How sleep deprivation can affect work performance during COVID 19

Unknown speaker

Hi guys, and welcome to our webinar today. We’re going to be going deep on sleep, and we’re going to have a focus on how the current situation of the coronavirus, the quarantine, is affecting our sleep.

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We’re seeing lots of information, but anecdotal and research-based, that’s giving us this information. So if you’re asleep as in any way being disruptive, this is the webinar for you. And we’re also going to be just going through general tips and tricks about how to get quality sleep.

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So yeah, stick around for the tips towards the end. So yeah, if you haven’t seen my face around before, my name is John Paul. Most people know me as JP, much easier. I come from a high performance sports background in a professional setting.

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And I looked at nutrition, sports science, and sleep with a lot of athletes. And I took that information around sleep over to the corporate setting as well as the other areas. And it’s one area that I see straight away in terms of just regular people on the street.

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And we see that that sleep is probably not looked at with the same intensity as things like diet and exercise, which for me is a mistake. I think sleep is really the foundation of your health. And it’s very difficult to build that on top of that foundation in regards to things like quality mindfulness practices, your mental well-being, your diet, or your physical exercise routine, if you’re not getting good quality sleep in the first place.

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So what we’re seeing at the moment is is sleep. There’s a lot of sleep deterioration for a lot of people, which is interesting, because it seems like we have more time to sleep in the current situation.

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So we’re going to get into that. So here’s my agenda for today. I’m going to give you a quick introduction into how sleep works. We’re going to go into what happens during sleep and what’s going on the brain, what’s going on physically.

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We’re going to look at how sleep affects us for better or for worse in regards to not getting enough. We’re getting the right amounts and we’re going to look at some of the research there and digest it for you guys.

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We’re going to look at the be cautious about our lifestyle, how we can we can manipulate that for the better or for the worse. Finally, we’re going to get into sleep rituals. We’re going to see how we can set up a nice ritual for the evening that’s nice and consistent that you can implement every day going forward.

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So if you haven’t done already, pause, get yourself a cup of tea, sit back, get a little notepad and a pen and to take some notes and relax and enjoy. So here we go. So we’re going to start and jump straight into sleep cycles.

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What happens when we fall asleep? What are the major cycles of sleep? What are they doing? So there’s two different major types. One of them most people have heard of. The other not many people have heard of.

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So we have REM sleep, which lots of people have heard of, and NREM sleep, or NREM. So REM sleep is for our active sleep, our dream stage, our neurological repair. And we get the removal of any waste products that are building up today, which we’re going to talk about a little bit more in a couple of slides.

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Our NREM sleep, our NREM, is our physical restoration sleep. So the restoration of our muscles, of our joints, of our digestive system. So both these types of sleep are really important. If we don’t get enough REM sleep, mentally, we’re just not going to be there.

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And if we don’t get enough NREM sleep, we are just not going to be able to physically deal with today, not going to be able to exercise, not going to be able to digest foods that well. So we need to get both.

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And on any given night, we will kind of drop between the two over the course of the night, hopefully. So usually what we will, let’s describe what we have in front of you guys. We have some sleep architecture, a sleep skyline.

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It looks like buildings kind of looking across the horizon. And along the horizontal axis, we have the amount of hours of sleep. So we have 0 to 8 for this individual. And then along the vertical axis, we have the different stages of sleep.

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And then the two major stages are dictated inside by color. So we have the bright red as our REM sleep. And then in the lower portion of the chart, we have our NREM sleep. And the deepening stages, it looks like a staircase downwards.

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when we fall asleep, our body has a nice decision to make. What kind of sleep does this person need? And what most people’s body does is it goes into NREM sleep first. It decides let’s physically restore this person, let’s get their muscles, digestive system back in some sort of order, and then we’ll move into the neurological repair.

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So it drops into the deepening stages, it comes back out, and then we get a small block at that dream state, and then it drops back down again. So as you can see, almost a night can be cut into two slices.

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So the first portion of the night, it’s more physical repair, and the second portion of the night, the REM blocks get bigger and bigger, and it’s more neurological repair. So something easy to then understand is if we don’t get enough sleep, if you only got five or six hours sleep, what you’re missing out on mostly is that REM sleep, that neurological repair.

