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Get Psyched
Trailer
Bonus
Episode 34
Season 1
Let's Talk Health: Get Sleep (Why & How)
Get Psyched intro music was created by PME, used by permission. Find PME on Spotify.
10 Reasons why good sleep is important.
Why do we need sleep?
The effects of sleep deprivation and chronotype on adolescent affect.
10 Reasons why good sleep is important.
Why do we need sleep?
The effects of sleep deprivation and chronotype on adolescent affect.
Episode transcript from Otter.ai:
You're listening to the Get Psyched podcast. I'm DJ Psyched and today we're talking about sleep. I want to talk about why sleep is important and how we can improve our sleep. I wanted to talk about this because I haven't really been sleeping my best lately, like a lot of people. I mean, while you're in quarantine, it's just hard sometimes to get yourself on a regular sleep schedule. So I decided I'd make myself a guide on how to sleep better to see if that would help me improve my sleep, which I'm going to talk about that in the second half of this podcast, I thought it would be important to address the why why is sleep important could knowing why sleep is important, could understanding its importance possibly help in getting better sleep, or could it in any way help motivate me or anyone like me trying to get better sleep to get better sleep. And for me, I think it totally worked.
After doing a lot of this research and learning about the positives of getting good sleep and the drawbacks of not getting enough sleep. I think that it's definitely motivated me to actually start taking some of these steps and really putting this into my life. To sum it up, I want to say something that a lot of people know about sleep, sleep is key to a healthy lifestyle. A lot of the times when you hear people talking about living a healthy lifestyle, they're talking about eating good. They're talking about working out and they're talking about getting good sleep, everyone knows that these three things are key to having a healthy lifestyle. And something I thought was interesting is the more research I did, the more I realized these three things really bounce off each other a lot. And the science and the studies all kind of back it up. eating better, helps improve our sleep, working out helps improve our sleep, sleeping improves our workout qualities, and sleeping improves the way that we digest things. And they all kind of bounce out each other in different ways like this working out, eating better, and sleep. They're all most effective when you're doing all of these things.
But that's not what today's podcasts about today we're focusing in on the sleep aspect of it. Why is sleep so important. And we're going to talk even a little bit about what is sleep and how sleep cycles work. But first, we're going to talk about the positive effects of sleep. But before we get into everything, I just want to say I got my information from articles that I read and peer reviewed studies that I read. I also got some of it from my time in college, I studied psychology and I took a few health courses, I combined all this different stuff that I learned to put this podcast together. But to make sure I give credit where credit is due. I'm going to link the articles and studies that I talked about below. If you want any more information, if you want to see where all this stuff came from, I'm going to have the articles below. So you can see that for yourself. And some of this also is just from experience. But for the most part, I'm going to be backing up everything I say it's not just going to be me being like get sleep because it makes you feel good. We're gonna get into this a bit, I want to talk about the true positive effects of getting sleep and the true negative effects of sleep deprivation. So let's go right into it positive effects on our body.
When we sleep more, we improve our immune function. This is so important all the time. But it's also really important right now in the world. We're in the middle of a pandemic and anything we can do to make sure that we're safe we should be doing and sleep is one of those things sleep boosts our immune systems sleep will help us heal faster from sicknesses. And sleep will also prevent us from getting illnesses. So there was a study that once gave people nasal drops with a cold virus in it. And there were two groups of people in this study people who slept less than seven hours and people who slept eight hours or more. People who slept less than seven hours were three times more likely to actually develop that cold and people who slept the full eight hours, which means that just because of the way that they were sleeping, some people didn't get the cold.
So if you and someone that you're around are both exposed to a cold, your friends stay up all night and you decide to get some sleep chances are you won't develop the cold and your friend just might just the factor of sleep alone could prevent you from getting an illness. It's good to sleep when you're sick, because you can heal yourself. Everyone knows that you need sleep when you're sick to get your body back in order. But you could also prevent illnesses by sleeping. I think that's great. Another point to sleeping better is more social and emotional intelligence. This is one that I wasn't quite expecting. But I saw it in a few different articles and a few different sources. And basically, there's this understanding that if we sleep less, we'll have a harder time reading people's emotions and understanding social cues than if we had more sleep. So you'll experience a little bit less empathy if you're not sleeping as much and you'll be worse at reading emotions. But if you sleep more, you'll be better at these social functions which goes into another point which is our mood which is greatly improved by getting good sleep but we're gonna talk about that a little bit more when we talk about the effects of not getting sleep.
Sleep helps us heal and repair our bodies. It helps with our heart with blood vessels and with muscles. This is really big for working out a lot of workout programs will recommend you take melatonin because melatonin will help you sleep better melatonin will help put you into a deeper sleep and this is important because our body will repair our muscles while we're sleeping. If two people were to both do the same workout work themselves out to the body theoretically speaking, the person who decides to go to sleep that night nice and early and get nine hours of sleep is going to have their muscles repaired at a faster and more efficient rate than someone who decided to stay up and sleep like five hours before work the next day. Sleep improves our repairing and healing of our bodies. So if you're working out, you're going to get the most out of your workout by sleeping well. And also you'll be refreshed and recovered to work out the next day, which goes into another point. good sleep helps improve with athletic performance. It's been linked to improve speed, accuracy, reaction times, and our mental well being which all together will improve all kinds of daily functioning. But yes, it's been linked to athletic performance and working out. So that's another way that sleep and workout are important. Another really important thing is consolidation of memory. Getting good sleep will help us improve our consolidation and our recall of memories. This is why it's so important to sleep before an exam, you'll hear people say all the time, make sure you sleep the day before an exam and make sure you have a good breakfast.
Why? Well, our sleep is going to help us consolidate our memories and improve our recall, which is really important. If you're doing something like taking an exam. When we learn something first we hear right? It's in our working memory. But we have to get that memory to consolidate, to stick to go into a different part of our memory so that we can recall it. recalling a memory is just pulling it out of your head and seeing it and really interacting with it right. This is why multiple choice exams are easier than having to type out an answer because it's easier to recall something if you have a cue to pull up your recall. And it's also easier to recall something if you sleep on it.
If you learn something and then you sleep well, you're going to have an easier time recalling it. Everyone knows you shouldn't cram study the night before an exam. But like my professor once told me, the best way to study for an exam is to study a portion of the information a few days beforehand, sleep really well so that you're going to consolidate that memory and have an easier time recalling it. Recall it the next day, keep recalling it in your head, and then learn some more information, sleep recall, keep doing this. And when the day of the exam comes, your consolidation and your recall are going to be at their peak because your sleep is key to that you could just stay up all night, learn all the information, keep recalling it in your head a bajillion times and get little sleep. But the problem is, the memories aren't going to consolidate as hard and your recall is going to be much harder. This is why sleep is so important for exams or anything like that. Usually in college, I was definitely one of those people who would study just a couple days beforehand. And it was a little harder to recall memories when I only had learned the information for like two or three days. But when I studied for the nasm exam, I spent months studying because this exam was kind of expensive, and I wanted to pass it first time. And I spent months and months learning the information and recalling it. And by the time I came to the exam, recalling the information was incredibly easy. It works consolidating memories is another big bonus to getting good sleep.
