The Importance of Sleep: Building the habit of quality sleep

Unknown speaker

Hi, everybody, and welcome to our very short, very practical webinar on sleep and recovery. Now, if you’re just watching 30 seconds of this, hold up. I’m not going to talk about just traditional, you know, don’t use your phone.

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I want to give you guys a really nice practical way of looking about sleep and recovery, and how you can balance it in your life a little bit better. So give me a couple minutes, and I think you’re going to really enjoy it.

Unknown speaker

Firstly, my name is JP, or John Paul. I’m a health coach and content strategist at Zevo Health. And yeah, I don’t want to waste too much of your time, so let’s get straight into it. So firstly, I have this nice little animation of a glass.

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So I like to think of stress on your system, total stress, as kind of like water going into a glass. So if you imagine a glass in your kitchen, imagine the stresses of your day, things like deadlines and work, things like arguing with your partner, things like unexpected bills, even things like physical activity, gardening, doing some DIY.

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All of these are stresses on the system. We can handle a little bit of a bunch of them. But if we start having too much of them, and it’s a really just stressful day, our cup, which is kind of like our tolerance of stress, will get filled up, and eventually we’ll start to overflow into symptoms and issues and concerns and problems.

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Okay, does that make sense? Hopefully it does. So what can we do? Well, a little bit of overflow is not the end of the world. A stressful day here or there isn’t going to kill you. It’s almost like we have almost like a little bit of a deal.

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drift tray, you like you see in the pubs where they give you a pint and put it on a little bit trips off and it’s all okay because we have a drift tray. And if you have a bad night’s sleep, and you have a stressful day the next day, you can kind of get through it in a couple days, you’ll, you’ll get some better sleep and life kind of balances itself out.

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So it’s really important that, you know, we understand we can deal with a little bit, but too much and it becomes an issue. Now, what dictates the size of our glass? Well, it’s really two things. It’s really our nutrition and our sleep.

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So when we’re especially asleep, now when we’re getting good quality sleep, consistently, then we have a nice big block, okay, where we can kind of deal with lots of that water or stress if we don’t get, you know, flooded.

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But when we don’t get much good sleep, and we’re eating crap, and we’re eating processed foods, then our glass becomes more like a shot glass, you know, we’re pouring all this water on top of it. And it’s, we’re just, we can’t deal with it.

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And we know that we got a week of bad sleep. And you try to, you know, exercise really well, you know, deal with family commitments, and then on work, and all these things are happening to you, and you’re just gonna burn yourself out.

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And that’s what happens to all of us. So we really have to be careful there. And if we’re not, and we start overflowing, and it falls into the drip train, then our kind of emergency drip tray starts to overflow.

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That’s when we run into big issues, things like metabolic issues, cardiovascular disease, and heart attacks, obesity, diabetes, even neurological issues, and can start to jump in like Alzheimer’s and things like that are correlated to chronically poor sleep.

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So what should we be thinking about? Well, I want you to have a look at these kind of symptoms of under recovery, or essentially too much water coming out. Now, the first one is actually quite interesting, because it’s, it’s the saviour as well as the symptom.

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So trouble sleeping, if you’re having trouble sleeping, it sometimes means that, you know, you’re, you’re chronically fatigued and kind of burnt out. We see this with athletes all the time, one of the first signs of over reaching and on the way to over training, is athletes actually can’t sleep, they’re doing all this training, and they’re actually not able to sleep.

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And it’s the same on our own on really stressful days. And we’re doing that time day in and day out. People just say, Oh, I’m just not a great sleeper. You know, I only sleep five or six hours a month.

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And that might be true, but it’s probably more so that you’re just really burnt out. You’ve burnt the kungal really hard and our sleep is just taking a big hit. What else? Well, impaired blood sugar control.

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What does that mean? That means when we’re eating meals, especially meals that have a bit of a carbohydrate demand on them, what’s going to happen is you’re going to feel that crash effect a little bit more substantially.

