Ep. #246: 7 Proven Ways to Sleep Better Than Ever Before

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100 percent natural pre workout fat burner supplement forge. Now, it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fit.

Fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state, and maintain intensity and focus in your workouts. All that is why Forge has over 400 reviews on Amazon with a four star average, and another 220 on my website with a Four and a half star average.

So if you want to get leaner faster, and especially in the quote unquote, hard to lose spots like the hips, thighs, and belly, then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of forge today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you’ll save 10 percent on your entire order.

And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let’s get to the show.

Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscleful Life and Legion Athletics. And in this video podcast, we’re going to talk sleep, how to sleep better. So imagine for a second, if you could fall asleep quickly and easily. Imagine if you could sleep deeper and not wake up as many times at night. Imagine if you woke up feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and restored.

For many people, that sounds like a fantasy, but it’s not supposed to be. That is actually how our bodies are programmed to work. Unfortunately, though, we can screw this programming up by making simple little mistakes for the most part that result in poor sleep. Fortunately, though, that also means that by making simple little improvements to our daily habits and routines, many of us can greatly enhance the quality of our sleep.

Now, let’s start this discussion with how much sleep should we be getting? And for many of us, the answer is more than we are currently getting. In 2014, the CDC declared that insufficient sleep has reached the level of a public health epidemic. Yes, it really is that bad. And according to polling conducted in 2011 by the National Sleep Foundation, 43 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 reported that they rarely ever have a good night’s sleep on weeknights.

Furthermore, 60 percent of people reported that they experience at least one sleep problem every night or almost every night. And the most common problems that people reported were having trouble falling asleep, snoring, waking up too many times in the middle of the night, waking up too early and then not being able to fall back to sleep and not feeling rested after waking up and the long term health implications of sleep insufficiency are quite a bit worse than many people realize.

Not only has. Sleep insufficiency been linked to auto crashes, industrial disasters, and medical and other occupational errors. Studies also show that it increases the risk of various types of chronic disease, including hypertension, diabetes, depression, obesity, cancer, and others. And as we have all experienced, it also decreases quality of life and productivity.

Furthermore, insufficient sleep also makes it harder to reach our fitness goals because research shows that inadequate sleep can slow down weight loss. It can lead to weight gain, not directly, of course, more just through stimulating the appetite, which then leads to overeating and, of course, weight gain.

As well as reduce testosterone levels. So the bottom line here is your sleep hygiene is like your diet. It’s either working for you or against you, regardless of whether you realize what you’re doing or not. If you sleep too little for too long, the consequences, which are unavoidable, can be quite severe.

And on the flip side, if you sleep well, then the benefits can be surprisingly far reaching. Studies have shown that when you give your body enough sleep, it does better in just about every way. Here’s a short list. So getting enough sleep improves your memory. It reduces your levels of systemic inflammation.

It makes you a better learner. It makes you a better problem solver. It helps you stick to your diet easier. It boosts your immune system. It improves your mood, it improves your athletic performance, and it even improves your longevity. So how much sleep do you need to be getting on average every night to avoid all of the negative things?

Side effects and reap all of the positive benefits. According to the national sleep foundation, sleep needs do vary from individual to individual, but most adults need anywhere from seven to nine hours of sleep per night to avoid the unwanted consequences of. Sleep deprivation. Now, since your individual sleep needs are going to vary based on a number of different factors, including your diet, your exercise routine, your genetics, your age, your lifestyle, and so forth.

An easy way to determine exactly how much sleep you need is to pick a two week period where you’re going to go to bed at the same time every night. Without an alarm set now chances are you might sleep a little bit more than usual at first if you have some sleep debt to pay off, but by the end of that second week, you should have fallen into a regular sleeping pattern of however many hours per night that number is going to be what your body needs for optimal health and function.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. Okay. So that’s how to determine how much sleep we need. Let’s now talk about how to get that sleep as effectively as possible.

So I have seven tips to share with you. And the first one is to avoid chemicals that interfere with sleep. Now, we all know, of course, that caffeine and nicotine are stimulants that can mess with our sleep and that we shouldn’t be having either of them within six hours or so of going to bed. But many people don’t know that alcohol can have the same effects.

Studies show that alcohol can help bring on sleep, but then it actually can act as a stimulant and increase the number of wakings at night. The solution then, of course, is to not have alcohol before you go to bed, and specifically you should include alcohol in that four to six hour cutoff rule. So no caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol four to six hours before going to bed for the best possible sleep.

