today I'm going to tell you about the six habits that are wrecking your sleep highquality sleep has changed my life there is literally nothing I do in my life that changes my conscious experience more than sleep now I came from a place of really bad sleep three little babies being a full-time entrepreneur grinding at work having some challenges on the home front I know what it feels like to have really bad sleep for a very long time it's miserable so today I'm going to tell you the six habits that are in your sleep and what you can do about it number one is eating food too late now for example let's say your bed time is 10 p. m. and at 9:00 p.
m. in the middle of your favorite episode you decide that eating a piece of pizza is a good idea and then one piece of pizza turns into the whole pizza in that moment several bad things happen one is your body has to spin up all kinds of metabolic activity to address this food it must digest that's challenging you have a blood glucose Spike when that happens and then once you have that it drops so you have this blood glucose fluctuation you also have a disruption of melatonin production where your body says I want to get ready for bed and now that's off the rails so it disrupts the entire process the body is expecting as you ready yourself for sleep so don't do that I'll tell you from my experience I wanted to test I wanted to find what is the very best time to eat my final meal of the day so I did a few hundred experiments I would test 1 hour before bed and two and three and four all the way back to 11:00 a. m.
my bedtime is 8:30 and I also tested types of foods so i' would say what happens when you eat a salad you know 3 hours before bed or a piece of bread or some pasta so I was testing my metabolic response to these Foods at these times of day and I found that my best time of day was 11 11:30 a. m. of my final meal now you may see that crazy it probably is according to current standards also when I did that my body was able to complete digestion by the time I went to bed now there's a few markers that I looked at to see what was happening first my resting heart rate became my best predictor of how well I would sleep so when it was between 46 and 50 I was almost guaranteed a perfect night sleep when I ate later in the day my resting heart rate would be increased to 55 56 57 and when I saw that it was guaranteed to about 30% less quality it is absolutely predictable so the takeaway here is the time you eat matters a lot now you are different you're unique your body type your metabolism your genetics so what I'm going to encourage you is not to do what I do at 11:00 a.
m. but to Experiment 2 hours before bed and then three and then four expect momentary discomfort but your body absolutely adapts to it now number two is not having a wind down routine now this is something that is so important in my life I know if I work up until 5 minutes before my head HS a pillow I'm going to have a wrecked night sleep just guaranteed because I will go to sleep thinking about the day like the conversations I had the things I should be doing the things I forgot to do the people I should have contacted all these thoughts like your brain's trying to keep track of all the things to make sure you're on top of it or other people may have ruminations of anxieties or things like that my bedtime is 8:30 p. m.
when 7:30 arrives nighttime Brian is now in charge so when 7:31 happens and a thought comes into my brain you forgot to contact so and so today I can say thank you work Brian we have all day tomorrow to address this need and that really helps me call myself to say you know what I'm not in work mode I don't own that responsibility if you want you can write it down so you don't forget about it but it's really important to say that you are now in sleep mode and you're doing the things to prepare yourself for that so you want to be mindful before you go to bed you want to avoid arousal activities so you want to avoid you know arguments you want to avoid any kind of like Hard Exercise anything that's really stimulating your nervous system I'm not sure I can recall an evening as stimulating so during the day our sympathetic nervous systems get us ready to take on the world and Tackle all the challenges but when we get to the evening your parasympathetic nervous system is going to calm you down and get you ready for bed so you want to do parasympathetic activating activities so I'm going to give you a few examples one and this is my favorite is read a book before bed like in hand or if you have a Kindle I guess that's fine too but in hand and read a book so no screens no tablets no television screens no mobile phone but a book in hand it is my favorite and it calms me the very most you could also Journal you can meditate you can take a bath you can go for a walk these activities will calm your body down and get you ready for sleep you will find the things that you like but you definitely want to give yourself at least 60 minutes before bed to prepare yourself number three is having stimulants too late in the day so let's just say for example you have a cup of coffee at 400 p. m. and your bedtime is 10: p.
m. caffeine has a halflife of 6 hours so that means at 10 p. m.
when your head HS a pillow it's equal to having a half a cup of coffee so you want to be mindful now some people metabolize coffee in a way where they can drink caffeine at any time and they're fine but others are much more sensitive including myself so I personally I stopped caffeine and alcohol entirely one because they disrupted my mood they would take me up up and then push me down and I'd have this problem on my hands now with no caffeine and no alcohol I'm very stable throughout the entire day uh if you're going to drink caffeine try to have it earlier in the day but again experiment on the right time that's not going to disrupt your sleep number four is not properly regulating evening light now in the morning light is great getting sunlight in the eyes for the first 15 to 30 minutes the day it sets the Circadian rhythm it improves mood there's all kinds of health benefits that's great when the evening comes for two hours before bedtime you want to start slowly dimming your lights you want to hang out in the warm Spectra colors that's between 2700 and 3500 Kelvin so you want to be mindful of uh lessening light if you want have red light you also want to eliminate blue light so you can do a few things on this front you can use flux f.
