Tips for Great Sleep
This blog is part 2 of the Skinny Up!® Sleep Series. Part 1 talks about why sleep is important when it comes to weight loss. If you haven’t read that one yet, check it out here. You might be saying to yourself, “Alright, I know I need good sleep. But I just don’t sleep well!” Maybe you wake up not feeling rested yet. Perhaps you have trouble sleeping through the night. To help you today, here is some helpful info for achieving better sleep:
It seems that sleep has a huge relationship to the schedule you keep in life, or lack thereof. When it comes to your schedule, you should try to keep a few things consistent:
• Try to go to get up and go to bed at the same time every day, including weekends. By allowing yourself to stay up really late some nights or sleep in some days, you’re getting your body out of habit. It needs to be able to trust you with your schedule… don’t stress your body out!
• Try to avoid naps, especially in the late afternoon. This seems fairly straightforward… it’s a little like robbing yourself of nighttime sleep if you sleep during the day.
• Exercise in the morning. You might be thinking, “But I thought we weren’t supposed to work out while doing Skinny Up!®.” Way to read your Protocol Guide. You are correct. Your body will be working really hard as you lose weight with the Skinny Up!® Protocol, so during those few weeks, you can take a break from your work out schedule. Or you can tone it down a bit and only do some light yoga or walking to still tire your mind out a bit with some simple exercise. Your sleeping environment is also a big factor in how well you sleep. Try these simple ideas to help calm your sleep environment:
• Turn the temperature down. Or crack the window. Or change to a lighter blanket. When your body is able to cool down a bit, you will have much more restful sleep.
• Change your sheets. Different allergens can cause sleep to be less restful, so let yourself be healthy and undistracted by dirty sheets or weird smells. If you don’t want to change the whole set of sheets, try just changing the pillow case.
• Ditch the phone. Phones are a huge distraction in life, in more ways than one. Specifically, when it comes to sleep, your phone is bright, it’s full of stimulation in the form of information or games. Give yourself significant time away from your phone (at least an hour) before heading to bed. And leave it outside of your bedroom. If you use your phone as an alarm, go buy an alarm clock. Seriously, they’re only about $10 and work just fine. Finally, in order to have great sleep, it is important to give your brain the time and space it needs to process the day.
To help your brain shut down for a bit, try these things:
• Get a bedtime ritual This could look like some intentional deep breathing exercises. You could try journaling about your day. How about reading a good book? Or simply listening to some calming music.
• Take a bath This can be calming, which is nice, but it also sends you to bed with wet hair which will help to cool you down. Do what you need to in order to guard your sleep. Things that probably won’t be helpful would be eating a pizza before bed, looking at the news as you lay down, or drinking at latte at 8:00 and thinking you’ll be ready to sleep at 9:00.
Be smart. Sleep well.
