How To Sleep Better At Night And Wake Up Feeling Refreshed and good
If you've ever had a sleepless night, you'll know how awful you usually feel the following
day.
Sleep is very important because it allows the trillions of cells in your body to recover,
in order to protect you from diseases and stress.
However, if you're not getting at least 7-9 hours of sleep each night, you may find it
hard to concentrate and learn new things.
Sleep deprivation causes the signals sent through your nervous system to become sluggish,
which can cause a loss of co-ordination.
In fact over 20% of car accidents are linked with not getting enough sleep.
Even depression, anxiety and mental health problems can arise as you need sleep to help
balance hormones and neurotransmitters in the brain.
If any of this sounds like you, be aware that long term, poor sleeping habits can raise
your blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Today we're going to explore the 3 main causes of sleeping problems and how to overcome them
so that you can get more quality sleep.
This will naturally improve your health and overall wellbeing.
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This video is for educational purposes only, so do speak to your doctor if you have any
medical concerns.
1.
Reduce Stress Number 1: reduce stress
One of the main causes of sleeping problems is the accumulation of stress and mental worries
that are affecting your hormone balance.
Stress and anxiety come from a state of fear such as financial concerns, family troubles
and job related worries.
When you feel worked up and tense, your body goes into the fight/flight state and your
adrenal glands pump out a hormone called cortisol.
This can give you a tense feeling in your chest, you may feel just wound up and always
in a hurry to fix the next problem.
If you feel this type of tension for days, weeks or longer it can really affect your
sleep cycles.
If your cortisol levels are too high, you'll notice that you can't switch your thoughts
off when trying to drift off to sleep.
You may also wake up in the early hours between 1-4 am, when you should be in a deep delta
wave sleep.
The stress is affecting your natural sleeping rhythm, which in turn can weaken your immune
system and make you more susceptible to infections and various diseases.
To reduce stress and calm down your adrenal hormones (cortisol), there are various things
you can do such as taking long gentle walks in nature or outside for at least 30 minutes
each day.
Gentle exercise and physical work helps to dissipate energy that's trapped in your body,
helping to calm down your stress hormones.
Eating foods rich in potassium and magnesium will also help to turn off the fight or flight
response in the body, which you can get from eating large leafy green salads with lots
of colorful vegetables on a regular basis.
Potassium and magnesium act as natural tranquilizers, helping to calm down the firing of neurons
through your nervous system, so that you feel more relaxed and calm, resulting in a deeper
night's sleep.
Another common problem is going to bed too late in the evening and staying up past midnight.
The body has a natural circadian rhythm, which is like a hormonal wave pattern that regulates
your sleeping patterns.
It comes down around 10 to 10:30 pm, so that you can fall asleep naturally, and it works
in harmony with natures cycles of sunlight and darkness.
However if you push past 10:30 and into midnight, you miss the hormonal wave of melatonin and
will find it much harder to drift to sleep for a least another hour.
One of the main issues is the use of artificial light from cell phones, TV's and other devices.
These emit a blue light which suppresses the sleep hormone called melatonin, and makes
it hard to fall asleep.
Turn off all of your devices at least 30 minutes before you go to bed so that your body knows
it's time to wind down, switch off the stress response and get ready for sleep.
If you've tried all this and you simply can't seem to switch your thoughts off, then load
up on B vitamins during the day, especially Vitamin B1.
Eating 1-2 tablespoons of nutritional yeast in the afternoon will help to calm down your
stress hormones throughout the day so that you achieve a better sleep at night.
If you're a coffee drinker or consume lots of tea or soda, the caffeine in these beverages
can also affect your sleep cycle because it stimulates the release of cortisol from your
adrenal glands.
Start cutting back on the caffeine, and if you do drink it, make sure that you stop at
least 7 hours before you go to bed.
If you want to take something a little stronger, then consider taking ashwagandha root capsules.
This is an ancient adaptogen herb.