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Especially when you have things that are carb heavy, like sugar retreats, you’re going to feel quite destroyed after when really tired and sleepy and fatigued. Now, I’m not saying anyone that’s going to have a tub of ice cream is going to feel a bit like that.

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But if you’re just having it like I’m feeling like that throughout the day in between meals, that’s because possibly that you’re having impaired blood sugar control based off your bad sleep. It’s one of the symptoms of bad sleep and under recovery that our blood sugar control gets out of whack.

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And thus, if that stays out of whack, we start to run into issues like diabetes and prediabetes. Finally, fatigue. And that’s both physiological. and psychological emotion. So if you’re feeling like you just don’t have the energy to do anything, if walking to your local shop feels like a big chore, or maybe you just feel like you’re driving everywhere because you feel tired, or just physically you don’t feel like you’ve got the motivation to exercise you want to,

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but you just feel physically achy and tired, well that’s during sleep we get that kind of restoration of our muscles and our bones and our digestive system, that’s all kind of recovered to baseline. But if you’re not getting enough sleep every night, we’re never getting there that full recovery and we’re constantly taking pounding on it, we’re going to run into issues.

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Also psychological, so things like our ability to deal with stressors we’ve already talked about, but things like productivity, things like brain fog, if you’re having kind of constant issues at work where you just can’t get into that good flow, that productivity state, maybe you’ve got some feedback from a boss and it just might not be bad, but it might just be like come on, you’re not flying here.

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So have a look at that, that productivity level and that creativity and your ability to remember things and your brain fog, that could be all in that kind of balance of you’re putting too much water in, you’re putting too much stressors based off the size of your cup, it’s tiny your cup, so how do you address that?

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And what should you address? Well there’s three things that you can address, two of them I’m just going to kind of tick off, just so you understand them, they’re really addressed in other Zevo Health trainings that we offer, but I just wanted to give you a bit of an understanding, so the first one is how much water you’re pouring into the glass, so that’s the moderating of your input stressors, so can you moderate it first?

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Well there’s some stressors, you can moderate, and some stressors definitely can’t moderate. So for some people, they might have a health concern, you know, or a family member might have a health concern in order to have a financial issue.

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And some, we can’t often moderate these, definitely not in the short term, you know, they’re just there. Some other stressors, we possibly can moderate, you know, you can put boundaries in place, you can just make some calls, make some decisions, whatever, just take yourself out of a stressful situation, and that can help.

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So there’s some things we can, some things we can, so just addressing what you can do there. A stress management training session will be a great one, just to kind of start figuring them out for yourself.

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Improving stress resilience. So this is the idea that one stimulus, one stressor, to two different people can can lead to two completely different responses. Think of it like a exercise for a runner.

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So if you prescribe a 5k run at a certain pace, to someone, and that’s like a runner or someone quite fit, that’s only going to be a drop of water in their system because they’re resilient to that type of stress.

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While if you give that same dosage of exercise to someone that’s physically unfit and under-trained in regards to running, that might be just a huge amount of stress. That might be almost like getting a hose and just shooting it at their glasses.

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Stress everywhere. And it’s the same for all stressors. We all have a different ability to deal with stress just because that one is good at one type of stress resilience, might not be good at another.

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So there is tools and abilities you can develop in regards to your stress resilience, especially when it comes to things like work stresses or interpersonal stresses. And that can be again addressed in some kind of stress resilience training.

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But the one I wanted to focus on a little bit more today, of course, is to improve our stress capacity, aka build a bigger glass. And that can be done by look better nutrition. And when we’re fueling ourselves better, that’s always going to help.

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But what we’re going to focus on today is, of course, our sleep and getting ourselves some good quality sleep. I want this to be super practical. I’m not going to spend too much of your time. I’m going to just focus on three really nice ritualistic tips that you can start implementing straight away, or over the next couple of days, that’s hopefully going to build your nice big glass.

