Best Practices for a Better Night Sleep

►Eating window.  Heavy foods or large meals should be eaten between 11AM to 5PM.  Outside of this window you can enjoy lighter and easier to digest foods.   Try a small, high-fat snack 1 hour before bed.  This helps to keep blood sugar from dropping too low in the middle of the night and increases GLP1 to avoid waking hungry (eg 1 tsp nut butter, or 1 T of nuts (chewed well), 1 T egg salad or ½ hard boiled egg, 1T cheese.  Start small and adjust amounts to avoid waking before your normal wake time.  (Note: carbs, sweets and alcohol at this time disturb sleep)

►Liquids.  Satisfy your hydration needs before 5PM, then only sparingly sip water to reduce potty wake-up calls at night.  Avoid diuretic drinks like tea and coffee, and herbs after 4PM.  Decaffeinated drinks may still be diuretic.  And teas like “sleepy time“ tea also give the body fluids to process and wake you up at night.

►Physical activities.  Avoid strenuous activities which raise stress hormone levels such that the liver does not have enough time to clear them from the blood before sleep.  Similarly avoid therapies that may produce irritants in the blood such as doing lymphatic drainage techniques and percussion massages.  Do these before 5-6PM.

►Emotional activities.  Ditto above.  This includes emo movies, political news, stewing over emotional irritants (pray and forgive instead).

►Lighting.  Melatonin is an important sleep hormone that our body makes as the sun is setting. Its production is inhibited by the energy efficient LED lights, which, although they make print easier to read, the blue part of the spectrum inhibits our own production of melatonin and signals our body that it’s morning time, wake up!   Since it is difficult to avoid these lights, an easy solution is to wear blue blocking glasses 2-3 hours before bed which enables our own melatonin production. Other sources of blue light include the screens of computers, laptops, tablets, and phones. These devices have settings that enable you to change the background or the lighting of the screen to reduce the blue light.  Google how to do it for your device.

►Do not sleep with your cell phone in the bedroom.  Turn off all blue tooth devices!

►If you carry weight in the abdomen, and/or have constipation issues, then when you lie down gravity no longer helps to keep the diaphragm (breathing muscle) free to expand.  This situation puts stress not only on the breathing but also on the heart!  For this you can try side sleeping with a back bump, or, sleeping on a wedge.  It would also be important to do the ab massage to relieve constipation and reduce abdominal pressure upwards on the diaphragm.  A part of this massage also increases bladder volume so there are fewer potty calls at night. Check my website.

►If you snore or wake with a dry mouth then you are a mouth breather.  Consider  (Google) mouth taping.  Micropore tape is placed over part of your mouth (so you can still cough or sneeze) to keep lips together but not completely sealed.

►Breathing exercises that switch on the parasympathetic nervous system are very supportive of sleep.  These are slow, shallow, nose breathing exercises.   Google.

►Some drugs can disturb sleep (Look up your drug side effects!)  And some nutrient deficiencies effect sleep, notably Magnesium and Iron.