And the last one I have for bonuses to getting good sleep is brain functionality, which includes our cognition, concentration, productivity and performance, which kind of Lincoln's everything else I was saying already. And we all know that like when you sleep well, you feel well rested, you get more done, you're more motivated to do things, it's easier to do things, when you have better sleep, you are more inclined to do things, you're going to be more productive, your brain is going to be working at a faster rate, your performance is going to be up, you're gonna be able to focus a lot harder. We all know these things. We've all experienced it before. And it's good for your brain functionality to get good sleep. So that's why sleep is important. Those are some benefits. Looking at these benefits does make me realize that I've been putting my sleep on the back burner as far as a priority. It is really great to do things I love sitting here and making this podcast I love editing my podcasts, I love writing for my novel. I love doing all these things. But I do know that I need to go to sleep at night and wake up and do these things. Because just staying up and doing them all the time and waking up early and just trying to get everything done. As opposed to taking any rest time is not efficient, it's not really helpful to try and do doo doo doo doo and not do the one simple task that's going to help make all these tasks better. I am way more focused today to do this podcast and to do this research, because I got better sleep last night. As opposed to if I had just gotten a few hours of sleep, and I'd probably be groggy and just do the easiest podcast that came to mind. Aside from just the positives. I do want to talk about the negatives.
What happens if we don't get good sleep? Well, I'm just gonna say first and foremost, the opposite of everything I said before, right? You're gonna have worse immune system, you're gonna like struggle with recall. But we're gonna talk about some other stuff too, the worst of what I've seen so far, and what I really want to talk about was emotional difficulties. This is a huge one. And it's something that I've noticed within myself a lot and I know a lot of other people feel this too. When you don't sleep as much you don't feel as good emotionally, not just physically and this has been reported there was a study I'm going to link the study down below the participants in this study, they reported less positive emotions when they were sleep deprived, as opposed to when they were well rested and sleep can affect our mood. So overall sleep is just going to have this effect on making us feel down.
A lot of this stuff is very multi dimension It's not just as simple as bad sleep means bad emotions. The benefits to having good sleep will make us feel better emotionally, because it feels good to get things done. It feels good to have good workouts done, it feels good to be able to remember stuff, it feels good to have those positive effects. And it feels bad to have some of these negative effects I'm going to talk about here, there's a multi dimensional layer as to why not getting enough sleep will affect our emotional state and make us less positive and ruin our emotions, I think it's important to remember that sleep because of all these different factors, it really does have a big role, not just our physical health, but our mental health, I'm going to go into something else that I found interesting was the risk factor for obesity in not getting good sleep. So this is also very multi dimensional, it's thought that a bunch of different factors that include our hormones, and our motivation to exercise are what effect this risk of obesity, like I said before, when we sleep really well, we're more motivated to do things including working out and you know, getting in certain activity levels.
But when we don't get sleep, we're gonna feel physically exhausted, we're going to be less motivated and less driven to do things we're going to be less likely to work out. And so that can be one factor that leads to this increased chance of obesity and hormones are also a part of that a part of our body and our physical functioning, we have two very important hormones that deal with our appetite that's our ghrelin and leptin, whenever we don't sleep as much, we're gonna have higher levels of ghrelin, this is what gives us appetite gonna make you hungrier, and you're gonna have reduced levels of leptin, which suppresses our appetite, which is basically kind of what makes us feel full. So you could feel less fool and more hungry, just because you're not getting as much sleep, your hormone levels are going to be out of whack and having your ghrelin and your leptin not properly aligned and not working with your body is very frustrating. It's annoying. And it's going to make it harder to know your true hunger levels, which, like I said, is a risk factor for obesity. But not only that, it's just unpleasant to feel hungry. And to have like these fluctuations in your body, like I said, the big three, jump around with each other, eating good working out getting good sleep.
So getting good sleep is actually going to help your hormones out so that you can eat better. And like we already said, getting good sleep is going to give us better workouts. So yeah, I just thought it was an interesting point that I saw there, that it does increase the chances of obesity, but also it plays a role in our hormones. And we also already talked about brain functionality with cognition, concentration, productivity, all that, like I said, the negative effect is that those things won't be there, you won't have the increased productivity, you'll have a lot less productivity, you won't be able to concentrate as much and performance is going to be down. And also there was a study that found that the impacts of our brain function with sleep deprivation, were similar to that of alcohol intoxication, meaning that with less sleep, our brain is kind of operating as if we were drunk. Anyone who knows what that feels like knows that your brain is not functioning, its full ability, and it does not feel very good. And sleep deprivation can do that to us, I'm not going to be really extreme here and go into all the extreme side effects that could happen with sleep deprivation.
But there are people who say that there are certain things like heart disease or high blood pressure, that could be affected from not getting enough sleep. But let's not let it ever get to that point right here, we're just talking about not getting enough sleep and getting enough sleep and what it can do in the short term. But yes, in the long term, not getting enough sleep is also going to have a lot of terrible effects on us our mind is a muscle is something I learned in psychology in school a lot is that even if something isn't perfect, even if you're not getting an entire eight hours of sleep every single night, maybe Fridays, you usually get less sleep or something like that maybe your sleep schedule isn't totally perfect, it's better to try and get it right most of the time, get that sleep as much as you can have a general slope that's increasing slowly and steadily throughout time, it's good to just try and get as much sleep as you can and stay that way. Because the positive effects will build up over time, if you're getting good sleep, the majority of the time, you're going to feel a lot of these positive effects. And it's not going to matter if you have a few bad days, as opposed to if you're constantly getting really bad sleep, then you're probably not going to feel the effects of good sleep as much it works the same way both ways. Right. If you're constantly getting really good sleep, then a few bad days are not going to ruin you, you're not going to end up you know with all these negative effects just for a few bad days.
But you want the slope to be mostly positive for that. If your slope is mostly negative, if you're usually getting really bad sleep, and then you have a few days of good sleep, then you might not experience some of these positive effects to the same extent that you would what I'm saying here is it is important just to try and get as much good sleep as you can as much as you can. Because over time, the good stuff will build and become even better. But if you're going the other way, if you're going to have a bad sleep day and you're going to let that keep carrying on, then the negative effects that's when they can become a bit more detrimental. Now I want to talk a little bit about sleep and the cycles. I'm not going to get way too into it. I don't want to talk about each individual cycle. I learned about it once it's really interesting. If you want to learn more, I will have a link below about these sleep cycles. But just to keep it brief, I'm going to summarize it by saying there are two main kinds of sleep and NREM sleep or REM sleep as most people call it. Most people have heard of REM sleep, the difference is, NREM sleep is non rapid eye movement. And REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep, there are three stages of sleep that are in the NREM cycle. And then there's one phase of sleep that is REM. REM sleep is where we want to go. This is what most people are talking about when they're talking about sleep. REM sleep is that nice deep sleep, where we dream, our body kind of paralyzes a bit. And some people think that's because like, we don't want to act out our dreams while we're sleeping. So our body like paralyzes itself, which I think is kind of neat. I don't know if there's any way to prove that or if we know that for certain. But it's kind of a cool thought that like our body keeps us in inaction so that we don't like act out our dreams in our sleep, which sometimes does happen. So that's REM sleep. And REM sleep is very heavily associated with memory consolidation, a very big part of sleep is REM sleep, we want to get into that deep sleep or we're dreaming our bodies still, we're consolidating our memories. And the way that sleep works is like I said, there's those three cycles of sleep that are in an REM sleep, and then there's REM sleep. When we sleep at night, we go through all these four phases multiple times, we don't just slowly get into a deep sleep and then stay in REM sleep. We cycle through these sleep cycles all throughout the night. And usually each cycle takes about an hour and a half to two hours.