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And longer, more in depth sessions that we provide, we’re looking at probably seven, and we’re really diving into them and getting, you know, quite practical. But today we’re only going to stick with three.

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And the first of which being get outside and move. So before you think, okay, I already know this, I know I should be moving, I should be outside. This is possibly more important than you might first think.

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So When you traditionally know about sleep, people say, you know, be careful with life, you know, in regards to technology in the evening, be careful watching your phone in bed, you know, be careful with all your lights and all these sort of things because light has a big effect on our internal body clock, our circadian rhythm, our hormonal balance and release.

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And everyone focuses on the darkness in the evening. And no one focuses on the brightness during the day, which is just as important, you need that yin yang. So yeah, we all know, you know, don’t use that tech too much in the evening, but get outside during the day, move exercise is great for engraving your internal body clock, even if you don’t have the motivation, just trying to do a little bit.

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But the most important thing is bright light during the day, natural bright light. Do not, especially if you’re a remote worker, just start your day, sit down without being outside, going all the way to lunch, maybe not even getting out at lunch and just never really getting out.

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You’re not gonna sleep well that night. And maybe you are, but your quality is not gonna be good. You need to get out. And I think you should be getting out a couple of times before lunchtime, before work and maybe even a micro-movement break where you’re getting some movement outside during the day.

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Look, if it’s raining, it’s raining. It’s usually raining. So you’re just gonna have to even expose yourself to light out of windows really gonna help. But if you can get outside, bring an umbrella, put a jacket on, go for a quick loop around, and it’s gonna help your sleep by guaranteed.

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Okay, so stimulants. We need to be careful with stimulants too. So of course, people are very protective of their coffee, and people love coffee. And I’m sure most people watching this have had a coffee eater already, or they plan to have one.

Unknown speaker

And look, I love coffee too. It’s protective against certain types of cancers. It’s high in anti-inflammatories. It can be good in a lot of circumstances. But the one thing to know about caffeine is that it has an effect on our sleep.

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But how much of an effect? Well, pretty significant, depending on when you take it. So when we’re talking about a lot of drugs, they’re often measured, they’re effectiveness in something called half-life.

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So half-life is how long the active ingredients in drugs take for half of it to leave the system. So if you can imagine a cup of coffee that you might have right now has about 120 milligrams, something like that, of caffeine, that active ingredient that’s gonna have the effect on sleep.

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So the half-life would be for half of that, or 60 milligrams, to leave the system. How long would it take? So you can guess, say you took one at three o’clock after lunch, how long would it take for half of that coffee to get out of the system?

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The answer is, depending on the person, probably six to eight hours. So you’re lucky. if you had a tree, nine o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, somewhere along there, you’re only gonna have a half of it gone.

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So for me, that’s bedtime. You know, I go to bed about half, 10. And that means I’d have half of a cup of coffee in my system trying to go to sleep. Now I might fall asleep, and many of you will say to me that, no, that won’t affect me.

Unknown speaker

You know, I can drink a cup of coffee in bed and still fall asleep. But you probably could, and I’m not saying good, but your quality of sleep doesn’t kind of be good. With that caffeine in the system, you’re not gonna fall into those deep stages of sleep, and then you’re gonna wake up quite lethargic.

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And what will you probably do if you wake up lethargic? You’re probably gonna grab another coffee, and then need another one, and another one to kind of get into this ritual. So be cautious about the coffee.

Unknown speaker

Look, if you’re gonna have coffee, enjoy it. Look, be my, you know, don’t let me stop you. But what I would say is, and try to time them before lunch, okay? Then alcohol, again. Look, I’m not saying not to drink alcohol.

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I enjoyed lots of wine on the weekend or a beer or whatever it is. No issue for most people. But alcohol definitely does have a strong effect on your sleep. And it is not like a nice nightcap, you know, where it just gently puts you to sleep.

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It really knocks you out on your quality of sleep on those nights, even when you’ve had that, like one glass or that one small bottle of beer has an effect and your sleep quality is not going to be good.