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what that might be correlated to the next day is you not being able to process information, memorize things. Your partner might say, hey, make sure you pick up some milk when you’re going to Tesco and then you come back in the door.

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They say, did you get the milk? Can you say, sorry, forgot. And these sort of things, they just keep happening. And that’s often because you’re just in a little bit of sleep debt and we’re going to get into sleep debt.

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So sleep debt, just like financial debt, is the amount of sleep you should be getting minus the amount of sleep you’re actually getting. And that will equal your sleep debt. So if you need eight and you only got six, then you’re in debt of two hours for that night.

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And that’s okay. We can deal with that. But what about if we do that for a week? Well, then you’re in debt of two hours for seven days. Matt’s 14 hours. And that’s when we start to run into bigger problems.

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And if you’re just not a great sleeper, you’re not sleeping that much for long periods, times, months, years, things like that, then we got to see bigger problems. So we thought there’s a difference between acute, small, single, nice sleep debt and chronic.

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So with chronic, what we’re starting to see more is correlations between cardiovascular disease, increased chances of things like heart attacks. And then what’s becoming more apparent is neurological diseases when we talk about chronic sleep debt.

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So across the night, I bought our brain as a special function, an important function to remove any waste products that are built up throughout the day. So right now, while you’re looking at me, there’s a there’s a waste product building up in the brain.

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And this is called beta two amyloid. And this builds up across today but fortunately our brain is able to almost turn on a tap when we’re asleep and remove some of that waste product with the idea that there’s no build-up over time but if you’re not giving your brain enough of a chance every night to do that then we start to see a build-up and that build-up is correlated to increased incidences of things like Alzheimer’s disease so that brings us into the current situation what’s happening right now so we first need to we were getting this individual information back from people saying hey my sleep’s disrupted we’re getting I’m getting strange dreams you know is that normal at the moment why is that suddenly happening and during the current situation and there’s reasons why.

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But firstly, we needed to see if this is happening to a lot of people. So a recent poll was released of 2,000 people. Firstly, they said there was a 53% increase in vivid dreams since the quarantine began.

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So 53% of that 2,000 people mentioned that. Of those vivid dreams, 21% of the audience have seen an increase in nightmares and with at least one in the last week. And then 45% of the audience had noticed a small difference in their sleep for the worse.

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So not only that it was changing and evolving, but it was getting worse. So some interesting stuff coming out. So what’s going on there is because, remember, in REM sleep, we’re dealing with some of that neurological load that was happening the day before, be it needing to remember things or needing to process things.

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So what’s going on now is people are remembering more of their dreams. And what we’re seeing is more of us are taking on some of the stresses that are happening during the day. So they’re taking these upsetting dreams and nightmares and content from their working days because of the excess stress that we have during the current time.

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And that’s being processed during dream time. So yeah, it’s a complex enough one. If your lifestyle, anything going on at home and say you’re working from home, you’ve got kids, you’re worrying about school, when it’s opening, you’re worrying about all these different health concerns or financial concerns.

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The way we process a lot of that strain is during dream time. So if there’s an increased amount of anxiety and stress, then we’re going to see an increased amount of vivid nightmares. Mary’s vivid dreams, because dreams, that REM sleep is an important time to process that information, to deal with it, okay?

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So that’s what’s going on there. We’re getting, we’re getting, our brain has more of a load and more of a need to process that. From the NREM perspective, we see this all the time. So if you, say you ran a 10K today at lunch, a 10 kilometer run, tonight when you fall asleep, your body will be like, okay, there’s a lot of damage done to this person physically.

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They’ve got a lot of repair that needs to be done. And if we were to analyze their sleep on that particular night, you would see a lot of NREM physical restoration in that block of sleep. But we often don’t think of that when we’re looking at anxiety and stress.

Unknown speaker

So what’s going on now is, instead of exercise causing the excess and stress, we’re seeing a lot of just general neurological stress, financial stress and we’re seeing this stress, health concerns, health anxieties, all sorts of things and this build up over the day has to be processed and that’s being processed during REM sleep and that’s what’s going on there and if that’s very intense sometimes I can even disrupt your sleep.