So that's why it's important to get good sleep at night, get few hours of sleep and have consistent sleep. Because if you were to lay down at night, get a good eight hours in you'll go through that cycle a few times you'll get that REM sleep and you'll get these impacts. That's better than getting like a few hours of sleep and then taking naps throughout the day. If you're going to take a nap which I don't know the science of naps, I don't at all. But most people say like a nap is like 20 minutes or something, you're not going to get to REM sleep in that little bit of time. that's besides the point. But the last part of this before we get into how to get better sleep is how much sleep do we need to get them to get these benefits. So to basically summarize it, which I will also link this below, if you're interested in learning more babies need the most sleep around school age, we need nine to 11 hours of sleep, teenagers go to about eight to 10 hours of sleep being an adult, pre adult, all those stages, it's usually about seven to nine hours of sleep, which is where I guess the magic number eight comes in. Because it's besides being a kid, eight hours seems to be pretty standard for most age groups.
I guess in conclusion, yeah, sleeping eight hours a night is good. That's basically what I drew from this is that like, get that eight hours try to get some nights of nine hours get good sleep, yet more than seven hours of sleep. So now this is the part of it, where I talk about how I plan to get better sleep. And hopefully, these tips can help you too. These are things that I've tried out throughout the years things that I've been trying out recently and things that I think really work and helping get better sleep tip one set a bedtime and a wakeup time. And a lot of people say when you do this, you should definitely stick to it all the time, including weekends. And I think that's true, especially when you first do it like when you first set a sleep time and a wakeup time. It is better to do it every day than to like do it a few days and then not on the weekends because you want to get your body used to it.
People who have a set bedtime and a set wakeup time will tell you that if you get your body on a clock, your body will do the work for you, you will not really need to wake up to your alarm anymore. If you're consistently waking up at 6am your body will just wake you up at that time. And you won't need to like try and wear yourself out or take a bunch of melatonin or try all these methods get to sleep early if you're going to wake up that early. Because if you're going to wake up that early, and you're consistently going to sleep at the same time at night, your body will start to get tired and you will start to wear out earlier in the day. This is something I used to experience back in college I did used to go to sleep at like 9:10pm and I'd be up at like six or 7am and I was just consistently like even on the weekends I would just pop up at like 7am and I could not stay up past like 10 that was what my body had adjusted to. So my body was giving me these cues without me having to do anything to help it but just like you could put your body on a schedule you could get your body off of it. By staying up too many times by sleeping in too much. I've ruined that cycle my body is no longer like that I used to be incapable of waking up past 7am I would try really hard because I would like there were some nights I'd go to sleep at like 2am and then my body would force me awake at 7am and I just couldn't go back to sleep. As doesn't happen to me anymore. I could very easily sleep till like 11 or 12 setting a bedtime and setting a wakeup time is very important. Currently I'm going to try midnight to 8am I think that that's a pretty standard base way for my lifestyle right now. It's just going to work. You don't have to do the extremes of going to sleep at like nine and waking up at seven whatever works for you. Whatever works for your lifestyle. I think midnight to eight sounds great for me.
Tip number two, no caffeine past 5pm I actually haven't had coffee in like a week but before that I was drinking coffee non stop like I would drink a cup in the morning and then a cup a few hours later in the morning and then a cup in the evening and a cup around like six or seven very much unneeded I just really like coffee. Which is terrible for my sleep because I would have these rushes of energy and then that energy would kind of live on throughout me and I'd be able to easily stay up till three to 4am, which is just really unnecessary. But having no caffeine past 5pm is just supposed to help your body rid itself of the caffeine before your bedtime. And this will probably differ for different people depending on when you're trying to go to sleep. I think what I read was like you want to have your last cup of coffee at least six hours before bed. Some people say way more. Basically, coffee should be a morning thing. Don't put it into your evening don't have late coffees, if you're trying to go to sleep early. Make sure that your caffeine levels aren't really high a few hours before bed.
Tip three, no phone an hour before bedtime. This is one that is really, really helpful. I've noticed that with myself, if I really want to get to bed, the easiest thing for me to do is just pull up my book and start reading, put my phone aside and it'll be way easier to fall asleep. It's so easy to lay there in bed and stay awake till obscene hours on your phone. No matter what you're doing. Tick Tock is the absolute worst I could stay up to like five or 6am easily on Tick Tock I don't it's addictive, and the screen is bright. And I don't know, everything about that app somehow just has some mesmerizing thing about keeping you up at night. But tic tocs not the only one there are plenty of apps and things you can do on your phone or on your computer that will keep you up way past bedtime. It is something about the screen, you know, like they say like the blue light from the screen is gonna keep you awake that and usually what you're doing on your phone or your laptop or whatever is kind of like mesmerizing is gonna keep you up. If you're watching a TV show, you're gonna want to stay up and continue watching because you're into it. If you're on an app or something, most apps are made to be addictive made to suck you in. And most things are made to suck you in on a computer screen. So it's important to get away from those screens an hour before bed. If you want to pull yourself into sleep, it's easier to do something relaxing, maybe write in a journal or a book or something or read or do some kind of craft. Doing something that's not electronic an hour before bed will greatly increase your chances of falling asleep as something I've noticed for myself. And the research says it to not having those screens in front of your face is really good for you along with this something that I do and something that I've recently started doing to increase my sleep, no phones in bed, it really helps to not do things in your bed that aren't sleeping. I haven't been doing this much lately, but it's something I want to start doing more. I do do the second part of this, like I don't do anything in my bed other than sleep. I think that it makes total sense. If you want your body to associate sleep with your bed, don't do other things in bed, don't scroll on your laptop in bed, I use that chair over there to read because I don't even really want to read in bed much anymore. I don't ever use my laptop in bed, I don't edit in bed. I don't do anything in bed besides sleep.
But also just don't have your phone near your bed, don't have your phone on your bed. If you're going to charge your phone, charge it across the room. Don't leave it near you. It's tempting. If it's far away, you won't do it. If it's right there, you're gonna pick up your phone right before bed. First thing in the morning, I did this last week, I just left my phone on my computer desk before I went to bed at night. And when I went to sleep I was reading before I went to bed. And the first thing I did in the morning was read because my book is right next to me and my phone was far away. And it felt good to not get on my phone first thing in the morning, it's not stay up late on my phone.