The second tip here is to turn off the electronics. And this is important because bright lights, and especially the type of blue light that comes from TVs and computers and smartphones, messes with our body’s melatonin production. Now, melatonin is a hormone that’s produced by a little gland in the brain.

And what happens is, as the day goes on, and as we get closer to going to bed, melatonin levels rise. And that naturally signals the body to get ready to go to sleep. Now, light is your body’s primary regulator of melatonin production, which of course makes sense because it’s just in line with the natural fluctuation of the day.

The sun comes up, it’s time to wake up, it’s time to get active, it’s time to do things. And then as the sun is going down, light levels go down and it’s time to get ready to go to sleep. Now, this simple little biological system worked well for a long time until we invented electronic lights and then invented screens to stare at.

And as I mentioned earlier, research shows that these artificial lights and the blue hued lights in particular are powerful melatonin suppressants. So what we are doing is interfering with our body’s natural biological processes that prepare it for deep and restful sleep. Now, what should we do about it?

There is compelling evidence that it may be best to actually banish blue light and even artificial light altogether when the sun goes down. But for most of us, that’s a tall order. We’re not going to do that. So the next best thing though, the next best science based recommendation is to not watch TV or use a computer, tablet, or smartphone for at least an hour before going to bed.

You should also download and use a program called flux. If you are on a desktop or a Mac book, I’ll put a link up here. And I think there are some equivalent apps. I believe on iPhones, I’m Android. I believe the iPhone now just has it built in. It has a flux like function that basically what it does is it just adjusts the temperature of the light at night.

So at night you don’t get a harsh blue light. Instead, you get a Warm more reddish light and research shows that light doesn’t negatively impact melatonin levels nearly as much as the blue light. So yeah, anyways, I think iPhones come with this feature now built in, I think you can just turn it on.

I forget the name of it. You can just Google that. And on Android, I use Twilight is what it’s called. Again, at this point, Android may actually have a built in and I’m just not aware, but I still use a program called Twilight. Okay. So the next tip here is to exercise regularly because of course, exercise is awesome.

Exercise improves just about everything in your life that you would want to improve, including sleep. And studies show that exercise can improve sleep quality in people that have sleep problems and people that don’t have sleep problems. And some people respond faster than others to it. So some people see market improvements in their sleep relatively quickly, while other people need to exercise regularly for several months to see a difference.

But in the end, everybody sleeps better. When they exercise regularly and in terms of when to exercise, studies show that some people get the best results when they exercise early and other people actually get better results as far as sleep goes when they exercise later in the day. So the bottom line here is try early exercise times, try later exercise times.

You probably should cut it off a couple hours before going to bed. You don’t want to be too jacked up going to bed, wake up early in the morning, try that, see how it impacts your sleep. And then maybe try after work, a six or 7 p. m. exercise time. See how that impacts your sleep or maybe earlier in the afternoon, if you can.

Okay. So the next tip here is don’t be overweight. So if exercise is the thing that can improve every aspect of your life, then obesity is its antithesis. Studies show that an absolutely staggering number of physiological and psychological benchmarks are undermined by being overweight and sleep hygiene is one of them.

And obesity and sleep hygiene can have a particularly vicious relationship where they feed into each other, literally, because as I mentioned earlier, studies show that when you’re not getting enough sleep, your body’s, Appetite gets screwed up. The hormones related to hunger and satiety get thrown off and generally speaking, hunger levels rise sharply, which of course promotes overeating and promotes being overweight.

Okay. The fifth tip, which is something that has helped me recently because in the past I never had any sleep issues until I had two kids and more businesses and more things. And so recently my sleep has been on and off. It’s been okay. And then I’ve. I’ve woken up too many times in the middle of the night, so the thing that has really actually helped me get my sleep back to normal is creating a relaxing pre bed routine.

And there are a number of ways you can do this. I’ll link to an article that I wrote right up here that gives you a number of evidence based ways to relax at night. For example, many pre sleep routines include stuff like taking a hot bath, reading a book, listening to calming music, doing breathing exercises, stretching, and so forth.

For me, it’s mainly reading and listening to calming music. I like that. It helps me relax and it also helps me get sleepy. And that’s an important point because ideally you go to bed sleepy where your eyes are closing. Not just relaxed and you can fall asleep if you lay in bed for a little bit. But ideally, you’re sleepy, you lay in bed, and you fall asleep very quickly.

Okay, so the next tip is to think dark, quiet, and cool, because those are powerful cues for the brain to put the body to sleep. Now, by dark, dark in your room. Pitch black, actually, because studies show that even low levels of artificial light in your room when you are trying to sleep can interrupt your sleep.

