Strength By Fitness
The fact-based pillars of quality sleep & sleep related habits.
Welcome to another fact-based article from Strength by Fitness.
At Strength By Fitness, we do not just coach nutrition and fitness, fat loss, performance and strength, and all those things.
We work with fostering healthier habits too, and recovery and stress management are part of that, as is sleep.
So here are a few basic pillars that will let us improve your sleep quality and sleep cycle, and the many health metrics that in turn will improve.
Get 10 to 50 minutes of natural daylight early in the day.
Sunshine is only bad for you if it’s excessive. Up until that point, some amount of daily sunshine is tremendously beneficial for human health, from vitamin D production to better sleep.
I will not say that you have to get outside close to waking up. Please, have your breakfast and black coffee in peace and calm.
But getting that pre-lunch daylight will work better than dipping your toes in the setting afternoon sun.
Why?
It keeps your circadian master clock healthy and on schedule.
Which in part helps to improve our melatonin production and all the other sleep-related processes & health metrics.
“healthy lifestyles elicit contempt, and anger in less healthy people”
Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness
Number two.
Consistent Sleep Schedule.
Keeping the same sleep & wake times 7 days per week reinforces your habits in a positive way.
Just like regular exercise and healthy food habits good folks.
Regular habits become far more effortless to maintain and our sleep cycle is a habit.
This further cements your circadian rhythm. Which improves sleep quality and related health metrics.
Do you need help succesfully changing your lifestyle habits?
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Number three.
Time-Restricted Eating.
If possible, eat your last high-protein meal around 2-4 hours before sleep time.
This pillar of better sleep habits is not essential at all, but I am mentioning it because it can aid a little bit with your metabolic health. No, fasting is not magical. We are only talking about a slight window of not consuming food before naptime, that is all, and its impact is not as important as the other things we are talking about in this article.
But if you are way too hungry to sleep, relax, and have a low energy protein-rich snack.
Like 1 apple and a small cup of soy milk, or water with 15 to 30 grams of protein.
Number 4. Bedroom Temperature.
Keep your bedroom cool. The human body prefers a slight temperature drop in our core body temperature during the night.
It is therefore ideal to sleep in a bedroom that’s 16-20°C.
This will assist that natural drop in core body temperature and in turn, greatly improve deep sleep quality. If it’s too warm your body can not properly regulate its temperature, which will decrease sleep quality and sleep duration.
And now you have a solid basic foundation for better sleep.
Regarding Sleep Trackers, I will Say This.
There is no need to track your sleep, just foster good habits such as the simple steps outlined here.
Add regular exercise on top ( which will help sleep quality and sleep-related health outcomes too ) and adopt healthy high-protein, high-satiety foods if you have not already done so.
Of course, if you feel good about tracking your sleep, by all means, go ahead and enjoy that.
But if that supposed healthy habit makes you feel worse you are in good company and can relax about it.
A simple fact is that a large chunk of humanity get stressed out by sleep-measuring gadgets, & non-exercise stress is detrimental.
Coffee and alcohol.
Earlier in this article we talked about positive habits that promote better sleep. There are other fairly common habits that will wield a powerful leverage over your sleep quality too, and that is coffee and alcohol consumption.
Coffee.
Black coffee is healthy for us. Just do not consume too much, or too late in the day.
Even those who swear they can fall asleep right after a big cup of black coffee will decrease their sleep quality. So make it a permanent habit to have all of your black coffee ( 2 to 4 normal-sized cups ) early in the day.
That means no coffee after 1400 to 1500 at the latest. Personally, I have all 4 cups pre-gym right in the morning. But why?
Science to the rescue.
Consuming caffeine too late in the day will reduce total sleep time by upwards of 45 minutes, sleep efficiency by roughly 7%, and the precious amount of deep sleep with 11 minutes or so.
To avoid this, if we say that you need to fall asleep by 22.00 that gives us a situation where you can not have coffee after 1300, and PWO no later than 0900 in the morning.
Boom. Is there anything else to say in regards to sleep, and coffee?
Sure, let me wrap things up with this.
The quick and short numbers above simply mean that if we still have caffeine in our system when we are supposed to fall asleep it will impact our sleep quality in a negative way by slowing the onset of that sleep, blocking our adenosine receptors, lowering deep sleep levels and shortening that crucial cycle of our sleep, and disrupt our established sleep patterns.
Hence, no coffee after 1400. But if your naptime is 22.00, that means that you should cut yourself off at 1300.
Why is our circadian system so important?
Our circadian system regulates our internal biological clock, affects our sleep cycles, hormone production, and many other physiological processes that are needed to keep our brain, performance, cognitive capacity, health, and fitness levels operating as they should.
Its importance can in other words not be overstated, and consuming coffee or caffeinated PWOs too late in the day will disrupt this important system.
On the other hand, black coffee consumption has clearly been demonstrated to provide a substantial decrease in chronic diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and different forms of cancer. This is why no one should avoid coffee, you just need to understand when to drink it.
Alcohol.
As for alcohol, not only is the complete health impact of alcohol a big negative.
But it also wrecks your sleep quality. Plenty of people will claim they sleep better after some alcohol. And yes, you can certainly sleep, but it hurts the quality of your sleep, and deregulate your body’s hormones and processes in a big way. Alcohol might feel as if it destresses you, but it actually does the opposite.
So, have your black coffee early in the day, and learn to say no to alcohol to further boost health outcomes and boost sleep quality even more.
.
Cited study.
1. The effect of caffeine on subsequent sleep: A systematic review and meta-analysis – PubMed.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36870101/
2. Coffee and sleep: Benefits and risks – ScienceDirect.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612324001109
You can also read this article over at Medium if you are a paying Medium Member.
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