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We all know the feeling of suddenly waking up because of a very vivid dream or nightmare and we’re seeing that disruption. So that’s some of the basics of what’s going on at the current time. Obviously there needs to be more research into individual cases but we’re going to hopefully get into how you can combat one or two of these things around that towards the end.

Unknown speaker

So yeah, just returning back to the general numbers in Ireland, we know that Ireland reports about 34% of the population being sleep deprived so just on an overall sense even before you know we get all this excess stress we’re not getting enough sleep and even with young people in the UK 44% of adults in the UK say they were too tired to even work out and women saying that they’re more affected than men,

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52% of females saying they felt too tired to go to the gym. So we’re seeing that even before we put excess stress on ourselves we’re already not getting enough sleep so that’s just a recipe for disaster.

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So let’s get into how sleep works. How do we feel sleepy? How do we wake up? What’s going on there? So the main thing to consider here is your circadian rhythm. So our circadian zones are internal body clock so we all you know have an understanding about clocks and time you know if it’s midday, if it’s three o’clock, if it’s first thing and warning, we can just check the time and we know.

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But our body also needs to have an understanding about what time of day it is because it needs to be able to release hormones and signals to us to make ourselves feel awake, make ourselves feel sleepy, make ourselves be able to process information, food, all these different things across the day.

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And unfortunately, it doesn’t have a, you know, a Casio strapped to its brain, it doesn’t, it can’t just read the time, it has to get some kind of information from around us to get that information. So get that data.

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So the way it does it is through a few ways, but the most important ways is through sunlight and through temperature. So when life doesn’t actually have to be sunlight, but sunlight is the main way, when life hits our eyes, it’s telling our bodies, okay, it’s not nighttime anymore, it’s not sleeping time, it’s time to be active, time to kind of be able to process information, time to move, hunt, get food,

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all these things that have always been important to humans. Also temperature, when the temperature starts increasing, we know that the sun’s up, it’s time to do things, and then when the temperature starts to drop in the evening, then it’s time to sleep and get tired.

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And the main way these are dictated is through two hormones. So we have our melatonin, which a lot of people have heard of, it’s our sleep hormone, it’s a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, and it’s secreted, sorry, it’s suppressed by life.

Unknown speaker

And so if you need to fall asleep, what’s an easy way of preventing yourself from falling asleep? Turn on all the lights, you know, because that’s going to suppress our meltdown, but we know that we don’t sleep with the lights on, well most of us don’t for that reason.

Unknown speaker

So cortisol is our other one. So cortisol is an essential steroid hormone, and that’s secreted by an adrenal gland. And it’s important for our metabolism, the metabolism of, I’m sorry, metabolism of nutrients, so how we deal with food coming in, and the storage of memories.

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So it’s important that we have that balance between the two, we don’t want one to be high, and the other one to be high, because that kind of, that’s, that’s counteracting each other, we want to be able to go one up, one down.

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So here’s a simple, oversimplified, but simple, and picture of the two. So during the day, our cortisol rises up. So right now, hopefully, and your cortisol is, is high, not too high if when we’re stressed, and there’s something very stressful going on, gets elevated past where we really want it to be, and that’s an issue.

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But we do want to elevate right today, so we don’t feel sleepy, and we’re able to digest foods to to process information. And right now, if you’re watching this during the day, your melatonin is probably quite low, and that means that you’re not asleep on your keyboard.

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Hopefully not yet, anyway. And then as the sun starts to set and your environment starts to darken, then your melatonin will start to rise. And that’s going to help you feel a little bit sleepier. Your cortisol is going to start to drop as well.

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And that crossing between the two, with the cortisol coming down the melatonin, nope, is going to dictate you falling asleep. But we’re easily able to mess that whole situation up. And if light helps it, light can also hinder it.

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So the first way you can mess it up is through brightness. So night at light, night at light, light at night is something that has been shown in a lot of academic research to induce sleep disturbances.

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and it impairs that melatonin secretion and what we see is five, the light that is five looks, so looks is how you measure brightness. Five looks is about a candle held about two feet away, so I’m about two feet away from my camera here.

