Sleep to Recharge

Let’s get into what it takes to get a great night’s sleep to ensure you are entirely recharged to perform at your best!

The benefits of sleep are mind-blowing! If you want to learn more about them, I highly recommend Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep. For now, I will focus on optimizing your sleep so you can experience these benefits.

The Circadian Rhythm

The goal is to have maximum energy during the day. This can only be achieved with great sleep at night. The key to achieving these opposites is setting your circadian (meaning about 24-hour) rhythm. 

First, we must understand the inverse relationship between melatonin (sleep hormone) and cortisol (stress hormone). Everybody experiences a peak in cortisol when they wake up. When your cortisol peaks, your body can only increase melatonin about 12 to 15 hours later.

The chart below shows what your circadian rhythm SHOULD look like.

The key to increasing melatonin in the evening so you can easily fall asleep is to get cortisol to reach its peak as soon as possible after you wake up. Failing to do this will cause yourger, making it impossible for melatonin to get up and cortisol to fall asleep.

 Let’s get into the actions you can take to influence the hormones cortisol and melatonin directly.

Morning

It’s a mind-blowing fact that the eyes are actually part of the brain, which is the control center of your entire body. Knowing this, it makes sense that you can leverage the power of your eyes to influence your hormones.

The most significant signal you can give to your brain and body about the time of day and thereby set your circadian rhythm is getting outside the moment you wake up. The neurons in your eyes respond to the particular type of sunlight created by the low solar angle of sunrise.

If you wake up after the sun has risen, it’s still best to get that light in your eyes as soon as possible. Even overcast weather provides an amount that is much stronger than any artificial light. This procedure is 50 times less effective when viewing through a window, so make sure you go outside. In only 2 to 10 minutes of being outside, you will have set your day rhythm by peaking cortisol as soon as you wake up. This practice also clears out adenosine, which can be described as sleep hunger.

 If you understand that light suppresses melatonin, you can start to see how detrimental most people’s habits of staying inside when waking up and blasting themselves with screens in the evening are. 

This is no small matter, as metabolic health, hormones, depression, andchoring your circadian clock, as we discuss here. When you do this, anxiety can all be helped by an it’s amazing how many of the other biological anchors fall into place. Simply going outside consistently when you wake up firmly anchors your rhythm.

Evening

As the morning was all about getting cortisol up, the evening was logically all about getting melatonin up. The longer you’ve been awake, the more sensitive the sensors in your eyes are to any light. That is why screens in the evening world are such a problem. In the perfect case, you should avoid screens before bed because the blue light emitted from electronic devices suppresses melatonin.

In the real world, you should invest in blue light blockers. If you don’t want to spend the money, you can wear sunglasses and score some extra style points.

The deeper into the night we go, the more important this becomes. Blue light exposure between 11 pm and 4 am suppresses dopamine release, can inhibit learning, and create all sorts of detrimental effects the next day. 

A useful tip is to view the sunset as the type of light it creates. This prevents some of the negative effects of light during the evening, as your body has gotten a good signal that it’s evening. Candlelight and fireplaces also do not get registered by the mechanisms in your eyes, so they are fine all evening. 

As mentioned earlier, adenosine is described as sleep hunger. It gets cleared out by caffeine or taking naps, so it’s best to do these after 2 p.m.

If you are tired in the afternoon, meditation will help you get the same effect as a nap. A huge added benefit of meditation is that it trains you to calm down deeply. Everybody can force themselves to stay awake, but you can’t force yourself to fall asleep. Meditation trains you to relax and thereby accelerates the transition into sleep.

Supplements

Melatonin is a powerful hormone; you shouldn’t take it as a supplement. It’s been shown in many cases that commercially available melatonin is very inconsistent, ranging from only half to about 400 times the strength that it says on the bottle, which can be very dangerous. 

Better options are apigenin, L theanine, Magnesium Threonate, and some simple chamomile tea. Chamomile tea improves sleep and reduces appetite, which is also important as it’s best to stop eating about two hours before bedtime.

Digestion requires a lot of blood flow to the stomach; your brain needs this blood flow to access the deep sleep stages in the first hours of sleep.

Bedroom

Keep your bedroom dark, cool, and quiet to create a good sleeping environment. To complete the cycle, you can set a timer to turn on the light before waking up or leave your blinds open so the sun comes through even with your eyes closed. This will jumpstart your morning and keep your rhythm consistent. Added benefits are that it increases your total sleep time and makes you want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.

I hope you’ve found the actionable information in this edition helpful so that you can experience the sensation of being wholly rested and fully energetic.