does this throughout the sleep cycle, refiring the neurons used during the day. If you are not asleep for long enough every night, this process cannot occur.
This is also a reason why we can’t bank sleep, ergo sleep extra on weekends to make up for a lack of sleep in the week. Once we’ve had a lack of sleep, that specific memory coordination isn’t going to happen again.
That’s just one reason why, again YOU NEED MORE SLEEP.
So today, I wanted to break down HOW you can start to take back control of your sleep.
Onto Sleep Hygiene
Or SleHy as NO one calls it.
No, it’s not about brushing your teeth. Though that is obviously important, people!
Instead, sleep hygiene is simply the development of a consistent sleep routine. The key thing about these sleep routines is they can help our brains deal with a possible contrast between our actual circadian rhythm and our chronotype. (See more about chronotypes in this previous edition).
Now, before we dive into what makes for great sleep hygiene it’s caveat time*.
When dishing out advice to different people, with different lives, it’s always worth remembering that there is no easy universal solution.
The things I am going to mention are all important aspects of a good sleep hygiene routine, but they may not be feasible for you for whatever reason.
That being said, sleep is so vitally important that the worst thing we could do is throw our hands up and resign ourselves to poor sleep – your brain deserves better!
Get eight hours
We cannot stress this enough you need to be getting eight hours a night. This is a hard thing to do consistently! If your schedule is anything like mine you have some early mornings and some late nights, so building a perfectly consistent routine is hard – but you’ve still got to do it!
The best way to ensure you are always getting enough sleep is to go to bed at the same time every day, and wake up at the same time every day. (Yes, even on weekends.)
This allows our brain to make sleep into a habit, which goes some ways to counteract our bodies natural chronotype.
Same place, same time.
The ElePHONE in the room
Starting with the big boy. Your phone is a disaster for your sleep, as you probably are fully aware. It’s a disaster for a few reasons, with the blue light it emits often being cited as interrupting our sleep cycles. This is true, but also not the only problem.
Suffice it to say, your phone is far too interesting for a body and brain that wants to go to sleep. The sporadic notifications, the colours, the messages the lights, the likes etc all engage our mesolyombic dopamine reward circuitry – which also keeps us awake.
So, we need to do as much as we can to get our phones out of the way BEFORE bed.
This means, as much as we can – we gotta get our phones out of our bedrooms.
Now, just going to get in before this excuse… “I need my phone in my room because it has my alarm on it”. Buy an alarm clock. It’s too important to sleep well, and your phone is too damaging to this process. It’s worth the purchase.
But it’s not enough to just put them in the kitchen. We need to make sure we are weaning ourselves off our screens well before we actually go to sleep. Build in a ‘Wind Down Hour’ before bed.
Let’s game it out, we need to be up at 7 tomorrow, so to get eight hours we need to be asleep by 23:00. Okay, so from 10pm – we don’t touch our phone.
What to do instead? Reading is profoundly powerful for our sleep routines, not only because it puts us into our parasympathetic nervous system, but also because books can hardly be described as stimulating.
And staying asleep
We need as much as possible to try and stay asleep! Now this is clearly easier said than done, and there isn’t always a massive amount we can do about it.
Any new parents for example, all I can say is good luck!!!!
However, if the same thing keeps waking us up, it would be reasonable to see if there’s any way we can manage that. Snoring for example, if you have a bed partner who’s less than quiet, it’s probably worth investing in some earplugs to reduce the disruption.
Wrap it up, and go to bed!
Again, it’s really worth the caveat that these techniques are not universal and may not work for everyone. Instead, it’s the principle that’s super important.
These are not a one size fits all, but hopefully you’ve spotted at least one of these behaviours which will help you get better sleep more often!
Want some white noise to help you fall asleep?
Sorry, can’t help.
But we do have a VERY EXCITING and very WAKEFUL podcast that you should totes listen to!
This week Andy and I discussed, you’ll never guess what… SLEEP!
You can watch the full episode on Youtube:
… and listen wherever you get your podcasts! 🎧
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Thank you for reading this edition of The NeuroNinja Newsletter!
The NeuroNinja Newsletter was written by Adam Wright. Edited by Angela Wright.