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If I was holding a candle that’s about two looks, I’m not that bright, but when we see someone sleeping under those conditions we see a 63% increased chance of self-reported depressive symptoms. It’s also the half, the brightness of something like a city light, so if you’re sleeping under city lights outside and it’s penetrating through your windows because your curtains aren’t grayed or whatever,

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that’s going to have an influence and it doesn’t have to be even through the eyes. There’s a decent amount of research showing that even lasers pointed behind your knee at the back of your knee can have an influence on your hormone secretion at night, so that’s number one thing, to understand that light has a huge influence on our circadian rhythm.

Unknown speaker

So what’s going on there? It’s important to, once we understand this, to be able to manipulate this, so getting bright light in the morning really sets our day off, so let us set that rhythm off nice and early and having darkness in the evening really helps it, you know, that you relax and go to bed, because if you’re using your phone in bed, if you’re using your laptop, if you’re taking yourself to sleep with Netflix in bed or you’re shopping on ASOS or you’re scrolling on Instagram,

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you’re suppressing that melatonin, you’re promoting your cortisol, and we’re going to see just a range of negative health outcomes if this is happening all the time. What’s interesting and probably relevant to the current situation, when we have that lack of social connection, there’s decent research looking at high school students that thousand high school students over in the States.

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And they showed that each hour of law sleep was associated with a 38% increase of feeling sad or hopelessness and a 58% increase in suicidal attempts. So we see that it’s having an effect. We’re losing that REM sleep and that’s having an effect and that’s that’s correlating itself in these negative feelings like sadness and hopelessness.

Unknown speaker

And it doesn’t have to be just these kind of neurological effects. We also see it on our our physical system. So what’s interesting is that you can look at people of the same age but you can compare them via groups if they’re in a group that sleeps for seven hours or if they’re a group that sleeps less than five hours.

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So people that aren’t getting good sleep and we can analyze how their heart’s looking. So we have our chronological age if you’re 30, if you’re 40, if you’re 50, but your heart can age at different rates.

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You know, if you’re putting a lot of unhealthy stress, if you’re smoking, if you’re drinking too much alcohol, if you’re not exercising, if, you know, you have chronic stress across the day, your heart is taking a toll and they’re showing that they can be excess heart age for people that aren’t sleeping enough.

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And then we see that when they’re in groups of people that are sleeping less than five hours, they can have an excess heart age of 10 years they’re senior compared to people that are sleeping seven hours.

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So they can be at the same age, but their heart rate, 25% of them, in fact, have a heart rate 10 years they’re senior. So I want to get into some of the benefits of sleep because it can all be a bit of scary, but you see, you can imagine, easy peasy, if these are negatives happening when you’re not getting enough sleep, the positives are amazing.

Unknown speaker

So you’re able to handle more stress if you’re getting good quality sleep and your immunity is much better. It’s very interesting for the time as well. Now this wasn’t done on immunity of COVID or anything like that.

Unknown speaker

So I want to make that clear. But there was a research paper called sleep habits and the susceptibility to common cold. So what they did is they looked at 153 participants. They looked at them for two weeks.

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They used the common cold, the rhinovirus in their nose, they use a dropper and they gave them a dose of the cold. And then they measured their sleep and they showed that people that were getting less than seven hours sleep were three times more likely to have clinical symptoms of the cold versus people that were getting eight hours sleep.

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So think about that this way, like if you were to lose an hour of sleep tonight, wake up an hour early and not get one hour, you’re in sleep out of one hour, and you’re exposed to the cold, you’re going to be three times more likely to get symptoms of that compared to, you know, your cell.

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getting eight hours. So that’s how strong of a potent thing it can be on your system. So let’s get into the tips and tricks and how we can kind of manipulate it for the better. So firstly, you got to take ownership of it.

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Just like I talked about at the start, you know, we often take ownership of our exercise routines, we plan that on paper, we call up PTs, all these sort of things, or our nutrition, we get diets, we’re super strict.

