Improving Your Sleep Cycle

There's a number of things that can impair your sleep drive, and so we want to try to eliminate those. A lot of these are substances that can impact our sleep. For example, caffeine. Caffeine is in our system for a long time. I Do stop drinking caffeine by five to 6:00 PM even though I still feel like it doesn't help. Should I be stopping earlier? It's probably fine to consume caffeine, say up until noon, right, or a little after lunch depending on when your bedtime is. We just want to ensure that we give yourself the best chance to get to sleep. Without that in your system, alcohol is relaxing. A lot of people use it to help them fall asleep. However, it impacts the brain such that it changes the sleep architecture, kind of the stages of sleep that we go through and can actually lead to more fragmented sleep, making us feel less restored the next day At nighttime. I've noticed whenever I have had an alcoholic beverage that I do wake up much earlier with anxiety, or if I had it earlier in the day right before I go to sleep, I'll have anxiety. So that's something I would definitely like to try is with drinking, just to not do it anytime close to bedtime. One of the few things that we know might increase deep sleep for some people is more exercise, But with the baby, it's really hard for me to schedule in exercise at all, and oftentimes it is easiest for me to exercise later in the evening when he is in bed or ready for bed. Exercise too close to bedtime can actually undermine sleep. This isn't true for everyone, but oftentimes when people exercise vigorously before bedtime, it increases our sympathetic nervous system and that arousal system making it difficult to kind of wind down. And then the final thing is around screen time. Now, this is a contentious issue and I'm certainly not someone to say no screens, because that would be hard and challenging, and it gives a lot of people a lot of joy. So we know that the content that people consume can often be really engaging, right? It, it can be really rewarding and make it difficult for us to let go, for us to kind of enhance that relaxation response. Yeah, it would probably be in my best interest to put away the digital devices. It's important to address all of these behaviors to improve your sleep. Now, some of them may be more relevant to you than others, and so with that, we should focus on those big ticket items. So if you're someone who consumes a lot of caffeine right before bed, maybe that's the one that you want to focus on first. Or if you're someone who spends three or four hours in social media right before bed in bed, maybe that's where we focus our attention. All of these behaviors are worth examining and potentially acting on to improve your sleep. Today's daily action is try something new to help with your sleep. Commit to a new sleep habit by doing it daily. You might...