Podcast Disclaimer
Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more
Podcast Disclaimer
Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more
How is your sleep? Do you sleep well at night? Do you toss and turn? Are you a light sleeper? Are you someone that wakes up and always feels tired, not rejuvenated, feel like you could do with another five more hours asleep? If this is you, then you've landed on the right episode of me&my health up. I'm your host, Anthony Hartcher. I'm a clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist. The purpose of this podcast is to enhance and enlighten your well-being. And today I'm going to be doing that on the topic of optimising your sleep. So it's that time of the year we're in summer in the southern hemisphere. And we have longer days, and we are very a lot more active. Because of the this it's warmer, it's lighter. And we can do more and fit more into our day of the daylight. So it is a time of the year where we often go quiet sleep deprived. And I'm going to be sharing some insightful tips on how to get a good night's sleep, sleep easily, sleep well and wake up rejuvenated. I want to share this story because I've been someone that's been pretty good with sleep, but always wanting to do it better. Because I realise how much it has a difference on my energy the next day, my mood the next day, and how I eat the next day and the amount of energy I have to exercise. So I've always been looking to improve my sleep, I acquired a Oura Ring in order to help my sleep or at least track my sleep and better understand my sleep patterns. And whether I'm getting a good night restorative sleep and how many hours because in actual fact, when you go to bed, there's time where you're lying in bed that you're not actually sleeping, that you can think well, I was in bed for 10 hours, therefore I got 10 hours sleep. But it's not like that, because you have a sleep efficiency, which in actual fact, you could be in bed for 10 hours but only have an 80% sleep efficiency, and therefore only getting eight hours only getting eight hours. Well, that's your nightly recommended intake. So between seven and nine for adults is what is recommended for and that's sleeping time. That's not actually time in bed. So it's really important we distinguish that and understand how much actual time we're sleeping. There's many devices that can do this. There's the Apple Watch, the Garmin, there's the Fitbit, there's plenty of devices out there where you can track your sleep. But I suggest you get a good device, the Oura Ring is really recommended comes recommended for me. It's very accurate. That's what I like about it its accuracy is really good. And it's not something that you really notice on your body. Some people don't like sleeping with watches. And for me, yeah, the the ring is not too much of an interference as to something on my body and it has that intrusive sort of feel about it. So I suggest you get something to track your sleep and measure so that you actually can see how you're performing based on what you're doing during the day. And I'm going to share lots of insight as to what you can do during the day and at night to enhance your sleep. So let's start with where you should start around getting a really good night's sleep. And it really starts with the day. It starts with what how you occupy your morning, are you getting out and getting natural light. So natural light converts our melatonin so and it actually promotes wakefulness through raising cortisol. So our melatonin starts to dissipate and break down. And we start to have a natural rise in cortisol when we see the morning light, and our body starts to produce serotonin, which is the precursor to melatonin. So we actually want to get that morning light to start the cascade to produce serotonin, which is also that neurotransmitter that helps with our mood regulation, feeling good about ourselves. So we want to create plenty of this and the best way to do that is in morning light. So get out get your eyes, your photoreceptors in your retina exposed to light so that morning light natural light is the best way to arouse yourself to get that cortisol production up to start stopping the melatonin production. Start rising the serotonin production and this is a great way to kickstart your day is just getting natural light exposure first thing and that morning light is fantastic. It hasn't got any UV initially. Once it gets that 10% above the horizon that's when the UVA kicks in. But this time of the day is fantastic to get the infrared light, okay? It's part of the light spectrum, we can't see, but it's the long wavelength light that is really, really helpful for our restoration of our body. And certainly to get us aroused, awoken and lifted up. So also, by getting that natural light, we also get the temperature, which is like a second way in which our body senses whether it's night or day. So we've got our light receptors in our retina, but also our temperature in our skin, our receptors, that gauge heat in our skin, our heat receptors in our skin. So when we get out and we get that first light, we're also telling the skin, yes, it's daytime, let's start doing daytime activities. Let's