And by quiet, I mean keeping your room as free of noise as possible because when you’re sleeping, your brain is processing the sounds in your environment on a very basic level. And while these sounds may not wake you up, they can negatively impact your sleep stages and they can increase your blood pressure.

They can increase your heart rate. And so what can happen is You can actually stay asleep for the entire night, but because of your sleep cycles getting messed up by noises in your environment, you can wake up feeling not very rested. Now, if you can’t do that, because let’s say you live in a big city and there are always noises going on all around you, then you should get an app or you can get a little standalone machine that will play Soothing white noise to drown out all the random noise that can disrupt your sleep.

Okay. So the final tip here is to look into supplementation. Now I saved this for last because it is the least important and you should really be looking to address lifestyle factors before supplements. Not that supplements are dangerous, but it’s just, if you have lifestyle things that need to be addressed.

Unfortunately, you can’t supplement your way through them. The supplements aren’t that powerful. They’re not NyQuil. So if you have addressed all of the lifestyle things that you can and you want even better sleep, or if your sleep is not quite where you want it to be yet, then it does make sense to look to supplementation.

Now, there are a lot of supplements out there that are billed as natural sleep aids. And unfortunately, many of them either Don’t work or come with too high of a risk of unwanted side effects. And so I’m going to share with you a few of my favorite sleep supplements that are not only proven to work and be safe, but also have essentially no side effects, very low risk of any side effects whatsoever.

So the first one is glycine, which is an amino acid and it’s a neurotransmitter that’s found mainly in foods that contain gelatin like meat and various types of seafood. A glycine is pretty cool as far as sleep goes because research shows that it can reduce the amount of time that it takes to fall asleep.

It can improve your overall sleep quality. It can also reduce the feelings of fatigue that is caused by impaired sleep. So if you don’t sleep enough, glycine can help you not feel it as much. And lastly, it also can improve cognitive performance when sleep is impaired. So again, if you don’t get enough sleep, you can do a bit better with glycine.

The clinically effective dosage is very simple. It’s just three grams. So three grams about an hour before you go to bed, good to go. So the next supplement is one we’ve all heard of, which is melatonin. Again, that’s a hormone produced by the brain that regulates sleep. And it’s also found in small amounts in various foods like tomato, walnuts, strawberries, and olive oil.

Now, studies show that melatonin can reduce the time that it takes to fall asleep. It can improve sleep quality, especially in people who have insomnia, and it also can reduce symptoms of jet lag and improve memory encoding. Now, as far as dosing goes, the clinically effective dosage ranges between 500 micrograms and five milligrams.

And something that you should know about melatonin is that the benefits are not dose. Dependent, which means that taking more is not going to help you sleep better than less. And what this also means is that if your body doesn’t respond well to a small dose, like 500 micrograms, then it’s unlikely to respond well to a larger dose, like five milligrams.

That larger dose is unlikely to help your sleep quality and actually unfortunately just increases your chances of experiencing unwanted side effects like grogginess. Okay. So my next favorite sleep supplement is lemon balm extract. Now lemon balm is an herb that has been used medicinally since the ancient Greek times, for thousands of years now to relieve anxiety and agitation and promote better sleep.

And so it’s no surprise that studies show that lemon balm extract can improve sleep quality. It can reduce feelings of anxiety and stress and induce feelings of calmness. It can also improve memory and it can reduce symptoms of anxiety related insomnia. Now, if you want to try those supplements, you can go buy them separately and individually, of course, or you can check out my sleep supplement, which contains clinically effective dosages of each, along with a cool little molecule called rudacarpine, which can negate the effects of caffeine and caffeine stays in our system for a long time.

A lot of people don’t realize that by the time they’re going to bed, they still have some caffeine in their system and that it can also interrupt. They’re asleep. Rudacarpine can cancel it out. And so this supplement of mine is called lunar. And if you want to learn more about it, just head over to legionathletics.

com slash lunar. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, If you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that’s it.

Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me, seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100 percent natural pre workout fat burner supplement forge.

Now it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fasted state and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach. Minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state, and maintain intensity and focus in your workouts. All that is why Forge has over 400 reviews on Amazon with a 4 star average, and another 220 on my website with a 4.

5 star average. So if you want to get leaner faster, and especially in the quote, unquote, hard to lose spots like the hips, thighs, and belly, then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of forge today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps. Use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you’ll save 10 percent on your entire order.

And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now. Place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.