How To Sleep Better And Improve Your Routine

Here I am, back with another blog to help give you all some tips and tricks on how to improve your life’s organisation through good planning of your next day, making the right preparations the night before to kick off the next day and level up your sleep to make sure you get better and deeper sleep at night.

This blog will cover the following topics to help you:

The benefits of getting a healthy amount of sleep
How I go about planning my next day through the use of a diary
The Art of Sleep Hygiene and how to improve yours to help you get the sleep you need

I feel this one is a great blog when matched with the one that I did about cutting out caffeine from your life. These two together will definitely take your life to the next level from what I’ve experienced myself.

Benefits of good sleep

There are many, many benefits to having good sleep that you feel that knowing them would be standard however, these benefits are often overlooked and once we start to lose our good quality sleep, we start to see issues crop up but don’t naturally put it down to sleep.

Don’t worry though, I’ve got your back and will give a list of some of the biggest and most common benefits of getting that good quality sleep in:

Better mental performance – How many times have you woken up feeling groggy, heavy headed and struggling to function correctly? This is because you’ve not got enough sleep and it’s affecting your mental performance. Most will do this on a recurring basis and end up finding that this is the norm, trying to force themselves to up their game with caffeine. But if you break the norm that you’ve set, you’ll suddenly find this new lease of vitality and next level of thinking and mental capacity that will most probably astound you!
Recovery – You time for shut eye is your time for you body to down regulate, and rest and recuperate. If you’re not getting enough sleep, your body doesn’t have the chance to fully recover physically and you’re more likely to be affected by this the next day. It also helps with mental recovery, helping you to lock in those memories gained from the day before and anything you’ve learned
Appetite and potentially weight loss – Poor sleep increases your body’s craving for food due to hormonal imbalances. This though causes you to crave higher calorie foods (for me, I always notice sugary stuff is what I want) which isn’t going to help any weight loss ambitions or wanting to live a healthier lifestyle overall.
Immune system – This is always a key one. That lack of recovery talked about before and you’re not having well regulated hormones is going to cause your immune system to be compromised, putting you more at risk of getting ill or feeling the effects of any illness you pick up.
Mood – I feel this is an of all the other factors listed above slowly grinding you down but when you add in the fact that you’re not allowing your body to reset and recover, your hormones are going to be out of balance and this going to really affect your mood. for example, getting into a repeated sleep schedule will take you up to 6 levels on the Hamilton scale for depression, which is at least 10% improvement.

The Art of Sleep Hygiene

This is something that many people get wrong when they go to sleep, or try to sleep anyway! What’s letting people down is what people call their “sleep hygiene”, which covers a couple of things. The first of these to talk about is the presence of blue light. To explain this, it’s time for a short and quick science lesson on blue screens and that they do in your body.

The ways to ensure this doesn’t happen is to put your screens away at least an hour before your bedtime whilst using lights that are closer to the red end of the spectrum or having a lampshade that filters the light this way. If you can’t avoid the use of devices before bed, utilising blue light blocking glasses could be a useful tool as a last resort.

The next thing that affects your sleep hygiene is caffeine and if you haven’t read my caffeine detox blog, you’ll surprised how much this can have an effect hours after consuming it. As I’m sure you’re away, caffeine is a stimulant and often used by people to stay awake for whatever reason. Well, without you realising, that afternoon coffee is probably still affecting you, your ability to sleep and your sleep quality. That’s because the half life (the time taken for half of the substance in your system to go) has a mean time of 5 hours.

That means your average cup of brewed coffee with 95mg of coffee drank at 16:00 could still leave 47.5mg in your system at 2100 when you’re heading to bed. That’s the same as having an espresso as you get into bed in pure caffeine value! To beat this, this study recommends keeping consumption at least 6 hours before you go to bed to make sure that you aren’t affecting the quality and length of your sleep.

The final thing you have to make sure that you do is down regulate yourself. What do I mean by this? This is where you slow everything down, calming your body and mind down so that you aren’t getting into bed still pumped up from all the stressors and stimulation of the day. You need time for your body to transfer from fight or flight to rest and recover, which is mainly at the hormonal level.