start elevating insulin, like with cortisol so that you can digest food. And so having food in the morning is really important to let the body know to start to continue to do daytime functions. So we want to get the natural light to tell the body Yes, it's morning time through the light receptors, a very powerful way to wake up the body. But we also want to get the heat onto our skin. So getting some exposure of our bare skin to the natural light is really helpful because it exposes us to heat that's also telling us it's it's daytime now, because nighttime is a cool day times are warm. And we also want to have some food in the morning because we are designed to digest food during the day. And we have the insulin available during the day to break down and to convert and to utilise our blood sugars for ourselves so that they can make energy. So we want all these daytime functions to initiate at the beginning of the day. So having breakfast within half an hour of waking is recommended, scientifically recommended. So half an hour within waking if you exercise exercise is a great way to start the day. Because it obviously induces cortisol production that induces wakefulness, it shuts off melatonin production, and it starts to arouse us. So getting outside in the morning, exercising, natural light, getting that exposure and then after your exercise, having breakfast, that is telling you your body, it's the beginning of the day, get ready, motorcar, but it's the beginning of the day. And this morning period, up until lunchtime is where we have optimal digestion and assimilation of food. So we want to consume most of our calories at the start of the day, and reduce them at the end of the day, because that's when our digestive system is switching off or down-regulating. So we want to have more at the start of the day less in the evening. So like for example, intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding is best done when we eat less at night and earlier at night and have still have breakfast, missing breakfast is not helpful for us, so we don't want to miss breakfast, we actually want to have breakfast. But in order to do intermittent fasting, we want to have less at night and eat earlier at night in order to get that time-restrictive feeding happening. So I really recommend you initiate your your digestion around the start of the day. And when you start to eat less at night, you'll feel hungry in the morning, what I find is a lot of clients eat a lot at night and they're not hungry in the morning, they don't need to eat because their body's still digesting last night's dinner. And so it hasn't had the time to get that deep restorative recovery, repair going on with the digestive system, because of the massive consumption of food at night. And we have our best restorative regeneration occurring at night, particularly between that 10 pm and 2 am is where we get that deep restorative cover, you know, rejuvenation, that 2 am to 7 am is where we get the emotional port, the emotional regulation. And we you know, helps with the, I guess, us remembering things as well as they're getting those neural connections embedded those pathways embedded in terms of what we learned the day before. And also in terms of helping us have, I guess, a good mood the next day by having that second part of the sleep, which is the dreaming part of the sleep. It's that more lighter sleep phase, but it's equally as potent in terms of emotional support, and the
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Anthony Hartcher:earlier part of the night at 10 pm to 2 am is where we have the deeper or the longer duration of deep restorative sleep, we're getting into that real deep restorative sleep into those delta waves. And in that, that is when our cells rejuvenate, repair. So we certainly want to make sure we're getting both parts of the cycle, if we go to bed really late, we can, I guess, miss a lot of that deep restorative sleep, and that repair to the cells and the tissues and the organs, we need that, we need that to happen. So we need to get to bed at a reasonable hour in order to make sure we maximise that deep restorative sleep. And then we also get our emotional support at the back end of the night. So let's get into what else you can do during the day. So exercise during the day is and being active during the day, it really supports sleep at night, because what we're doing is we're utilising our ATP, which is what our mitochondria produces, the powerhouse of the cell. And it's converting to ADP and then to adenosine. So it's converting from ATP to ADP and then into a MP and then into it, then adenosine. And it's the build-up of adenosine by binding to the receptors of the cell that builds up sleep pressure. So the more active you are during the day, the more you build up the adenosine within the body, and the more likely you're going to have that sleep pressure, that need to feel like you need to sleep that night. So the less active you are, the less the adenosine is built up in your body. And the other thing that really blocks the adenosine binding to the cell is caffeine. So this is why caffeine promotes wakefulness is that it stops the adenosine binding to the