So I think just keeping the phone away from bed and having a rule where you don't lay in bed with your phone, it really helps. Some of these other ones are very specific to me. So I'm just gonna go through them real quick. Tip four for me is using my Google calendar to plan things. If I use my Google calendar to plan that I'm going to do something in the morning, I'm much more likely to get up and do it. If I use my Google calendar to plan anything, I'm much more likely to get up and do it on that time. I love having my Google Calendar in front of me because it shows me that there's not a lot of time in my day. And I want to do a lot. So I need to be efficient about the way I use my time. Google Calendar has always been huge. For me, this tip really helps with my sleep, which I didn't honestly expect because as much as I love using my Google Calendar, it was always just to organize my days. But I find that when I'm laying in bed, and I think about the fact that the day before I set up my calendar for today, and I'm booked and I just can't afford to sleep in, it really pulls me out of bed. I'm like, okay, I want to get all these things on my list done today. I need to get up now. So that's really helpful for me for getting myself up in the morning, which is important for getting better sleep, right? Get yourself up in the morning. And then get yourself down at night. Something that I really need to work on number five is setting end times to things you're doing and sticking to them. This could go for anything. If you really love playing video games, tell yourself to turn the console off at like 11 if you want to go to sleep by midnight, if you're really into watching YouTube videos, tell yourself to turn it off at a certain hour to no matter what your thing is, whatever that thing is that's keeping you up, set an end time to it set a limit and I need to start doing this to myself more to there are definitely a few things that I just can do endlessly for a very long period of time.
And I need to stop set an end time to things and stick to it. It's hard it is I struggle with this a lot. I'll tell myself I'm like okay, I will stop listening to music at 11 I don't care what's going on and then 11 rolls around and I'm like a few more minutes and then all of a sudden it's like 3am so it's important to try set these end times and really make sure you stick to them. Tip six is one that I really love working out really hard in wearing myself out. If I am working out and I'm like, Okay, I need better sleep tonight and sleep much last night. I'm going to push myself a little harder in that workout because I know that physically getting myself to fatigue a little bit to feel feel really good.
First of all workouts feel great and I feel really great when I work out. But if I work out really hard, and I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna be tired later because that was a hard workout. That's a good feeling. I love like going to sleep at night like oh, I'm tired because I did really good in my workout today. I mean, working out in general improves sleep, but sometimes just telling myself like, Okay, I'm just gonna run for like five more minutes and I'll be a little more tired tonight. So yeah, I like to keep up my consistent workouts to get better sleep Melatonin is good. It's Melatonin is natural. It's something that's in our body already taking Melatonin is just supplemental to give us a little more melatonin. Melatonin is a natural hormone that helps us fall asleep at night and you can supplement with melatonin if you want to take it definitely do your own research. I've heard that not everyone should take melatonin. I've heard stuff about melatonin that I'm not going to say here cuz I'm not an expert on melatonin. But I will say that I personally use melatonin before to get better sleep. And it has worked for me, it helps put you in a deeper sleep, it can help make you feel a little drowsy. So it definitely does help in sleep. But like I said, if you're going to take you should probably do your own research and make sure it's good for you. Because I've heard that there are some cases in which you wouldn't want to take melatonin. Tip eight is one that's also very specific to me. But I think a lot of people would find enjoyment in this is reading right before bed and reading first thing in the morning. I already talked about this. But I just love doing these two things, not only because it helps me fall asleep at night to not look at a screen. But I really love reading. And so I kind of look forward to this time at night like I'm like, okay, I want to get myself into bed because I want to read a little bit. And when I first wake up in the morning, I have something to be excited about. I'm like, whoo, I get to read my story now. So I wake up and I'm like, Oh, yeah, that story. And then I'll just start reading and it gets me up a little faster.
So this really helps me wake up first thing in the morning. And it also helps motivate me to go into my bed. Number nine is very similar to the Google Calendar. Using a planner. I like sitting there and writing my stuff out. It's basically the same thing as the Google Calendar, except I use my planner a little more in the morning. Like in the morning, I'll write out everything I need to do. So once I'm done reading and I got out of bed and I'm writing in my planner, I get right to work because I see that there's a lot of things I want to get done. So now I'm like, okay, what's the first task I can knock out of the way. And the final tip I have Tip Number 10. Don't turn off the alarm when you wake up in the morning. If you have an alarm waking you up, don't turn it off and just roll back over. It may be hard the first few days, if you're trying to get your sleep on schedule, maybe you went to sleep a little later than you expected. Maybe you're feeling a little bit more tired than you expected. Don't turn off the alarm, go for it wake up, get up a little early. Getting up a little earlier means you'll get a little tired a little earlier. And you'll get to sleep a little earlier that night and you'll get better sleep at night. Sometimes you just have to fight through the first few alarms. But don't ever turn off your alarm if you've gotten the sleep that you really want and need for that time. Now if you're not feeling good, and you're like okay, I could use some more sleeps, I'm really not feeling well and you can afford it, go for it, get some more sleep.
But if you're really trying to get your sleep back on track, I think it's important to have a little bit of that willpower. I never read the book, The flinch. But it talks about how like, Well, before you do something, we always like to hesitate. We always hesitate before we do things and not turning off your alarm, don't hesitate, just do it just get up in the morning, it's really helpful for setting your sleep schedule and getting your sleep aligned. Just as soon as you hear the alarm. Don't turn it off, I only set one alarm in the mornings because of this. If I don't get up at that first alarm, I won't be able to get up. And in college, I couldn't afford that I couldn't afford to miss class or miss work, just because I slept through an alarm. So I put the pressure on myself, I set one alarm. And as soon as I heard it, I knew that I only had two options get up as soon as I heard the alarm and get on my schedule and get going or miss the alarm and missed something very, very important. And guess what, that's how I got my sleep schedule together the first time it is good. If you are thinking like okay, I really can't afford to miss something. And I might just sleep through my alarm, maybe have like a physical alarm and a phone alarm. So like your phone alarm goes off at that set time and you know, you need to get up. But just in case one minute later, you're like set alarm will go off for you. It's a little risky. But I think it's very helpful to try and train yourself to not drop that alarm if you don't want to go to the extremes of only setting one alarm because that could be a little dangerous, then just tell yourself that you can't turn the alarm off. You can't you're not allowed to it's a rule. No, turn the alarm off, get up and get going. And that tip really helped me when I was first getting my sleep together and it's something I want to start doing again.