So how do you go about doing this? Alongside putting those screens away to let that melatonin start flowing, if you’re working on anything, you need to make sure you’re putting it away around that 1 hour before too. Once you’ve managed to organise your day in your diary (what I’ll be getting on to next), my advise for down regulating would to do one of the following, if not all of them:

Meditate – This is perfect for you to clear your mind by just concentrating on your breath, reducing those hormones in your body that are ready for action and allow those ready for sleep to come through. All that is needed for this is to find a comfy, quiet place to sit/lay, set a 5-10 minute timer and just breathe, experiencing each breath in and out. If any thought pops up, just let it be. Don’t judge yourself for being distracted, just bring yourself back to your breath.
Stretch – After sitting, training and moving around all day, I like to stretch everything off and release the tension that I’m holding across my body. This helps not only good my good in good condition but relax everything prior to getting into bed.
Journalling – Whether after meditation or on its own, this gives time to reflect on the day. It allows you to get your feelings out on paper, allow you to be fully honest with yourself on what’s going on in any and all areas of life, and lets you release anything that you have pent up from the day.
Read – I find that without fail, if I’m laying down and reading, I start drifting off! Immerse yourself in either another world to let your mind loose and release what it’s holding on to or else use it to gently introduce some ideas and open your mind with a self improvement book for you to take with you into the next day.

Organising Your Day

As part of my night routine, I make sure that in my period of down regulating before I go to sleep, I plan the next day I have ahead. A lot people can go to bed thinking about all the things that they have going on tomorrow, often stressing them out and put them in a vicious cycle of thinking of what they need to do and stressing about it -> Unable to sleep due to this -> Stress out about not being able to sleep -> stress about what they have to do the need do about the next day. I mean how many times have you gone to bed and thought one of the following:

“Oh I must remember to do this”

“I need to make sure I’m awake for X”

“Don’t forget to you said you’d email Y”
“Oh sugar, I never got back to Z”

To stop this from happening, I make sure that I get out my diary and plan everything that I have going on the next day. This gets all my appointments laid out in a clear way and helps me section off my time for certain tasks that need doing. This then gives the framework for me to plan my training and activities for my health around it.

Different people work in different way but I find that having this regimented way with life keeps me on track with what I need to achieve that day and allow me to continue hitting the targets I set myself mentally, physically and productivity wise. The caveat that I add to that is I make sure that if required, I can move the blocks that I create around to give me the needed flexibility should something crop up.

You can find an example of my basis day in the picture to the left and how I plan my day.

Standard Blocks In My Day

These are some of the standard blocks that I put into my day to ensure that I prioritise my needs throughout the day to progress my development and maintain the essential health and well being. Without this, you’re no use to yourself never mind anyone else around you. One these are in place, you’ll have a clear guide as to what time you have left to play with. Obviously, when it comes to work and activities like that, you may have to drop somethings down priorities ranking.

Morning routine – I make sure to outline my morning routine so I know what I’m doing, can hold myself to account and outline what training training I have so that I don’t deviate or tempted to do something easier.
Meals – I like to make sure that I have a strong framework for my meals, giving myself plenty of time to both prepare and eat them. They are also a great way to break up the day.
Sleep – Sounds weird but I put into my diary when I’m going to bed. It makes sure that I have a hard marker in my head as to when to wrap things up for me get to bed.
Self maintenance – By this I mean time for you to stretch, get out the massage gun, yoga, foam roller; whatever you need to ensure that you aid your body to recover and keep itself moving and grooving correctly. For me, I find this is great just before bed to undo all the harm of the day and down regulate.
Reflection time – Things that fall into this category are meditation and journalling for me but you may have another way of doing this. This time allows me to clear my mind of the chaos that usually ensues inside it and use my journal to reflect on both the day gone by, the next one coming up and stay connected with where I am as a person.

Once these have gone in, any meetings or activities that I have for work go in here and the rest is left open to insert anything new and a “to do” list of things that can fit in anywhere available. I find this works for me but maybe another technique may work for you. Take some time to play around with what works for you, pay attention to what feels right and wrong, and make sure you implement the right stuff.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this blog and I really hope that you managed to take something from it to improve your lifestyle and help you start leading a healthier one. Be sure to share this with your friends and family if you found the message useful and feel that would benefit from it and together, we can come together to be a healthier race.

Of course, don’t be afraid to stick around and check out some of the other blogs that I’ve published, which should be recommended around the page or you’ll find more under the category drop downs found at the top. The other thing to do would be make sure you jump over to the social media links found below and make sure to follow more across the different streams, meaning you’ll be one of the first to hear about my blog announcements!