cell. And the caffeine takes that receptor site and keeps the cell alert and active. So caffeine in the afternoon evening is no good. Because it really stops that sleep pressure building up, it slows it down. And we don't want that. And caffeine has a long half-life. So it takes ages to break down in the body a long time to break down. So really no caffeine after 12, ideally, reducing your caffeine intake intake after 12 is better because it will allow the sleep pressure to build up, we actually want to feel tired when we get home from work that's natural. That's normal, right? We don't want to be waking up in the evening, we actually want to be feeling tired, we want to be getting to bed well and truly around that 10 pm or around that time. And again, there's the chronotypes of sleep too. So some people have the night owl sort of Chronotype, which means they go to bed late or wake up later. And that's important. And then you have the morning lark. So those people go to bed early and wake up early. And that's what I am, I'm a morning lark, it works really well for me. So I'm in bed 8.30 between 8.30 and 9 pm every night, and I'm up between 5 am and 5.30. And the other really important factor around going to bed is the consistency. And that's what they found during the sleep study. So Professor Matthew Walker has done copious studies around this and what he's found the number one important factor around sleep is consistency, the same time to bed and when I say the same time to bed, it's within an hour window, and then the wait time within an hour window so my hour window could anywhere between 4.30 am in the morning to 5.30 am in the morning. And my time to bed anywhere between really 8 to 9 pm is probably that time after 9 pm or I guess up to 9.30 I find my sleep's good. When I get to bed after 9.30 I really find it affects my sleep quality, because it shifts my circadian rhythm. And I really noticed that jetlag effect if I go to bed after 9.30 pm at night. And again, everyone's different. So you might find that you have a bit more wakefulness at night and a bit more sleepy in the morning. You want to work with your Chronotype. Again, I work with my Chronotype, I get the great results by making sure I'm in bed but I'm very consistent seven days a week around that to bed time to wake time it doesn't change even on weekends. I keep it consistent that way. I've got energy all throughout the week, and I don't suffer that Monday morning blues and Wednesday, hump day and all that sort of stuff because my circadian rhythm is consistent throughout the whole week. So make sure your're very consistent with your time to bed and wait time. And I'm very disciplined around that because I realise how much sleep impacts my overall health and well-being and particularly what the sleep studies have found a night of deprived sleep, so only getting around six hours or less sleep a night. And again, this is average, some people have got a tolerance where they don't need more than six hours. But this is the average they found those who got six hours or less ate around two... 300 more calories the next day, so you eat more and what they found the types of food these people that were sleep deprived were eating, they found are eating more higher calorific types of foods. So the more fatty of foods, the more carbohydrate-rich foods. So the more calorie-dense foods and the most calorie-dense foods or the combination of carbs and fats, right, so you know, the ice cream, the sugar and the fat. So that's the sort of food you're consumed, the hamburgers, you're consumed. So it's the greasy foods that you'll consume after being sleep-deprived. It's because they're highly calorific. And our body needs the energy to stay awake. And so it's telling you give me more energy. And you're also going to go or chase more simple carbohydrates or more high GI, not complex, simple, high GI carbohydrates, which is like the lollies and things when you're sleep deprived. Because your body wants to employ your brain certainly wants instant glucose, because glucose works really well for the brain that's fast converting, and it keeps you alert and keeps you in that survival mode. And that's what happens when we're sleep-deprived. We're very much in that survival mode. Hence why we don't have great emotional regulation, because we're in that lower part of the brain, the limbic center, the emotional center, and that's where we're in that survival mode, where feel like we're under threat. And so we behave like we're under threat that people are threatening our lives. And so we behave in angry and abrupt and irritable and not patient sort of approach to life, or we avoid things we're running away from things because you just don't have the tolerance to deal with it. Because you're so emotional. So that next day is really affected in terms of mental health, what we eat the next day. And then we generally don't have the energy to exercise when we're sleep-deprived. So it really affects your ability to exercise. So if you are sleep-deprived, you don't really want to be doing that belting your body around more because it's filling already, belt, belted around, it didn't have a good night's sleep, it didn't get its repair