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We never, well, we were rarely take that much ownership of our sleep, we just kind of let it happen. It’s important to plan it, you know, be aggressive in your planning. I’m saying, okay, just one thing I’m not gonna fall on is my sleep quality.

Unknown speaker

So really set it in stone. This is something that should be important to all of us. Let’s get good quality sleep and it’s your and my objective and my responsibility to do it for myself. No one’s gonna get myself into bed and get good sleep and for you.

Unknown speaker

So let’s create a good routine. So firstly, which is, I suppose, relevant to the current situation, is, you know, we’re often working from home at the moment. And I think this is going to be something that’s going to be happening for, you know, the next couple of years, we’re going to see an increase in the amount of people working from home just to separate work life from home life.

Unknown speaker

And it can be extremely difficult to suddenly turn off after a day of hard work and feel like you can leave your work where it is. So a very good tip that I was given a couple of years ago by a psychotherapist that works with our company said at the end of the day, get yourself a sticky note and just leave the things that you think you’re going to be processing after you close your computer laptop for the day,

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and just write them down and just return them back, return yourself back to them in the morning when you’re back at work. So that might be, you know, and finishing off a task might be emailing these three people, it might be, you know, and creating this document that you need to create, you know, when you’re finished your day, you should be finished your day, if you’re not doing your work, there’s no point really stressing too much about it.

Unknown speaker

So write it down on a sticky, leave it on your screen, close your laptop, it’s done, you know, the next day is the next day, you know, you’re done for the day. Then in regard to just overall processing of stressful information, you know, health anxiety, financial situations, things like that, it can be sometimes a good idea to, as I said with the yellow sticky note, do something like keeping a journal,

Unknown speaker

and then probably the best timing will be about two hours before going to sleep. So for most people, that’s around half eight, sometimes nine o’clock for people, just write down some of your worries, and any kind of information you need to kind of next steps to kind of process that, you know, or why or why that might might not be a worry or just processing some information that you have in your head so you can deal with it before you start winding down for the day.

Unknown speaker

So next thing is light. So we know and we’ve talked about how light has a big influence on us. And there’s a specific type of light that’s being emitted by technology that has a big influence on us. And it’s blue light.

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So blue light really has that melatonin suppressing factor in it. And it can be prevented if you just set your technology onto night mode. And that’s going to prevent some of that blue light being emitted.

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So that’s an important factor. Also, what we can do with our technology is just reduce the brightness. Sometimes we always have it set on the highest brightness, and that’s going to have an effect. And just generally around the house, try to reduce the brightness.

Unknown speaker

All the lights don’t need to be on. And really, just trying to slowly move yourself away from technology as nighttime comes in. So as we start to move into the bedroom, it’s really important to make the changes there with regards to technology.

Unknown speaker

So we need to keep technology away from reach of our bed. A lot of people charge their phone probably a foot away from their head, which is not good because you end up using your phone just before bed.

Unknown speaker

So I would say charge your phone somewhere else, keep your phone somewhere else in the evening at nighttime, pull that charger away from your bed straight away, put it somewhere else. Use a basic alarm, use an alarm on your wristwatch and buy a cheap one on Amazon, grab that old Casio you’ve got sitting up in the press and use that as your alarm.

Unknown speaker

There’s no really need to use technology in bed, you know, it’s a bad idea and it’s a bad habit that should be broken. Reduce that brightness in the room, it’s really important. We need to control the temperature.

Unknown speaker

Just as I said, our body doesn’t do good when the room is too warm, you know. The core temperature that we have now, we won’t be able to sleep with this core temperature if we were to get in the bed.

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Our body needs to dump heat to fall asleep. So if your room is too warm and you had the central heating on or you know, you’ve got large windows in your house during the summer and they’re kind of turning your rooms and different servitories, that’s going to have a big impact on your ability to fall asleep.

Unknown speaker

So trying to get those places cool, around 18 degrees can be really good to fall asleep in. So just making sure the environment is nice and cool, nice and cold, that can really help. So if you don’t know the temperature in your room, you can get like a temperature and humidity monitor from Amazon for cheap and they can be a great investment.

Unknown speaker

And just in general, thinking about falling asleep, it’s important not to just be going 100 miles an hour and then just suddenly stop and I think you can fall asleep. Like think of it as a car, your body’s like a car.

