Sleep Essentials

If you struggle to get to sleep, stay asleep and don’t wake up feeling refreshed. I’m gonna show you the two fundamental drivers of having a great night’s sleep. And this is covered in my book, upgrade Your Brain. The first is in order to get to sleep, you have to switch off adrenaline. It’s vital. And what actually happens is your brainwaves have to change into what we call alpha waves in order to get to sleep. Now, coffee, caffeine, um, it actually depresses melatonin, which is what you make at night to get to sleep. So rule number one is don’t have caffeine after noon. ’cause this depressing effect lasts for at least eight hours. So make sure you are caffeine free. Now, the next thing is that alcohol actually promotes the adrenaline off switch. It’s called gaba. GABA is both a neurotransmitter that switches off adrenaline and it’s an amino acid. So you can literally buy and supplement gaba. And if you take something like a thousand milligram, 500, maybe a thousand milligram, you’ll find that it switches off adrenaline in much the same way that a glass of wine or a beer switches off adrenaline. And it’s, it’s a safe and good thing to do. You don’t get drunk, but you do get this kind of adrenaline off switch. So GABA is very, very useful. Other nutrients that help to calm you down before you go to sleep. But l-theanine, this is an amino acid that’s found in tea, but not coffee. Magnesium is a relaxant of both your muscles and your mind. So 500 milligram of magnesium really chills you out, relaxes the muscles, and Epsom salts contain magnesium. So having a bath with Epsom salts, maybe even some aromatherapy oils like lavender, that chills you out. So as you’re moving towards nighttime, it’s very good to wind down on adrenaline. So for example, don’t go off for a sudden, you know, run just before you, you go to sleep. So exercise, do it a bit earlier so you can kind of chill out. Don’t watch a horror movie or the late night news, you know, which is designed to get you into some state of fear. Read a book or watch something simpler and nice and positive, and turn the lights down low. That’s, that’s also very important. So these are all what we would call sleep hygiene, which includes not having your television in your bedroom, kind of make the bedroom space a space for sleeping. Now if all that doesn’t work, there are some real quick wins. There’s a composer called Dr. John Levine and he’s made music, which you can download onto your phone. It’s called Silence of Peace. And uh, you can download it from a website called silence of music.com, and it literally puts you into alpha waves. So you can play that before you go to sleep. Or if you wake up in the night, you can, you can play it as you wake up just quietly in the background. Also, um, there are various techniques, and the one I love the most is called heart math. This is research from the Institute of Heart Math. And uh, what they’ve learned is that that stress part of your brain called the limbic brain has a lot of neuronal connections to the heart. And there are more that go, more signals that go from the heart to the brain and from the brain to the heart. So you can’t really think your way outta stress. You have to feel your way outta stress. And they’ve developed some very, very simple techniques and a, a very cool device. You literally clip on your ear and you plug it in your phone and it instantly shows you your stress state. And just by breathing into the heart space and evoking a very strong positive emotional memory or anything that generates a really good regenerative positive feeling, you can literally see yourself go into a state of resilience, which gets you into alpha waves to put you to sleep. So learning those tricks are very important. And alcohol, uh, while it promotes gaba, it only does it for an hour. And, uh, then you get the reverse effect. It depresses gaba, so that’s why you have a drink. And then another drink and another drink. And often we find ourselves timing our drinking. So you go to sleep a little bit inebriated, but it actually is depressing gaba. So don’t use alcohol as your only way of getting out of a state of stress. So all of those will help you go to sleep. But then the question is how do you stay asleep? And the fundamental neurotransmitter in the brain that helps you to sleep steadily through the night is melatonin. A melatonin is actually how we keep in sync with the day night cycle. So jet lag is a consequence of getting out of sync of that day, night cycle. The brain will naturally produce melatonin, which not only keeps you asleep, but it’s a very powerful antioxidant. So it cleans up your brain and three milligrams or five milligrams or possibly 10 milligrams, especially if you can get some melatonin that’s slow release. So it releases throughout the night, uh, will help you to stay asleep. And melatonin is made from serotonin, the happy neurotransmitter, which is made from tryptophan or five HTP. And by the way, antidepressants deplete serotonin and consequently deplete melatonin. So they could be another reason why you don’t have enough melatonin serotonin in the brain to help yourself stay asleep. The other thing that can wake you up in the night is having a blood sugar dip. So if your blood sugar goes high and then it crashes, when your blood sugar goes very low, you get a release of adrenaline and you can wake up in the night. And if you wake up in the night, somewhat startled, you have a dream that’s sort of quite anxious and so on. That is, um, that is a hallmark of having a blood sugar dip. So if you make your last meal of the day something that will stabilize your blood sugar, that’s very, very good. Maybe some fish or meat with some beans and salad or vegetables and so on. So actually those pulses, beans and lentils are very, very good for keeping your blood sugar stable. That also will help you, you know, get through the night and that’s what you are shooting for. Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, maybe waking up once if you need to go to the bathroom. But basically seven hours sleep is what really optimizes your brain function. Allows your brain to reset, minimizes your risk of dementia, maximizes your energy in the day. Uh, those are the secrets for having a great night’s sleep.