done, didn't get its maintenance work done. So what you want to do is gentle exercise if you've had a sleep-deprived night, so still be active, but moving the body in a more gentle way be kind to it, because if you keep belting it up, yes, it will help with sleep that night that it's not really trying to work with the homeostasis or the body trying to find that equilibrium, it's just going to shift it too much again, so evoke too much stress on the body the next day after being sleep-deprived, because being sleep-deprived, is stress enough for the body. So what else do we want to be doing during the day I just mentioned we want to be exercising during the day. When we exercise at night, what it does is it elevates our heart rate and it gets us hot, right? And both hot our core body temperature being elevated as well as our heart rate elevated prolongs our ability to fall asleep. So we we take longer to fall asleep, we take longer to get into deep restorative sleep. Our deep restorative sleep occurs when our heart rate drops to a low level, a really low resting heart rate and it will stay elevated if we exercise late into the evening. So you don't want to be exercising, you know three to four hours before bed. So if your bedtime is 10 pm, then you want to make sure you're exercising around 5 or 6 pm at the latest. Exercising 8 pm is really going to prolong that ability to fall asleep because also exercises induce cortisol production with elevated cortisol production, our body doesn't produce the melatonin, it doesn't start to build up it inhibits the build up of melatonin. So we need cortisol to lower in order for melatonin to build up in the evening. So we don't want to be exercising late in the evening. We don't want to be elevating our core body temperature late in the evening. So what are the things that are going to help drop our heart rate is hot showers because what it does is it drops our core body temperature by sending the blood out to the peripherals to cool down at the surface. And so hot baths at night and again allowing a bit of time for the body to then cool down as well afterwards, you don't want to, you won't be able to go from a hot bath straight to sleep you sort of want to have the bath sort of one to two hours before that sleep just to allow that body to cool, the core body temperature to drop again certainly hot baths in the evening. Not cold showers, not cold plunges in the evening. That doesn't support our restorative night's sleep, it's the hot cause that takes the heat away from the core and allows the core body temperature to drop. So having hot showers at night is helpful, hot baths at night helpful. That drops our temperature and heart rate. So on the talking discussion around temperature, what you want to also make note of is the room temperature, the ideal temperature, room temperature is around that 18 degrees Celsius is around ideal, but it really depends on your metabolic rate. And if you're got high metabolism, then you're generating a lot of heat. So you probably need a cooler room. If you've got a slow metabolic rate, then you're generally cooler. So you want 18 degrees might feel cool to you. So then it might be more like 20 degrees. So it really depends on the person. That's why I sort of give you I guess, the types of different types of people night owls, morning larks, and then you've got your metabolic rate people that are constantly generating energy constantly burning food, and then that slower type, you'll know your metabolism type based on how much food you consume. If you don't need to consume much in order to get through the day, then you've got a sort of low metabolic rate but a high efficiency, but then there's those that have a high metabolic rate, low efficiency, and they just need lots of food, but they're not really efficient with the food. And they generate a lot of energy, their body heats up. So making sure your room temperature is low. Really important that it's a low temperature, you actually want to feel cool, you don't want to feel hot, so cool the room down, make an effort to cool the room down at night in order to help you to fall asleep because if you're not cool, your heart rates going to be elevated. And as I said, the heart rate needs to drop in order to get into deep restorative sleep. The quicker it drops, the quicker you get into deep restorative sleep. So support the body dropping the heart rate by getting in a cool room at night, really reducing that room temperature as much as you can wearing the minimal amount of clothing to bed. It's okay to be a little bit cool on the cool side, not shivering. But on the cooler side. You don't want to be too hot, because too hot, will make it difficult to fall asleep because your heart rates elevated. So wear light things at night cool the room is really important. Now darkness, darkness is really important for those listening, I'm holding up a night masks that I wear. So I've just started wearing this night mask at night. And it has dropped or improved my sleep even more. So my sleep has gone to another level by wearing this night mask consistently, my heart rate has even dropped further. So my resting heart rate at nights dropped further simply because