That's it, there was my 10 tips on how to get better sleep. And we talked a bit about the positive effects of getting better sleep, the negative effects of not getting sleep, what sleep is sleep is just good for us all around. It's good for our memory. It's good for our bodies, it's good for our minds. And so I think it's really important to have this conversation about sleep, especially in this time of quarantine, where it's really easy to get off of a good sleep schedule. It's really easy not to care about your sleep schedule. If you're like me and you do everything at home, you work at home, you work out at home. A lot of people are doing this right now it can be really hard to get your on a regular sleep schedule, it could just be like time is a little endless. But sleep is important. Sleep is good for us and sleep can make us feel better. And that's something that's really cool and important to remember. So if you listen to this whole podcast thank you so much for listening. Let me know if any of this information was useful to you. was any of it surprising you already know all this or was anything new? And I'll Of course like I said, I'm going to have all the studies and information linked below. So thank you so much for listening and until next time, stay safe.
After doing a lot of this research and learning about the positives of getting good sleep and the drawbacks of not getting enough sleep. I think that it's definitely motivated me to actually start taking some of these steps and really putting this into my life. To sum it up, I want to say something that a lot of people know about sleep, sleep is key to a healthy lifestyle. A lot of the times when you hear people talking about living a healthy lifestyle, they're talking about eating good. They're talking about working out and they're talking about getting good sleep, everyone knows that these three things are key to having a healthy lifestyle. And something I thought was interesting is the more research I did, the more I realized these three things really bounce off each other a lot. And the science and the studies all kind of back it up. eating better, helps improve our sleep, working out helps improve our sleep, sleeping improves our workout qualities, and sleeping improves the way that we digest things. And they all kind of bounce out each other in different ways like this working out, eating better, and sleep. They're all most effective when you're doing all of these things.
But that's not what today's podcasts about today we're focusing in on the sleep aspect of it. Why is sleep so important. And we're going to talk even a little bit about what is sleep and how sleep cycles work. But first, we're going to talk about the positive effects of sleep. But before we get into everything, I just want to say I got my information from articles that I read and peer reviewed studies that I read. I also got some of it from my time in college, I studied psychology and I took a few health courses, I combined all this different stuff that I learned to put this podcast together. But to make sure I give credit where credit is due. I'm going to link the articles and studies that I talked about below. If you want any more information, if you want to see where all this stuff came from, I'm going to have the articles below. So you can see that for yourself. And some of this also is just from experience. But for the most part, I'm going to be backing up everything I say it's not just going to be me being like get sleep because it makes you feel good. We're gonna get into this a bit, I want to talk about the true positive effects of getting sleep and the true negative effects of sleep deprivation. So let's go right into it positive effects on our body.
When we sleep more, we improve our immune function. This is so important all the time. But it's also really important right now in the world. We're in the middle of a pandemic and anything we can do to make sure that we're safe we should be doing and sleep is one of those things sleep boosts our immune systems sleep will help us heal faster from sicknesses. And sleep will also prevent us from getting illnesses. So there was a study that once gave people nasal drops with a cold virus in it. And there were two groups of people in this study people who slept less than seven hours and people who slept eight hours or more. People who slept less than seven hours were three times more likely to actually develop that cold and people who slept the full eight hours, which means that just because of the way that they were sleeping, some people didn't get the cold.
So if you and someone that you're around are both exposed to a cold, your friends stay up all night and you decide to get some sleep chances are you won't develop the cold and your friend just might just the factor of sleep alone could prevent you from getting an illness. It's good to sleep when you're sick, because you can heal yourself. Everyone knows that you need sleep when you're sick to get your body back in order. But you could also prevent illnesses by sleeping. I think that's great. Another point to sleeping better is more social and emotional intelligence. This is one that I wasn't quite expecting. But I saw it in a few different articles and a few different sources. And basically, there's this understanding that if we sleep less, we'll have a harder time reading people's emotions and understanding social cues than if we had more sleep. So you'll experience a little bit less empathy if you're not sleeping as much and you'll be worse at reading emotions. But if you sleep more, you'll be better at these social functions which goes into another point which is our mood which is greatly improved by getting good sleep but we're gonna talk about that a little bit more when we talk about the effects of not getting sleep.
Sleep helps us heal and repair our bodies. It helps with our heart with blood vessels and with muscles. This is really big for working out a lot of workout programs will recommend you take melatonin because melatonin will help you sleep better melatonin will help put you into a deeper sleep and this is important because our body will repair our muscles while we're sleeping. If two people were to both do the same workout work themselves out to the body theoretically speaking, the person who decides to go to sleep that night nice and early and get nine hours of sleep is going to have their muscles repaired at a faster and more efficient rate than someone who decided to stay up and sleep like five hours before work the next day. Sleep improves our repairing and healing of our bodies. So if you're working out, you're going to get the most out of your workout by sleeping well. And also you'll be refreshed and recovered to work out the next day, which goes into another point. good sleep helps improve with athletic performance. It's been linked to improve speed, accuracy, reaction times, and our mental well being which all together will improve all kinds of daily functioning. But yes, it's been linked to athletic performance and working out. So that's another way that sleep and workout are important. Another really important thing is consolidation of memory. Getting good sleep will help us improve our consolidation and our recall of memories. This is why it's so important to sleep before an exam, you'll hear people say all the time, make sure you sleep the day before an exam and make sure you have a good breakfast.
Why? Well, our sleep is going to help us consolidate our memories and improve our recall, which is really important. If you're doing something like taking an exam. When we learn something first we hear right? It's in our working memory. But we have to get that memory to consolidate, to stick to go into a different part of our memory so that we can recall it. recalling a memory is just pulling it out of your head and seeing it and really interacting with it right. This is why multiple choice exams are easier than having to type out an answer because it's easier to recall something if you have a cue to pull up your recall. And it's also easier to recall something if you sleep on it.
If you learn something and then you sleep well, you're going to have an easier time recalling it. Everyone knows you shouldn't cram study the night before an exam. But like my professor once told me, the best way to study for an exam is to study a portion of the information a few days beforehand, sleep really well so that you're going to consolidate that memory and have an easier time recalling it. Recall it the next day, keep recalling it in your head, and then learn some more information, sleep recall, keep doing this. And when the day of the exam comes, your consolidation and your recall are going to be at their peak because your sleep is key to that you could just stay up all night, learn all the information, keep recalling it in your head a bajillion times and get little sleep. But the problem is, the memories aren't going to consolidate as hard and your recall is going to be much harder. This is why sleep is so important for exams or anything like that. Usually in college, I was definitely one of those people who would study just a couple days beforehand. And it was a little harder to recall memories when I only had learned the information for like two or three days. But when I studied for the nasm exam, I spent months studying because this exam was kind of expensive, and I wanted to pass it first time. And I spent months and months learning the information and recalling it. And by the time I came to the exam, recalling the information was incredibly easy. It works consolidating memories is another big bonus to getting good sleep.
