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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, welcome back to week three of this Christmas challenge. Now this week is sleep and recovery week. I mentioned this in the first week but the reason why we're doing like sleep specific stuff is because we don't really prioritize it even though we say we're going to. And it kind of makes it a lot easier if we've a theme for the week. So this week's about sleep and recovery.
Speaker 1:So maybe you don't wanna be focusing on the training as much or the macros if you feel like it's overwhelming you, but definitely try and eat well and get a sleep industry just to see the difference it is in your life. Now the important the reason why sleep is vital is this study on, sleep more to stress less, and they wanted to figure out was it poor sleep that caused burnout or was it burnout that caused poor sleep, right? So we know things impact sleep, we know psychological stuff and all that, but having less sleep, can impair autoimmune response, increase risk to your metabolic and cardiovascular health. They can definitely worsen your cognitive performance. I think in some things they say like if you sleep deprivacy like being slightly drunk or whatever, you're more snappy, you're probably the worst person overall, so it's not ideal.
Speaker 1:And, obviously, this is gonna be different for all of you because some of you've got kids and all. I'm not saying it's easy for everyone to get to seven, eight hours, but you have to put the effort into actually improve your sleep. No one else is gonna do it for you. So this research, by some Brazilian scientists, they collected data on 92 adults, and they used innovative statistical methods to see if one might be to blame or the other. So years of the study worked.
Speaker 1:Each participant used an app to log the number of hours they slept and to rate their stress levels from one to 10, very similar to how you do it in the turtle app, actually. It's pretty much exactly the same as ours. So So you definitely need to use that in the turtle app this week. And only those that followed instructions for thirty days straight were included in the results. So the researchers were looking for answers to four questions.
Speaker 1:They were looking after a especially short night of sleep, how long does an average sleep duration take to return to normal? After an especially stressful day, how long does it take for stress levels to return to normal? Does a day stress level have an effect on the next night of sleep? And does sleep duration affect the next day stress level? Here's what the study found.
Speaker 1:For the people in this study, sleep was the instigator of stress, not the other way around. So a lack of rest increased the participants perceived stress the following day, but stress levels didn't impact the next night's slumber. And this is quite surprising actually because we you'd really think it's the other way around. Also, participants seem to recover faster from a poor night's sleep than they did from a high stress day. Right?
Speaker 1:So they captured these levels in real time. So it's a very, very good kind of study. The tracking methods that obviously can be improved, they could maybe wear like wearables and stuff like that. But it is important to realize that if you're feeling very stressed and then you're not getting much sleep and you think stress causes sleep, it might be the other way around. So this week, make sure you get seven to eight hours of good sleep and you have good high sleep hygiene, which is, blackout blinds or, like, really dark room.
Speaker 1:Make sure it's not too warm. Make sure that maybe you don't eat an hour or two before sleeping, you don't drink much fluids before you sleep, so you don't wake up, go toilet. Maybe try white noise if you haven't already. Make sure, like, if you find it hard to fall asleep, no phone an hour or two before. Maybe read a book that can help you go to sleep.
Speaker 1:So try these things to get to sleep at a certain time. And the task today as well is is actually set your bedtime and your wake time. So you're gonna say today, I'm gonna go to bed at 9PM tonight. That means I'll probably try and get to sleep by 09:30, and I'm gonna wake up at 6AM. You know, you're gonna have those in place.
Speaker 1:And tonight we've got the, sleep seminar, and then also afterwards the yoga nidra with Annie, which is gonna happen Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. So you're gonna have the yoga to kind of get you to sleep from 9PM four days of this week to see if it helps. And if it does, it might be something you're gonna add in, when you need better sleep, maybe something some, like, super tool you can use. More sleep is, like, always nearly is, like, always a good idea. Like, most of you listening probably don't get good sleep.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna reduce your stress, we start with sleep. Like, I know sometimes it's hard to go to sleep when you're stressed because your mind's playing up and all that, but that's why it's important to have this ritual in the night to like set you like, get you ready to go to sleep. Like, we do it in the morning, we wake up, we have our coffee, we go for a walk, we might do a workout. You know, you have the shower, you have this kind of waking up routine. But in the night, we tend to just like, alright.
Speaker 1:Well, whenever I'm bored of scrolling on my phone, I'll try and go to sleep. And then you find, oh, well, I can't. It's because it's not, like, baked into your routine in the night, so it's very random. So you can't get into a sleep routine. But definitely look at seven hours minimum for this week if you can, and put it in the turtle app.
Speaker 1:Put it into the daily diary in there. So in the in the daily diary, in the morning, it asks you where your sleep was the night before. And in the evening part of the diary, it asks you how your, stress was that day, so your perceived stress. So it doesn't have to be physically you're, like, probably shaking my stress or whatever, but, like, how stressed do you feel today? And that's important to look at.
Speaker 1:So that's really the study that's like fueling why we wanna try this this week. Because there's many ways to reduce your stress. There's like doing exercise, which also helps you sleep. You know, there's kind of writing things down, journaling, there's, you know, therapy, there's all these things. But we sometimes overlook things that we can kind of do ourselves quite, you know, instantaneously.
Speaker 1:Like tonight I can improve my stress levels tonight if I sleep well. And tomorrow I'll feel in a much better headspace to tackle all that stuff. So that's it for today. I want to leave you with that. Your task is to set a bedtime and wake time for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Ideally, join the, sleep seminar tonight where I'm going to go over all the research I found on sleep, and it might be useful for you to go and try those out. And then your yoga nidra as well. So remember it's week three now, so you've done two weeks or at the end of this week we're halfway through. Some of you might be like, oh my god, I haven't done much in the last two weeks. I'm feeling stressed, what's the point?
Speaker 1:Some of you might be smashing it. Just remember like how much momentum you can build in just a few days, let alone a week or two, and there's four full weeks left. So don't worry if you haven't made the most of it so far. Just get into it today because morning and complaining like, oh, I feel so bad. I've done a bad weekend again.
Speaker 1:No. I need none of that's gonna help you. What's gonna help you is focus in today, one day at a time, track your nutrition, get your steps in, get a good night's sleep. That as you call, there is no doubt you'll have a better day tomorrow. Like how can you not have a better day tomorrow if those things are covered?
Speaker 1:So have a good one. I'll see you later on tonight in seminar. And, yeah, can you turn up with a pen and paper, and speak soon.