of the darkness in the room. And studies have done they've been comparable studies done around the light intensity. So Lux is a measure of light intensity. And they did a study with those exposed to 100 lux, which is still it's not light, but you can see your way around right you've so 100 lux is you want to be your room, your house before going to bed, you really want it to be around 100 lux in order for that light intense intensity to drop enough so that your body starts producing melatonin. So this is why you don't want to have white-blue light exposure in the evening, particularly, you know two to four hours before bed, you want to minimise it, and really minimise it two hours before bed so that the melatonin can build up in your body. And that invokes that drowsiness. That ability to fall asleep and get into it when the melatonin peaks is when we're really getting deep restorative sleep. So we want to allow that to build up through dropping the lights, have your light intensity less than 100 lux. And there's an app that you can download I'll include the app in the show notes. It's an app, it's it's just an indicative idea. So you essentially expose your camera to the light in the room and it will tell you the estimated lux based on the algorithm and it's it gives you an indication it's not entirely accurate, but it gives you an indication of the lux in the room. So this study compared those that was exposed to 100 lux, which I said in 100 likes you can it's light, it's not much light, you can still see yourself, you can still move around as compared to 4 lux, which is nothing it's dark, 4 lux is very dark. So they did this comparable studies and what they noticed that the insulin sensitivity had significantly improved in those that were in the 4 lux, the darker room compared to those in the higher lux, the 100 lux intensity light intensity. So insulin sensitivity is really important around weight loss and blood sugar regulation and minimising the risk of type 2 diabetes and reducing I guess the belly fat coming on. So the belly fat is a result of insulin resistance. So we want insulin sensitivity, a good night's sleep and a real deep restorative night's sleep will improve the blood sugar regulation the next day. So with a poor night's sleep, next day, cortisol is elevated. So cortisol, cortisol is that stress hormone that keeps us awake, it will be elevated and remain elevated from the poor night's sleep. And what that invokes is insulin production. And again, it's more than a consecutive days or nights of poor night's sleep, the build-up. So it's more of a chronic state, that's not good for our body, the acute state, our body can handle a poor night's sleep and then get back into homeostasis quite quickly. But when it's constantly sleep-deprived, then we start to have this constant cycle of elevated cortisol, reduce melatonin, so reduced deep restorative sleep, and elevated insulin, and then our body becomes desensitised to insulin. So the sensory desensitisation, so it's the overexposure to a particular thing, that the body then sees that as the new norm level, so therefore, if you've got high levels of insulin constantly, the body then sets a higher setpoint, around the amount of insulin that it needs to work with. And then, therefore it becomes less tolerant to lower amounts of insulin. And so our we constantly have high levels of insulin, which causes this insulin desensitisation of the cell and the receptor. And so, therefore we need more and more level higher levels of insulin in order for glucose to get into the cell. And so when we have high insulin resistance, we feel we don't have the energy, but we're taking plenty of energy in, our body's demanding energy. And because it's saying, well, my cells got no energy, I need more energy. So you're taking the energy in but because you have this poor communication, and the cells not uptaking the glucose into the cell, because it's desensitised to insulin, because insulin helps open the door of the cell to allow glucose in, glucose is knocking on the door of the cell saying let glucose in insulins knocking on the door of the cell to say, let glucose in, and then the cells not respond. It's saying no, no, that's not enough noise, I need more noise of insulin in order to let glucose in. And so you had this cascade of this feedback system, that you've got more and more insulin being produced, but you're not listening to it, you've feel like you need more energy, your leptin becomes problematic. In a sense, leptin tells us that we're full and we're satisfied, and we've got enough storage onboard enough energy storage onboard, it gets all this noise, a huge elevated noise of excess insulin. And it seems thinking oh, there must be enough energy in the system, it mustn't be enough energy in the system, therefore, you're producing more less, you become less sensitive to leptin. And leptin is telling this your brain that you've got enough energy on board, and you don't need to eat anymore. But because you're less sensitive to leptin, you're not getting noise, and you feel hungry all the time. So you eat more, you eat more high calorific foods, you're not taking it into the cell. And it's this vicious cycle, to being