And the last one I have for bonuses to getting good sleep is brain functionality, which includes our cognition, concentration, productivity and performance, which kind of Lincoln's everything else I was saying already. And we all know that like when you sleep well, you feel well rested, you get more done, you're more motivated to do things, it's easier to do things, when you have better sleep, you are more inclined to do things, you're going to be more productive, your brain is going to be working at a faster rate, your performance is going to be up, you're gonna be able to focus a lot harder. We all know these things. We've all experienced it before. And it's good for your brain functionality to get good sleep. So that's why sleep is important. Those are some benefits. Looking at these benefits does make me realize that I've been putting my sleep on the back burner as far as a priority. It is really great to do things I love sitting here and making this podcast I love editing my podcasts, I love writing for my novel. I love doing all these things. But I do know that I need to go to sleep at night and wake up and do these things. Because just staying up and doing them all the time and waking up early and just trying to get everything done. As opposed to taking any rest time is not efficient, it's not really helpful to try and do doo doo doo doo and not do the one simple task that's going to help make all these tasks better. I am way more focused today to do this podcast and to do this research, because I got better sleep last night. As opposed to if I had just gotten a few hours of sleep, and I'd probably be groggy and just do the easiest podcast that came to mind. Aside from just the positives. I do want to talk about the negatives.
What happens if we don't get good sleep? Well, I'm just gonna say first and foremost, the opposite of everything I said before, right? You're gonna have worse immune system, you're gonna like struggle with recall. But we're gonna talk about some other stuff too, the worst of what I've seen so far, and what I really want to talk about was emotional difficulties. This is a huge one. And it's something that I've noticed within myself a lot and I know a lot of other people feel this too. When you don't sleep as much you don't feel as good emotionally, not just physically and this has been reported there was a study I'm going to link the study down below the participants in this study, they reported less positive emotions when they were sleep deprived, as opposed to when they were well rested and sleep can affect our mood. So overall sleep is just going to have this effect on making us feel down.
A lot of this stuff is very multi dimension It's not just as simple as bad sleep means bad emotions. The benefits to having good sleep will make us feel better emotionally, because it feels good to get things done. It feels good to have good workouts done, it feels good to be able to remember stuff, it feels good to have those positive effects. And it feels bad to have some of these negative effects I'm going to talk about here, there's a multi dimensional layer as to why not getting enough sleep will affect our emotional state and make us less positive and ruin our emotions, I think it's important to remember that sleep because of all these different factors, it really does have a big role, not just our physical health, but our mental health, I'm going to go into something else that I found interesting was the risk factor for obesity in not getting good sleep. So this is also very multi dimensional, it's thought that a bunch of different factors that include our hormones, and our motivation to exercise are what effect this risk of obesity, like I said before, when we sleep really well, we're more motivated to do things including working out and you know, getting in certain activity levels.
But when we don't get sleep, we're gonna feel physically exhausted, we're going to be less motivated and less driven to do things we're going to be less likely to work out. And so that can be one factor that leads to this increased chance of obesity and hormones are also a part of that a part of our body and our physical functioning, we have two very important hormones that deal with our appetite that's our ghrelin and leptin, whenever we don't sleep as much, we're gonna have higher levels of ghrelin, this is what gives us appetite gonna make you hungrier, and you're gonna have reduced levels of leptin, which suppresses our appetite, which is basically kind of what makes us feel full. So you could feel less fool and more hungry, just because you're not getting as much sleep, your hormone levels are going to be out of whack and having your ghrelin and your leptin not properly aligned and not working with your body is very frustrating. It's annoying. And it's going to make it harder to know your true hunger levels, which, like I said, is a risk factor for obesity. But not only that, it's just unpleasant to feel hungry. And to have like these fluctuations in your body, like I said, the big three, jump around with each other, eating good working out getting good sleep.
So getting good sleep is actually going to help your hormones out so that you can eat better. And like we already said, getting good sleep is going to give us better workouts. So yeah, I just thought it was an interesting point that I saw there, that it does increase the chances of obesity, but also it plays a role in our hormones. And we also already talked about brain functionality with cognition, concentration, productivity, all that, like I said, the negative effect is that those things won't be there, you won't have the increased productivity, you'll have a lot less productivity, you won't be able to concentrate as much and performance is going to be down. And also there was a study that found that the impacts of our brain function with sleep deprivation, were similar to that of alcohol intoxication, meaning that with less sleep, our brain is kind of operating as if we were drunk. Anyone who knows what that feels like knows that your brain is not functioning, its full ability, and it does not feel very good. And sleep deprivation can do that to us, I'm not going to be really extreme here and go into all the extreme side effects that could happen with sleep deprivation.
But there are people who say that there are certain things like heart disease or high blood pressure, that could be affected from not getting enough sleep. But let's not let it ever get to that point right here, we're just talking about not getting enough sleep and getting enough sleep and what it can do in the short term. But yes, in the long term, not getting enough sleep is also going to have a lot of terrible effects on us our mind is a muscle is something I learned in psychology in school a lot is that even if something isn't perfect, even if you're not getting an entire eight hours of sleep every single night, maybe Fridays, you usually get less sleep or something like that maybe your sleep schedule isn't totally perfect, it's better to try and get it right most of the time, get that sleep as much as you can have a general slope that's increasing slowly and steadily throughout time, it's good to just try and get as much sleep as you can and stay that way. Because the positive effects will build up over time, if you're getting good sleep, the majority of the time, you're going to feel a lot of these positive effects. And it's not going to matter if you have a few bad days, as opposed to if you're constantly getting really bad sleep, then you're probably not going to feel the effects of good sleep as much it works the same way both ways. Right. If you're constantly getting really good sleep, then a few bad days are not going to ruin you, you're not going to end up you know with all these negative effects just for a few bad days.
But you want the slope to be mostly positive for that. If your slope is mostly negative, if you're usually getting really bad sleep, and then you have a few days of good sleep, then you might not experience some of these positive effects to the same extent that you would what I'm saying here is it is important just to try and get as much good sleep as you can as much as you can. Because over time, the good stuff will build and become even better. But if you're going the other way, if you're going to have a bad sleep day and you're going to let that keep carrying on, then the negative effects that's when they can become a bit more detrimental. Now I want to talk a little bit about sleep and the cycles. I'm not going to get way too into it. I don't want to talk about each individual cycle. I learned about it once it's really interesting. If you want to learn more, I will have a link below about these sleep cycles. But just to keep it brief, I'm going to summarize it by saying there are two main kinds of sleep and NREM sleep or REM sleep as most people call it. Most people have heard of REM sleep, the difference is, NREM sleep is non rapid eye movement. And REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep, there are three stages of sleep that are in the NREM cycle. And then there's one phase of sleep that is REM. REM sleep is where we want to go. This is what most people are talking about when they're talking about sleep. REM sleep is that nice deep sleep, where we dream, our body kind of paralyzes a bit. And some people think that's because like, we don't want to act out our dreams while we're sleeping. So our body like paralyzes itself, which I think is kind of neat. I don't know if there's any way to prove that or if we know that for certain. But it's kind of a cool thought that like our body keeps us in inaction so that we don't like act out our dreams in our sleep, which sometimes does happen. So that's REM sleep. And REM sleep is very heavily associated with memory consolidation, a very big part of sleep is REM sleep, we want to get into that deep sleep or we're dreaming our bodies still, we're consolidating our memories. And the way that sleep works is like I said, there's those three cycles of sleep that are in an REM sleep, and then there's REM sleep. When we sleep at night, we go through all these four phases multiple times, we don't just slowly get into a deep sleep and then stay in REM sleep. We cycle through these sleep cycles all throughout the night. And usually each cycle takes about an hour and a half to two hours.
