5 Steps to Improve Your Sleep

“Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year olds.” JoJo Jensen, Dirt Farmer Wisdom, 2002

I always like to focus on the positive but you can’t avoid the truth: not getting enough sleep, or getting poor sleep, makes for a grumpy unproductive person and is linked with developing obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and early death.  Sleep is king when it comes to your body’s health and healing; so let’s start getting healthier.

Get Natural Light During the Day

We’ve all heard how using our iPhones, tablets, computers, and flat screens at night exposes us to ‘blue light’, disrupting our circadian rhythm. This tricks our bodies into thinking it’s daytime and interferes with the quality and quantity of our sleep. But it goes both ways. The circadian rhythm is a daylong cycle.  It’s not enough to just avoid unnatural light at night; when it’s daytime you NEED natural light.

Eat Earlier in the Evening

Eating depresses melatonin, a hormone necessary to ready our bodies for sleep. Late dinners and that late night snack could be interfering with a good night’s sleep. Eat earlier in the evening and let your hormones prepare you for a restful night’s sleep.

Exercise Earlier and Give Yourself Time to Recover

Exercise can help you sleep better, longer, and deeper, and make you more energetic throughout the day. But even though you may feel exhausted after a workout, exercise right before bed can disrupt your quality of sleep. Not only does it raise your heart rate and stimulate your brain and muscles but exercise also increases your body temperature. Your body temperature naturally decreases during the night time hours with the lowest temperatures occurring about 4am. Raising your body temperature before bed can interfere with your body’s natural fluctuations and prevent you from reaching deeper sleep. If you’re going to work out right before bed, make sure you leave time to cool off or move your workout to an earlier time.

Develop a Nighttime Ritual

Our bodies are creatures of habit and they love being in rhythm. And your sleep-wake rhythm is no different. Developing specific nighttime rituals help you to stay in rhythm so that you can unwind from the day, let go of the daily stress, and relax so that you can get better and more regular sleep.  Avoid the stimulation from lights, sounds, TV, the Internet. Everyone’s ritual might look different: a book, a bath, meditation, talking with your spouse. But find one that you can stick to and do on a regular basis so your body can start to associate your ritual with sleep.

Go to Bed Earlier

The most effective way to get more quality sleep is to get to bed earlier. Our bodies evolved to sleep when it’s dark and be awake when it’s light. That means more sleep in the winter months and less sleep in the summer months. Lights in the house make it easier for us to stay up and do more work, watch more TV, and socialize at the bar with friends. But our natural rhythm is to wind down as the sun goes down and to rise when the sun rises. There is always some excuse, event, responsibility, TV episode to keep you up so this does require a conscious effort; but you will reap the benefits. According to the National Institutes of Health, nine and a half hours of solid sleep at least seven months of the year is the minimum required to beat cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and depression (Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival, T.S. Wiley). Is that worth the sacrifice of missing the latest episode of The Bachelor? Yes! Go to bed earlier. During the summer months, when the days are longer, you can get away with staying up later, but in the fall and winter, it’s important to go to bed earlier, turn the TV off after 9pm, get up as close to dawn as possible, and sleep as many hours as you can without losing your job or your spouse.

Each month throughout 2013 Franson Family Chiropractic will focus on one specific topic as the “Body Signal” of the month. We call symptoms Body Signals because they are the body’s way of telling us that there is an underlying problem. The workshops will talk about how to correct the cause of the problem as opposed to treating the symptom. Our next workshop focuses on SLEEP ISSUES and is on the 3rd of April at 6:45pm. RSVP on our Facebook Event Page or call our office at 978-927-8466. If you are a guest, admission is free.