sleep deprived, elevated cortisol, elevated insulin, elevated insulin over a period of time reduces the leptin signaling, and your ability to pick up on leptin signals to say that you're full and satisfied, and you've got enough storage on board. And so you're getting the signals to your brain saying now there's not enough stores, you need more stores and your thing. And now I've got heaps of stores, but I've got no energy, and I need more food and this thing. And this doesn't make sense. And it's because of this the communication breakdown within the body. Simply, it could be all driven from just poor sleep hygiene. So we really want to get our sleep hygiene on board. And it starts with getting that dark room, that cool room. And also taking your mind down relaxing your mind. So during the day, we are very aroused, we've got lots of sensory input. And with all that sensory input, our brain activity is elevated, it's heightened in that beta beta wave state, the beta waves and these beta waves, lots of cycles per second, right? They're very active, lots of stimulus, lots of input coming in. And so it is it's our arousal state. And when we're processing lots of sensory information during the day, what we want to do is reduce the amount of sensory information we're taking in in the evening. So we're allows our wavelengths to drop, we want to get into that more alpha. So we want to go from beta to alpha to theta. And then you know, it's that alpha theta sort of state where we get into that drowsiness and then we get into the delta, which is the real unconscious level. So, in order to do that, in order to drop the wavelengths at night, what we want to do is start to reduce the stimulus input. So we want to stop looking at emails. We want to start unwinding, start doing mindfulness practices that really calm the mind. So we want to do things that calm the mind to reduce the beta wave activity to get it more into the alpha wave activity, which is the more slower waves, the less cycles per second. And we want to slowly drop the the arousal in the brain by reducing sensory input, keeping it to a minimum. And the way we do that is through just doing activities that just calm us, not excite us, we don't want to do anything excitatory in the evening, we want to calm the mind. And doing this at least two hours before bed is really important. So we want to calm the mind or unwind the mind way in which to mind the mind is through journaling or writing things down. So don't allow things to be open and expose such as I didn't get that done. I'll remember it tomorrow. And so therefore, you're keeping that neural pathway open and you're keeping some excitatory stimulus to it, because you don't want to forget it, it's really important. And so you are keeping your brain at a higher level of activity in terms of consciousness and thinking, because you don't want to forget getting back to that person tomorrow. In order to slow down the brain, what you want to do is put that in paper to get it out. So you think you can put closure to it, you can close that file in the brain so it doesn't remain open. So by writing things down, and this is all the things I didn't get done that I'm going to do tomorrow, putting that down on paper closes the files and reduces the brain activity, it slows the brain activity down. And when our brain starts slowing down, our body realises that it's no longer and particularly with the temperatures dropping, so that the body's got to perceive the temperature drops. So you want to start getting some colder exposure in the evening. Start cooling your body in the evening, start getting darkness you know, so the, our strongest sense is through our eyes eyes is our strongest scent, our sight, our vision is our strongest sense. So if we can start reducing the input through our eyes and lowering the input, the light intensity, so stop getting on your phone, computer, minimise white lights, fluorescent lights, start dimming the lights, reducing the light intensity, it tells the light receptors, our photoreceptors in our retina that it's getting darker start doing nighttime things start producing melatonin. In order for us to convert serotonin to melatonin, our eyes are gonna perceive less light. So we want to have less light input in order to start producing melatonin in the evening, really important. So minimising your light exposure at night, candles are perfect, fire lights fine. It's more that red at red light, that red light is got longer wavelengths and is less arousing to the eyes. So you can put a few candles around, turn it into a romantic household in the evening is fine, because that will still allow the melatonin to start to build up. So I really reduce the light intensity in my house. I use this sleep mask at night. Again, this is a Harry Potter sleep mask. It's nothing expensive. It's really just getting something that's going to reduce the light getting into your retina is really important. The other sleep aid I use in the evening is I use mouth tape. So because I used to be a mouth breather I'm breathing less through my mouth and more through my nose now through getting this mouth tape. So I use this mouth tape for those listening. It's a I'll put