So that's why it's important to get good sleep at night, get few hours of sleep and have consistent sleep. Because if you were to lay down at night, get a good eight hours in you'll go through that cycle a few times you'll get that REM sleep and you'll get these impacts. That's better than getting like a few hours of sleep and then taking naps throughout the day. If you're going to take a nap which I don't know the science of naps, I don't at all. But most people say like a nap is like 20 minutes or something, you're not going to get to REM sleep in that little bit of time. that's besides the point. But the last part of this before we get into how to get better sleep is how much sleep do we need to get them to get these benefits. So to basically summarize it, which I will also link this below, if you're interested in learning more babies need the most sleep around school age, we need nine to 11 hours of sleep, teenagers go to about eight to 10 hours of sleep being an adult, pre adult, all those stages, it's usually about seven to nine hours of sleep, which is where I guess the magic number eight comes in. Because it's besides being a kid, eight hours seems to be pretty standard for most age groups.
I guess in conclusion, yeah, sleeping eight hours a night is good. That's basically what I drew from this is that like, get that eight hours try to get some nights of nine hours get good sleep, yet more than seven hours of sleep. So now this is the part of it, where I talk about how I plan to get better sleep. And hopefully, these tips can help you too. These are things that I've tried out throughout the years things that I've been trying out recently and things that I think really work and helping get better sleep tip one set a bedtime and a wakeup time. And a lot of people say when you do this, you should definitely stick to it all the time, including weekends. And I think that's true, especially when you first do it like when you first set a sleep time and a wakeup time. It is better to do it every day than to like do it a few days and then not on the weekends because you want to get your body used to it.
People who have a set bedtime and a set wakeup time will tell you that if you get your body on a clock, your body will do the work for you, you will not really need to wake up to your alarm anymore. If you're consistently waking up at 6am your body will just wake you up at that time. And you won't need to like try and wear yourself out or take a bunch of melatonin or try all these methods get to sleep early if you're going to wake up that early. Because if you're going to wake up that early, and you're consistently going to sleep at the same time at night, your body will start to get tired and you will start to wear out earlier in the day. This is something I used to experience back in college I did used to go to sleep at like 9:10pm and I'd be up at like six or 7am and I was just consistently like even on the weekends I would just pop up at like 7am and I could not stay up past like 10 that was what my body had adjusted to. So my body was giving me these cues without me having to do anything to help it but just like you could put your body on a schedule you could get your body off of it. By staying up too many times by sleeping in too much. I've ruined that cycle my body is no longer like that I used to be incapable of waking up past 7am I would try really hard because I would like there were some nights I'd go to sleep at like 2am and then my body would force me awake at 7am and I just couldn't go back to sleep. As doesn't happen to me anymore. I could very easily sleep till like 11 or 12 setting a bedtime and setting a wakeup time is very important. Currently I'm going to try midnight to 8am I think that that's a pretty standard base way for my lifestyle right now. It's just going to work. You don't have to do the extremes of going to sleep at like nine and waking up at seven whatever works for you. Whatever works for your lifestyle. I think midnight to eight sounds great for me.
Tip number two, no caffeine past 5pm I actually haven't had coffee in like a week but before that I was drinking coffee non stop like I would drink a cup in the morning and then a cup a few hours later in the morning and then a cup in the evening and a cup around like six or seven very much unneeded I just really like coffee. Which is terrible for my sleep because I would have these rushes of energy and then that energy would kind of live on throughout me and I'd be able to easily stay up till three to 4am, which is just really unnecessary. But having no caffeine past 5pm is just supposed to help your body rid itself of the caffeine before your bedtime. And this will probably differ for different people depending on when you're trying to go to sleep. I think what I read was like you want to have your last cup of coffee at least six hours before bed. Some people say way more. Basically, coffee should be a morning thing. Don't put it into your evening don't have late coffees, if you're trying to go to sleep early. Make sure that your caffeine levels aren't really high a few hours before bed.
Tip three, no phone an hour before bedtime. This is one that is really, really helpful. I've noticed that with myself, if I really want to get to bed, the easiest thing for me to do is just pull up my book and start reading, put my phone aside and it'll be way easier to fall asleep. It's so easy to lay there in bed and stay awake till obscene hours on your phone. No matter what you're doing. Tick Tock is the absolute worst I could stay up to like five or 6am easily on Tick Tock I don't it's addictive, and the screen is bright. And I don't know, everything about that app somehow just has some mesmerizing thing about keeping you up at night. But tic tocs not the only one there are plenty of apps and things you can do on your phone or on your computer that will keep you up way past bedtime. It is something about the screen, you know, like they say like the blue light from the screen is gonna keep you awake that and usually what you're doing on your phone or your laptop or whatever is kind of like mesmerizing is gonna keep you up. If you're watching a TV show, you're gonna want to stay up and continue watching because you're into it. If you're on an app or something, most apps are made to be addictive made to suck you in. And most things are made to suck you in on a computer screen. So it's important to get away from those screens an hour before bed. If you want to pull yourself into sleep, it's easier to do something relaxing, maybe write in a journal or a book or something or read or do some kind of craft. Doing something that's not electronic an hour before bed will greatly increase your chances of falling asleep as something I've noticed for myself. And the research says it to not having those screens in front of your face is really good for you along with this something that I do and something that I've recently started doing to increase my sleep, no phones in bed, it really helps to not do things in your bed that aren't sleeping. I haven't been doing this much lately, but it's something I want to start doing more. I do do the second part of this, like I don't do anything in my bed other than sleep. I think that it makes total sense. If you want your body to associate sleep with your bed, don't do other things in bed, don't scroll on your laptop in bed, I use that chair over there to read because I don't even really want to read in bed much anymore. I don't ever use my laptop in bed, I don't edit in bed. I don't do anything in bed besides sleep.
But also just don't have your phone near your bed, don't have your phone on your bed. If you're going to charge your phone, charge it across the room. Don't leave it near you. It's tempting. If it's far away, you won't do it. If it's right there, you're gonna pick up your phone right before bed. First thing in the morning, I did this last week, I just left my phone on my computer desk before I went to bed at night. And when I went to sleep I was reading before I went to bed. And the first thing I did in the morning was read because my book is right next to me and my phone was far away. And it felt good to not get on my phone first thing in the morning, it's not stay up late on my phone.