Unknown speaker

If you’re driving, on the N11, the N50, your motorway or whatever it is and you’re driving 120 kilometers an hour you can’t just suddenly pull on the brakes and the handbrake and you know parallel park you know you need to slow it down drop down the gears reverse it back it back into the parking spot nice and gently and sleeping is very similar you can’t just be using all this technology and exposing yourself to all this light energy temperature all these things and then just expect to be able to fall asleep we need to back it in just like the car we need to turn off the technology dim down the lights give ourselves a nice long lead in and that’s going to help us fall asleep much easier so setting up the bedroom blackout curtains eliminate a lot of that life we need good quality mattresses making sure you’re nice and comfortable and if you’re living in a room or in a house or an apartment that can get quite humid,

Unknown speaker

especially in the winter because of, you know, it might just be a little bit of an older house. You might see some mildew on the windows and things like that. Then humidity is probably very high and we often don’t sleep in really high humidity amounts.

Unknown speaker

So at 30 to 50% can be really good. So air filter and plants can be a good one or an air purifier. Dublin breaks the world, health organizations, air quality standards, one in every four days. So we need to know that our air is good when we’re breathing, when we’re sleeping, or else we often don’t breathe deeply and be able to get into that good sleep.

Unknown speaker

So I’ve got the plant recommendation here for you. It’s the Mudder and Laws Tongue. That’s what the nickname for this plant is. It’s got long slender, tough leaves. It can be bought in any little, you know, DIY store, even supermarkets often have them.

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And they’ve got great air purifying values to them. Camelot tea can help block some of the neurological responses to anxiety, things like that. So it can be really effective, especially during the current climate and time.

Unknown speaker

And those Himalayan salt lamps can be excellent for limiting the amount of light that’s kind of you’re being exposed if you’re reading beside your bed instead of having a big bright bulb. And then blackout, eye masks can be a great way of limiting the amount of light eyes are being exposed to.

Unknown speaker

So I wanted to jump to caffeine and alcohol, which is often a very frequently asked question. How does caffeine affect me? How does alcohol affect me? So we know that caffeine is a stimulant and it’s a stimulant that depending on the person can last in the body for a long period of time.

Unknown speaker

Now there’s a bit of individual diversity here, but for a lot of people, we see that it has a half life, about six hours. So how that works is if you get a regular cup of coffee, might have a. 120 milligrams of caffeine in it.

Unknown speaker

And what will happen there is if you have that, say, at midday, 12 o’clock, six hours later, at 6 p.m., half of that caffeine is being processed, half it’s still in the system. By about eight hours, we start to see the full amount being fully processed.

Unknown speaker

So that’s fine, eight o’clock, not too bad. But if we were to have it at three o’clock, then it takes till 6 p.m., sorry, 9 p.m. before we see all that caffeine being processed. And it won’t be till about 11 o’clock by the time we fully processed it.

Unknown speaker

And a lot of people say to me, hey, that’s not me. I can drink a cup of coffee before going to bed, and it has no impact on me. But what happens is when we sleep with that caffeine in the system, we don’t get good quality sleep.

Unknown speaker

Our sleep is very suppressed in terms of our deep sleep. We wake up feeling tired, low in energy, and what do we reach for? Well, we reach for another cup of coffee, we start that cycle, more coffee, more coffee, more coffee, poor sleep, poor sleep, poor sleep, more coffee, more coffee, and it’s hard to get out of the loop.

Unknown speaker

So be careful in your timing of your coffee consumption. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a sedative. It literally knocks the brain out. It’s like someone getting a frying pan and just knocking you in the head and then pushing you into the bed.

Unknown speaker

It doesn’t like, it’s not like an actual night cap, you know, where you have a little bit of wine or whiskey or something before you go to bed and you’re able to fall asleep quite easily. And it’s quite an intense, quite an intense way to drop yourself to sleep.

Unknown speaker

And what we see is increased waking over the course of the night. And what we also see is really poor quality sleep. You feel exhausted in the morning. And so alcohol has an effect on your sleep. And a lot of people ask me, what about just a glass of wine?

