Improve your sleep (and your health and fitness) with these nine strategies.
If you’re sick of hearing about how important sleep is and why you need it, feel free to jump straight down to the tips section.
If you don’t yet appreciate the role of good sleep, and how its importance is relevant to you, consider this:
It can influence:
● How effective your fat loss pursuit is: If you’re working hard to eat less calories, getting minimal sleep can reduce how effective your fat loss pursuit will be.
For example, one study that compared 5.5 hrs of sleep compared to 8.5 hrs showed that not getting enough sleep (the 5.5 hr group) negatively effects your ability to lose body fat and hold onto your muscle when you’re eating less calories. It can also affect your ability to adhere to your diet as certain hormones that are increased with little sleep can stimulate hunger and food intake. (1)
● How well you recover and your performance (physically and mentally). Think this only applies to elite athletes? If you’re focused on your career, it’s just as important to be mindful of how much sleep you’re getting as sleep deprivation can result in lower and less accurate cognitive performance, altered pain perception, lower feelings of energy and enthusiasm, and your judgement and decision making will deteriorate. (2)
● Your chance of injury and illness. With less sleep, there’s an increased risk of injury and pain. There are also higher levels of inflammation (and other factors) that contribute to the development of many chronic diseases (eg. diabetes, obesity, cancers, Cardiovascular, GI, lung, muscular, and brain diseases etc.) (3) If you’re wanting to stay active and healthy, paying attention to your sleep is an important part!
Sleep deficiency = “increased risk for acute illnesses, traumatic sports injuries, and development of chronic diseases…” (Copenhaver & Diamond, 2017)
● Your mood and mental health. There’s a relationship between insufficient sleep and mental health issues like depression, anxiety and stress. For example, not getting enough sleep can lead to your cortisol levels increasing, which increases your feelings of stress and consequently your risk of depression. (3)
When it comes to your general happiness – even if you don’t experience mental health issues – the tiredness, fatigue, physical discomfort and so on can lead to lower levels of happiness and positive emotions (4) (I’ve talked ad nauseam about the important role of positive emotions and happiness!).
So, if you’re trying to change how your body looks, you want to perform well physically and mentally, you want to stay as healthy and injury-free as possible and you want to improve your mental health, hopefully a few of the following tips will assist in improving your sleep:
* A quick note on how much sleep to get: There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for the ‘optimal’ duration of sleep. This will vary from individual to individual based on a number of factors, like your amount of physical activity, your age, genetic factors etc. The general recommendation for adults is 7-9 hrs (5)
• This would be a consistent and relaxing bedtime routine that helps with managing stress and encouraging sleep. By relaxing and reducing stress, you get a reduction in ‘cognitive arousal’ and consequently improved sleep (6), eg. a mindfulness practice or an activity that helps you mentally detach from work/life responsibilities.
• Another part of creating a relaxing bedtime routine is not having any stressful associations with your bed. This means making sure you don’t use your bed for working on assignments, making work phone calls etc.
Activities in bed, such as reading or watching television, have also been associated with subjective measurements of poor sleep (Mastin et al., 2006).
Exercise is effective at improving sleep quality (7). A mixture of aerobic and strength training would be great (Should I Be Doing Cardio Or Strength Training?).
• Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are associated with poorer sleep (eg. folate deficiency is associated with insomnia) so ensure that you’re eating a well balanced diet!
• Other than paying attention to your overall diet, some of the foods that show evidence of improving your quality of sleep contain high concentrations of melatonin (essential for good sleep), tryptophan (helps increase melatonin and serotonin (helps make melatonin)) and/or phytonutrients (can help reduce inflammation = improves sleep quality). (8)
• Two examples of sleep-promoting fruits:
1. Kiwi fruits (anti-oxidant, serotonin and folate content all contribute to improved sleep) (9)
2. Tart cherry juice or Jerte valley cherries (melatonin (health and sleep benefits) and phytonutrient profile (helps reduce inflammation = improves sleep quality). (8) (9)
• Some other potential sleep-promoting foods:
1. Fatty fish (contains Vit D and omega-3 fats important for regulation of serotonin – the precursor to melatonin) (10).
2. Tryptophan-containing foods such as milk, chicken, turkey, tofu and salmon. Pairing these foods with higher amounts of carbohydrates may help tryptophan be more effective (8)
• Put simply, try to avoid bright light exposure before bed and throughout the night, sleep in a pitch black room if possible and get as much natural light as possible in the morning and throughout the day.
• Sleep occurs when your core body temperature decreases. Heat moves from your core to your skin and then out to the environment (which allows your core body temperature to decrease). There are areas of your skin (such as your feet) where the increase in temperature promotes sleep and is associated with melatonin release (11).