So I think just keeping the phone away from bed and having a rule where you don't lay in bed with your phone, it really helps. Some of these other ones are very specific to me. So I'm just gonna go through them real quick. Tip four for me is using my Google calendar to plan things. If I use my Google calendar to plan that I'm going to do something in the morning, I'm much more likely to get up and do it. If I use my Google calendar to plan anything, I'm much more likely to get up and do it on that time. I love having my Google Calendar in front of me because it shows me that there's not a lot of time in my day. And I want to do a lot. So I need to be efficient about the way I use my time. Google Calendar has always been huge. For me, this tip really helps with my sleep, which I didn't honestly expect because as much as I love using my Google Calendar, it was always just to organize my days. But I find that when I'm laying in bed, and I think about the fact that the day before I set up my calendar for today, and I'm booked and I just can't afford to sleep in, it really pulls me out of bed. I'm like, okay, I want to get all these things on my list done today. I need to get up now. So that's really helpful for me for getting myself up in the morning, which is important for getting better sleep, right? Get yourself up in the morning. And then get yourself down at night. Something that I really need to work on number five is setting end times to things you're doing and sticking to them. This could go for anything. If you really love playing video games, tell yourself to turn the console off at like 11 if you want to go to sleep by midnight, if you're really into watching YouTube videos, tell yourself to turn it off at a certain hour to no matter what your thing is, whatever that thing is that's keeping you up, set an end time to it set a limit and I need to start doing this to myself more to there are definitely a few things that I just can do endlessly for a very long period of time.
And I need to stop set an end time to things and stick to it. It's hard it is I struggle with this a lot. I'll tell myself I'm like okay, I will stop listening to music at 11 I don't care what's going on and then 11 rolls around and I'm like a few more minutes and then all of a sudden it's like 3am so it's important to try set these end times and really make sure you stick to them. Tip six is one that I really love working out really hard in wearing myself out. If I am working out and I'm like, Okay, I need better sleep tonight and sleep much last night. I'm going to push myself a little harder in that workout because I know that physically getting myself to fatigue a little bit to feel feel really good.
First of all workouts feel great and I feel really great when I work out. But if I work out really hard, and I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna be tired later because that was a hard workout. That's a good feeling. I love like going to sleep at night like oh, I'm tired because I did really good in my workout today. I mean, working out in general improves sleep, but sometimes just telling myself like, Okay, I'm just gonna run for like five more minutes and I'll be a little more tired tonight. So yeah, I like to keep up my consistent workouts to get better sleep Melatonin is good. It's Melatonin is natural. It's something that's in our body already taking Melatonin is just supplemental to give us a little more melatonin. Melatonin is a natural hormone that helps us fall asleep at night and you can supplement with melatonin if you want to take it definitely do your own research. I've heard that not everyone should take melatonin. I've heard stuff about melatonin that I'm not going to say here cuz I'm not an expert on melatonin. But I will say that I personally use melatonin before to get better sleep. And it has worked for me, it helps put you in a deeper sleep, it can help make you feel a little drowsy. So it definitely does help in sleep. But like I said, if you're going to take you should probably do your own research and make sure it's good for you. Because I've heard that there are some cases in which you wouldn't want to take melatonin. Tip eight is one that's also very specific to me. But I think a lot of people would find enjoyment in this is reading right before bed and reading first thing in the morning. I already talked about this. But I just love doing these two things, not only because it helps me fall asleep at night to not look at a screen. But I really love reading. And so I kind of look forward to this time at night like I'm like, okay, I want to get myself into bed because I want to read a little bit. And when I first wake up in the morning, I have something to be excited about. I'm like, whoo, I get to read my story now. So I wake up and I'm like, Oh, yeah, that story. And then I'll just start reading and it gets me up a little faster.
So this really helps me wake up first thing in the morning. And it also helps motivate me to go into my bed. Number nine is very similar to the Google Calendar. Using a planner. I like sitting there and writing my stuff out. It's basically the same thing as the Google Calendar, except I use my planner a little more in the morning. Like in the morning, I'll write out everything I need to do. So once I'm done reading and I got out of bed and I'm writing in my planner, I get right to work because I see that there's a lot of things I want to get done. So now I'm like, okay, what's the first task I can knock out of the way. And the final tip I have Tip Number 10. Don't turn off the alarm when you wake up in the morning. If you have an alarm waking you up, don't turn it off and just roll back over. It may be hard the first few days, if you're trying to get your sleep on schedule, maybe you went to sleep a little later than you expected. Maybe you're feeling a little bit more tired than you expected. Don't turn off the alarm, go for it wake up, get up a little early. Getting up a little earlier means you'll get a little tired a little earlier. And you'll get to sleep a little earlier that night and you'll get better sleep at night. Sometimes you just have to fight through the first few alarms. But don't ever turn off your alarm if you've gotten the sleep that you really want and need for that time. Now if you're not feeling good, and you're like okay, I could use some more sleeps, I'm really not feeling well and you can afford it, go for it, get some more sleep.
But if you're really trying to get your sleep back on track, I think it's important to have a little bit of that willpower. I never read the book, The flinch. But it talks about how like, Well, before you do something, we always like to hesitate. We always hesitate before we do things and not turning off your alarm, don't hesitate, just do it just get up in the morning, it's really helpful for setting your sleep schedule and getting your sleep aligned. Just as soon as you hear the alarm. Don't turn it off, I only set one alarm in the mornings because of this. If I don't get up at that first alarm, I won't be able to get up. And in college, I couldn't afford that I couldn't afford to miss class or miss work, just because I slept through an alarm. So I put the pressure on myself, I set one alarm. And as soon as I heard it, I knew that I only had two options get up as soon as I heard the alarm and get on my schedule and get going or miss the alarm and missed something very, very important. And guess what, that's how I got my sleep schedule together the first time it is good. If you are thinking like okay, I really can't afford to miss something. And I might just sleep through my alarm, maybe have like a physical alarm and a phone alarm. So like your phone alarm goes off at that set time and you know, you need to get up. But just in case one minute later, you're like set alarm will go off for you. It's a little risky. But I think it's very helpful to try and train yourself to not drop that alarm if you don't want to go to the extremes of only setting one alarm because that could be a little dangerous, then just tell yourself that you can't turn the alarm off. You can't you're not allowed to it's a rule. No, turn the alarm off, get up and get going. And that tip really helped me when I was first getting my sleep together and it's something I want to start doing again.
That's it, there was my 10 tips on how to get better sleep. And we talked a bit about the positive effects of getting better sleep, the negative effects of not getting sleep, what sleep is sleep is just good for us all around. It's good for our memory. It's good for our bodies, it's good for our minds. And so I think it's really important to have this conversation about sleep, especially in this time of quarantine, where it's really easy to get off of a good sleep schedule. It's really easy not to care about your sleep schedule. If you're like me and you do everything at home, you work at home, you work out at home. A lot of people are doing this right now it can be really hard to get your on a regular sleep schedule, it could just be like time is a little endless. But sleep is important. Sleep is good for us and sleep can make us feel better. And that's something that's really cool and important to remember. So if you listen to this whole podcast thank you so much for listening. Let me know if any of this information was useful to you. was any of it surprising you already know all this or was anything new? And I'll Of course like I said, I'm going to have all the studies and information linked below. So thank you so much for listening and until next time, stay safe.