Unknown speaker

You know, I can drink a glass of wine every night, I have no issue. It will have an effect on your sleep. So to understand that is important and possibly I’m not telling you guys not to be drinking any alcohol, but I am telling you alcohol has been shown to have a significant effect on your sleep and to be cautious and knowledgeable upon that bit of information.

Unknown speaker

So some tips. If you have had too much caffeine, vitamin C helps process it quick and then get it out of the system. So if you want an espresso after your dinner when you’re on holidays or something like that, no problem.

Unknown speaker

And maybe a bit of vitamin C there will help it get out of the system. Exercise is a great way of reinforcing your circadian rhythm. So if you can get exercise during the day, great. Exercising too late at night is not the best idea.

Unknown speaker

That’s often the frequently asked question, I guess. Because when we exercise, we start to promote cortisol. It’s a stress hormone. We’re lifting weights, we’re running. We’re stressed in that environment.

Unknown speaker

And it takes a while to shut that back down. making sure you’re not exercising too deep into the evening, you know, after eight or so, it’s probably not the best if you’re trying to get better than normal air.

Unknown speaker

Cardamom seeds, we have cardamom pods here and inside there’s little black seeds. They help desensitize the central nervous system. So if you had a really kind of high intensity day in work and you just feel, oh, I need a holiday sort of thing, you just feel fried and you just feel one of like, you know, soak into the couch and just watching Netflix all night, you just need to decompress.

Unknown speaker

Chewing on a few cardamom seeds has been shown as a good way of desensitizing the central nervous system and really, you know, help and relax you a little bit. I have a lamp there as the next one, but what can be great here is the bulbs that you use and especially around your bedroom.

Unknown speaker

You can get different intensity, you know, if you’ve got Amazon and look for bulbs, like you can get really bright white ones or you can get warmer ones and the warmer ones are gonna have less effect.

Unknown speaker

on your release of hormones. You can even get light spectrum changing ones that change as the evening goes on. And that can go from bright white to like warm orange. And then finally, yeah, chamomile tea and something that has no caffeine and can be a great option.

Unknown speaker

So yeah, I finally wanna jump into the healthy sleep timeline for a lot of you guys. So at eight o’clock, we were thinking about brightness. We’re thinking about blue light reduction and that’s gonna help suppress some of all that cortisol that we’ve produced of course today and we’ll have high levels where they’re at.

Unknown speaker

For the current situation, a little bit of journaling might be a great opportunity. That might be a great opportunity to do a little bit of journaling if there’s anything on your mind. So at nine o’clock, we’re trying to limit the tech usage altogether, thinking about doing something like a digital detox where okay, no more phones after nine.

Unknown speaker

I’m gonna do stuff like I’m gonna iron some clothes, I’m going to read a book, I’m going to prep some food for the next day, these sort of things, which we aren’t so focused on you being excited by technology.

Unknown speaker

Getting into bed after good amounts at a good time is also important. We get better quality sleep before we’re staying in the natural cycle of the sun rising and falling. So if you can get to bed at a good hour, that’s an important factor for good quality sleep.

Unknown speaker

And then giving yourself an opportunity to get good amounts of sleep. So making sure you can get seven to nine hours every night. If you’re not giving yourself that opportunity, you’re never gonna get good sleep.

Unknown speaker

So making sure you do the maths. Okay, I gotta start work at seven or I gotta wake up at seven. Well, then what time do I need to get to bed so I can get good quality sleep for that night? So taking all those five.

Unknown speaker

factors into consideration, thinking about some of the tips I gave you, hopefully there’s one or two things in there that you can take forward and sometimes that information is fresh in your head now and it won’t be tonight so scribble down one or two of those things and try to implement them straight away and I promise you sleep is really the foundation of your health and once you can get that solidified and it’s nice and solid,

Unknown speaker

everything else in terms of well-being becomes a lot easier. So yeah, I wish you guys a really good night’s sleep tonight and going forward and yeah, I wish you the best of health over this challenging period that we’re in at the moment.

Unknown speaker

So thank you guys and I’ll see you on my next webinar. Goodbye.