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You might still get a nine hour sleep, but you’re going to wake up kind of just not good, you know, and not well recovered. And thus you’ve got to be careful with your alcohol consumption. For a little tester, I would say for you guys, try to do a week where you have alcohol, no later, midday and reduce your alcohol contents, you know, cut it out for a week, something like that.

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See if it affects your sleep, you know. Finally is to cool down and look at the nice little puppy dog all bundled up and nice and warm, which is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. You need to cool down.

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And the way you should be thinking about this, the core temperature, my core temperature and your core temperature. Whatever it is now, it can’t be that when you’re going to sleep. It just can’t. It needs to be cooler.

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You need to drop your core temperature to sleep. So how do we do that? Well, it’s kind of dumped into the air. So if the air is too warm, first off, that’s going to be an issue. And we know this in the summertime months when it’s really warm or whatever, you know, it might be 18 degrees one day and we all rock into the office and everyone’s tired.

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Do you sleep last night? No, I didn’t sleep last night. Do you sleep last night? No, I don’t sleep last night. It was so hot. And that’s literally because we can’t lose the temperature. The air is too warm.

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We’re having issues. The same on holidays when you go to a warm country, our body’s not used to it. So you need to be cautious about the air in your house. home, either that might be central heating in the winter or in the summer, you might not have to place ventilate it or, you know, the way the suns came through the window is just turned into a little bit of a greenhouse, you need to dump some of that heat.

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And, and that’s also why a lot of people can’t sleep after exercising too late at night, their core temperature gets too hot. There’s a few reasons why you can’t sleep or exercise, but one of them is the core temperature reason.

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So try to cool yourself down, be careful with too much clothes, try to start that process half an hour 45 minutes before going to bed of trying to cool yourself down, you’re going to sleep much, much better.

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A nice cool room 18 degrees is perfect. So then what about your emotional cool down? Well, the way easy enough way to think about this is during the day, it’s like you’re driving on the motorway. 120 kilometers an hour, you know, things are, you know, high intensity, but the sleep you need to park.

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Okay. And for most people they try to go from 120 miles an hour and they try to like swing it in and then suddenly park and what happens is they crash and it’s a disaster and they can’t sleep and all these sort of things.

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Ambulance is coming up but what you need to do is slowly move through the gears touch the brakes go to 80 go to 60 go to 40 pull up beside your parking spot you know reverse back in boom you’re gonna get a great night’s sleep that way you need to slowly bring yourself down and that could be true nice rituals it could be true and calm amount of tea it could be true reading a book some sort of process that you go okay it’s 10 o’clock it’s 9 45 i’m gonna do my three things to take me off the motorway you know could be tea get my my breakfast ready my stuff ready for for breakfast could be folds and clothes whatever those rituals are but they’re just something in your mind to say okay these are my slow down rituals and that’s really going to help you emotionally and psychologically just prepare yourself bed if you’re getting super stimulated before bed it’s going to be difficult have you ever tried to sleep after like a gig got all that music and all that stimulation it’s just impossible the same after like a football match if you’re if you’re if you’re watching it or something like that or if you went to a rugby game or something like that and all that noise and stimulation it can be really difficult and life can give you those micro simulations you might not be aware of it might be an ethics documentary you know about a serial killer or something like that or or a sporting documentary that made you real emotional or something and you don’t know it but your your hormones have been stimulated and you’re just having trouble get back the balance and getting to that parking spot so just be cautious have your kind of wind down time and try to adhere to that give yourself those rituals just every night just slow yourself down so don’t you go.

Unknown speaker

That was quick. That was only three nice tips. But hopefully you can get some takeaways there. Make your cup a little bit bigger. Be able to deal with the stressors of life. And yeah, sleep is a foundational piece.

Unknown speaker

So I really think you should don’t take it for granted. Try to implement some of these tonight and your whole health and well-being will improve almost immediately. So take care, everybody. And I’ll see you hopefully on another webinar.

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Goodbye.