More than anything else, great sleep starts with all the things that happen before bedtime.
Here’s the common story that you might resonate with.
You finally get to bedtime, absolutely shattered from a busy day. Jumping into bed you hope and pray for some solid sleep to undo the days, weeks or months of sleep debt you’ve accumulated. Only to toss and turn and either struggle to get to sleep or stay asleep.
This cycle typically repeats over and over, meaning every morning you wake up tired and unrefreshed.
The important realization here is that poor sleep is a symptom. It plays out due to what’s going on in the body at the time of sleep, but it’s most strongly impacted by what went on earlier in the day.
Here are the three key foundations for great sleep:
- Light exposure
- Hydration
- Temperature
LIGHT EXPOSURE
Light has the strongest impact on sleep wake cycles of any environmental factor.
There is more to light than meets the eye, and I think this is why we have really lost touch with just how much it can impact our sleep quality. in fact our experience of light is nearly the complete opposite of what is natural.
There are bright lights in our houses long after dark and blue light glaring at us from screens. Throughout the day we are often inside under artificial light which is significantly less intense than natural sunlight. At night we have light exposure well after the sun has gone down. For a lot of people the first light exposure we have in the morning is either artificial light, or sunshine through our sunglasses on the drive to work.
The natural light exposure we need to regulate our circadian rhythm is the early morning intense blue light as the sun comes up. You could get this by going outside for a walk for 10 minutes before work, or sitting outside with your breakfast. It’s not hours and hours but just some time spent getting that real life giving light.
At the other end of the day it’s seeing the changing of light as the sun goes down and we start to notice those amber colors on the horizon that signal the days end. We can mimic this in our homes by dimming or switching off the overhead lights, switching to yellow toned lightbulbs and using floor or low lighting where possible.
Managing light exposure also involves monitoring our screen time use in the evenings and before bed, using blue blocker glasses, switching to night mode and just getting off devices and hour or 2 before bed.
Ultimately our exposure to light regulates our sleep wake cycle, so if we want great sleep we need to set our environment up in a way that allows it to happen consistently.
HYDRATION
You need to be hydrated to sleep well and sleeping well helps you stay hydrated.
Being dehydrated makes it harder for your body to regulate blood sugar levels. It struggles with nutrient movement into cells and can’t bring down internal body temp. Sleep quality and onset are reduced as a result.
Blood sugar drops and increased core body temperature are both things that can cause you to wake more frequently or have disrupted and poor quality sleep.
When you sleep poorly, a hormone called antidiuretic hormone is not released and so you need to pee during the night. This is where it gets really interesting. Waking to pee at night would be one of the most common sleep disturbances we see in clients over 40. Alongside difficulty in falling asleep.
The common response to this is to drink less in the afternoon and evening and unfortunately most people find this doesn’t really help. In fact it’s possible it makes the issue worse because it contributes to overall dehydration.
Instead of drinking less, focusing on staying well hydrated through the day and into the evening. Using a good electrolyte before bed, along with some magnesium can also really help.
TEMPERATURE
To fall asleep our internal body temperature needs to drop. This drop in temperature is meant to happen naturally as part of our circadian rhythm. When circadian rhythm is disrupted because of our light exposure and other habits, the drop doesn’t happen efficiently or consistently.
If you are getting into bed and you’re too warm, your beds too hot, your room is stuffy or perhaps you have been exercising or are mentally a bit wound up. There is a lot going against your body’s ability to cool down.
Firstly, staying well hydrated and keeping the lights turned down is going to be a great place to start. You could also look at your wind down routine. What are you doing in the hour prior to bed, what could you change to allow your temperature, heart rate, stress levels and nervous system to wind down.
Investing in natural fiber bedding or clothing could be a great option as synthetic fabrics make it harder to regulate body temperature well. And then consider having a warm shower which actually can help cool the core body temperature.
CONCLUSION
The foundations of great sleep are the things we do prior to bedtime, light exposure, hydration and temperature. We can see how all these things start to tie together, light exposure impacts circadian rhythm, which impacts body temperature. Hydration also impacts body temperature.
We have worked with many clients now to build up these basics and see really positive shifts. With people that were hardly sleeping starting to finally sleep through the night. Nothing in the body works independently so addressing sleep really starts with working towards simple improvements in all these areas.
It’s the things we do before bedtime that make the biggest difference in the long term. And then it’s about hitting repeat – doing these things over and over to rebuild our natural sleep cycles.