the link in the show notes as to the mouth tape I use have even got mouth tape for kids. So if if your kids are snores, or I was a snore or once a snorer, I put the mouth tape on started to encourage my body to breathe through my nose. What that does is really helped with getting the right blood lit blood oxygen levels in your in your body. If your blood oxygen levels drop, then your adrenal glands at the top of your kidneys will shoot out some cortisol to you know and produce wakefulness in order to start breathing again, norepinephrine is also secreted in order to wake you up to get that breath of air, what we want to do is make sure our blood is well oxygenated and breathing through the nose is key to maximising the amount of oxygen getting into our system. We don't we need less at night because we're less active, but we still need oxygen. And if we've got an impaired airways and when mouth breathing, then you know our amount of oxygen getting into our system is less and we can get woken simply because we're not getting enough oxygen to continue to function. So obviously we are we're still needing energy at night in order to do restorative functions and we need less oxygen but we still need oxygen and the best way to get it is through nose breathing and your partner will love it because you're not snoring. So mouth breathing is really associated with snoring and impinged airways really important that you manage your blood oxygen through nose breathing at night. Mouth tapes can help but seek professional guidance in relation to this because you might have some obstructive airway breathing disorder. And that needs to be dealt with by a professional. So there's certainly professionals out there that help with respiration system. And you can also do sleep test to make sure you haven't got the obstructive sleep disorder or sleep apnea. So making sure you get enough oxygen, because that will cause us to continually wake during the night when we're continually waking during the night, we're coming out of our deep restorative state of sleep. And we're minimising the deep restorative state of sleep, which is where we do the repair work. So we don't want to be just getting taken out of that quickly, all of a sudden, just because our blood oxygen is dropping too low. And the other thing with by getting enough blood oxygen is that the body remains a nice pH balance of the blood. And that can help with minimising the amount of urination happening at night because the body will get acid if acidosis is building up, because we're not getting enough oxygen in or getting enough CO2 out probably more than CO2 out works both hand in hand, we need to keep that pH balanced, the body then may force you to go to the toilet or wake you up to go to the toilet in order to get the acid concentration out of the body so that you don't build up the acidosis levels in the body. And that's you know, excessive amount of hydrogen or excessive amounts of acid in the body, our bodies trying to maintain a really narrow bandwidth of pH. So drinking alcohol at night will help you calm the brain. So it does bring you down from the beta high levels highly excited states. So it does calm the brain so it will slow the brainwaves down or you'll do less processing, less analytical thinking. So it does do that. But the thing is that it also is inducing a toxin into the body. And so the body needs to work hard to get a toxin out of the body and to break the alcohol down. And so the heart rate will be elevated, because in order to get the blood around through the liver in order to process the toxins out of the blood. And so yes, you're going to have elevated heart rate you won't get into those deep restorative states but you'll fall asleep okay, simply because you've calm the mind down but we can calm the mind down through mindfulness and doing those practices such as journaling I mentioned before, so they're my top tips in getting in our restorative night's sleep be consistent, cool room, dark room, making sure you're starting these practices cold exposure, dark exposure as well, and truly before bed you're not exercising too close to bed, you're not eating too close to bed, eating too close to the bed elevates the heart rate so eat early and life at night is really important so that you go to bed on a light stomach so that you're not haven't got the elevated heart rate, elevated heart rate will be called due to the digestion so you don't want to elevate the heart rate and the increased digestion will also increase your body temperature so we don't want that, we want to fall asleep. So hope this helps in terms of getting a restorative night's sleep please leave your comments and feedback what's helping you get through in terms of having a good night's sleep I'd love to hear what else you'd like to know about sleep. Please let me know I've got plenty of expertise around sleep, have been studying this for many years now. So please get back to me I'd love to hear from you. And continue to health up, continue to look after your well-being through making sure you get a restorative night's sleep, sleep easy, sleep well, and health up. Thank you for listening.
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