Adaptogens help your body manage stress and keep your hormones balanced such as cortisol
and melatonin.
2.
Urination At Night Number 2 is Urination at night.
If you’re waking up 2, 3 or more times during the night to pee then your suffering with
a common problem called nocturia.
Often people believe that this is a symptom of age but it's not.
It's actually caused having too much of the insulin hormone in your body which causes
you to be more thirsty, and dump more water at night.
High insulin levels also causes the prostate gland in men to enlarge, putting even more
pressure on the bladder.
To lower your insulin naturally at night, simply stop drinking and eating after 6:30pm.
Every you time you eat, you stimulate insulin, especially when you eat sugar and refined
carbohydrates.
However people who follow a low carb diet such as keto, tend to have much deeper sleeping
patterns because they aren't eating foods that cause fluid retention, and their insulin
levels drop.
This eliminates the need to pee during the night.
Eating large salads for lunch as I mentioned earlier in the video, will also help to drive
insulin down because of the amount of minerals and nutrients within vegetables.
3.
Fast Heart Beat The third common cause of sleeping problems
is a fast heart rate.
If you're lying on your pillow at night and you can hear your heart beating in your chest,
or feel it in your ear then this may be caused by a Ph.
Problem.
If your blood is too alkaline or too acidic, certain minerals needed to regulate your heart
beat don't get used properly, causing your heart rate to speed up.
It's nearly impossible to fall asleep under these conditions.
Avoid any acidic foods after 6:30pm to help prevent this from happening.
However, earlier on in the day time, I recommend drinking 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
in a glass of water before your meals.
This helps to strengthen the stomach Ph, so that you can absorb more minerals like potassium
and magnesium that regulate your heart beat.
A fast heart beat at night can also be caused by overtraining and exercising too heavily,
without giving your body a chance to recover.
So make sure that your workouts are intense but for shorter periods such as HIIT.
If none of this works, it may just be down to stress.
Try this simple trick to calm down your heart rate.
Lay in bed and breathe deeply counting to 5 as you breathe in, and 6 as you breathe
out.
Slowing down your exhalations stimulates a part of your nervous system that relaxes and
calms down your heart and blood pressure.
This will help you to drift off into a deep state of sleep and relaxation so that your
body can recover from a good days work.
If you're a soda drinker, then you may also consider dropping this habit.
Soda contains high amounts of phosphorus as a preservative.
Unfortunately phosphorus can raise your heart rate and increase the risk of a heart attack.
Consider drinking peppermint tea, or chamomile tea instead as these have been shown to trigger
a hormone called GABA in your brain, that naturally calms you down and makes you feel
more focused and peaceful.
Additional Tips
Now you're aware of some of the main underlying causes of sleeping problems, I want to share
a few extra remedies and tips that you can use to help yourself fall asleep and stay
asleep throughout the night.
Lavender essential oil is well known for helping people to drift off to sleep.
Simply massage a drops into your temples or on your pillow at night.
This oil contains linalool.
When you inhale this gently it helps stimulate serotonin and melatonin in the brain which
help you to sleep better, and also help in managing anxiety and depression.
Make sure you carve out some time in your day to focus on yourself and find ways to
relax.
Epsom salts can be dissolved in bath water and can really help to soothe and calm down
the muscles within the body, where there is tension or pressure.
If you do decide to start bathing in order to relax, you can also add some lavender oil
to the bathwater to enjoy similar effects.
If you work in an office job and are sedentary most of the day, it's very important to start
getting outside, getting the sunshine on your skin and breathing in more oxygen.
Sunshine emits infrared light which helps to normalise your body clock for a normal
sleeping pattern.
Also, essential oils are released into the air from tree tops and plants which help to
calm down stress, blood pressure and anxiety naturally.
Keeping the sugar and caffeine out of your diet is essential if you can't sleep, because
they both act as stimulants and keep you awake.
They also cause you to urinate more.