So, how can you ensure your core body temperature is cooling down for good sleep?
*Talk to your doctor first
There’s an association between higher magnesium intake and sleep quality in healthy adults. And there’s been a few quality studies that show magnesium supplementation improves sleep (15).
Magnesium is involved in almost all of your bodily processes, and one of these major processes is its role in regulating sleep (like regulating your circadian rhythm, cellular functioning, relaxant and anti-depressant effects etc) (15) (16).
Your diet, consumption of caffeine and alcohol, use of certain medications, physical and mental stress, ageing, menopause and mental health issues like depression can all lower your magnesium levels (16), so supplementing is a good way of increasing these levels and improving your sleep (among all the other body-wide benefits).
What form should you take and how much? The dosage that is often recommended is between 200-400 mg a day. I would try both a transdermal application and an oral powder and see what works best for you. When trying the transdermal application, use a magnesium chloride spray (eg. Ancient minerals magnesium oil spray – 6 sprays = 100mg of magnesium). When taking an oral powder, try magnesium threonate (1g of powder = about 72mg of magnesium one hour before bed).
Glycine is an amino acid that plays a role as a neurotransmitter (meaning it can influence many of your body’s functions).
Studies have shown that supplementing with as little as 3g before bedtime can help improve your sleep (17) (18). If you’re struggling to sleep and are reaching for sleep-promoting drugs like benzodiazepines, be aware that they mess with your sleep stages resulting in sleepiness throughout the day and reduced cognitive function. Glycine, on the other hand, showed the opposite (lower daytime sleepiness and an improvement in cognitive function) (18).
How to take it? You can buy glycine on its own and consume 3-5g within an hour of bed time. You can also supplement with collagen as it contains high amounts of glycine (eg. a 15g serving of collagen may give you about 3g of glycine).
If you’re feeling stressed and anxious you’re probably aware of how much that can negatively effect your sleep. This is where L-theanine can come in helpful.
L-theanine is an amino acid that is found in tea leaves and is known to help you feel more calm and decrease stress/anxiety (among other benefits).
L-theanine has been shown to be a safe natural aid in improving your quality of sleep (in all age groups). It doesn’t make you sleepy or drowsy but there’s an improvement in relaxation and your nervous system is geared more towards a ‘rest and digest’ state as opposed to a ‘fight or flight’ state (19).
How to take it? 200mg of L-theanine (‘Suntheanine’ is the one they used in the studies) 30-40mins before bed (19)
• A regular bedtime can help bolster your ‘circadian rhythm’ (leading to better sleep). One study showed that university students who had irregular bedtime schedules experienced poor sleep quality. This could be because irregular bedtimes disturb your circadian rhythm (20)
• An active mind isn’t conducive to falling and staying asleep. This paper discusses how incomplete tasks (especially work-related ones) can keep you thinking, worrying and negatively impact your sleep. The authors compared writing about completed tasks verse writing about future tasks. The individuals who wrote about future tasks (a to-do list) fell asleep faster (21).
• Spending some time before bed writing a detailed and long ‘to-do’ list may help you sleep better.
• Recovery sleep may be helpful when you’re expecting (or have had) a bad night’s sleep. It also helps take some pressure off stressing over the fact that you’ve had an awful sleep.
• If you’ve had a night of very little sleep, incorporating a nap, an extended recovery sleep, or a nap and extended recovery sleep may help with the following:
- A short nap can recover alertness and promote performance.
- You’ll experience less fatigue and overall sleepiness with a short nap schedule.
- Sleepiness and attention/reaction time recover better if you get a 9 hr ‘recovery sleep’ compared to a 6 hr recovery sleep.
- When it comes to getting your immune system back on track after a night of very little sleep (2hrs), having a short midday nap (30mins) before an extended recovery sleep (10 hrs) will return it just about back to normal (the nap + recovery sleep was better than the recovery sleep alone).
- Longer recovery sleeps may have a stress-reducing effect
(22)
• If you’ve had a poor night’s sleep, getting a 30 minute nap in around midday/early afternoon and/or extending your ‘recovery sleep’ (9-10hrs) the night after may be helpful. Try not to nap after 3pm as this reduces your sleep pressure and try to keep a regular bedtime schedule as much as possible outside of these occasional recovery sleeps.
Nightly rituals, exercise, eating certain foods, proper light exposure, supplementation, temperature regulation, ‘to-do’ lists and sleep recovery strategies: there are many more ways to get better sleep but at least one of these should help – when sleep improves, all aspects of your health and fitness improve, so I highly encourage you to experiment with a few of these tips and see what works best for you!
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