We live in a world where we have more distractions to prevent us from getting some quality sleep. Many of us struggle to get the recommended 7 – 9 hours of quality sleep each night. We live with technology in our lives in some form that presents challenges to prioritise our sleep more. From anything from mobile phones, that have social media accounts. TV and apps like Netflix, Disney+, amazon prime. Where the hours go by while we watch TV or scroll on our phones.
Why sleep matters
Sleep makes up an important role in various ways. From how we feel, how we think, and how we perform in our everyday tasks. You might think you are fine but your ability to learn, remember and using knowledge is impaired when you have poor sleep. So when you are working you will likely not perform as well at work.
You might wonder how sleep can affect our weight loss efforts. Firstly, not getting well rested can affect how you move. Because if we feel tired the next day we will tend to move around less which means our step count will naturally be lower. Which also means we will burn less calories. If we are doing planned exercise, we likely won’t get a good workout in because we won’t be performing at our best.
Relationship between sleep and diet
Sleep also has an impact on our diet. You have two hormones called ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin which is the hunger hormone that tells your body that you are still hungry and need more food. Leptin is the fullness hormone, which tells your body you are full. So if we have poor sleeping habits, then the hunger hormone goes up and the fullness hormone does down. When we have a poor night’s sleep, do you think we will eat chicken and salad? No, it’s the higher calorie, less filling tasty foods we will be eating.
Setting up the environment
Do you want to improve your sleep? I will go into some methods that can be applied. Take a look at the temperature of your bedroom, keep the room at a nice cool temperature. We can wear fewer lairs of clothing in bed and thinner bedsheets to help keep cool. Because if we are too warm it can make it more difficult to drift off.
Keep your room pitch black by using blackout blinds. So you are keeping any lights shining in from the window. No light from TVs or light from LED clocks in your view.
Electronics try to avoid the best you can, using screens before bed. Such as watching TV before bed for example watching a TV series on Netflix. Scrolling on our phones or tablet before bed. Some devices have blue light dimming feature built-in we can turn on, if not there are some apps.
Pre bed routine
Routine is massively important. Now we can’t move when we work. But we can try to do our best to aim to plan our bedtime, to sleep keep the same times we go to bed at night and get up about the same time every day, ideally on weekends too.
Write down any tasks you have to do and any stressors on a pad before bed. Because if you have anything you need to do the next day, it will likely be on your mind and you will be thinking about it so you don’t forget. Same with anything that is stressing you, putting it down can get it out of your mind.
Sleep is an often overlooked aspect of our lifestyle when it comes to keeping at a healthy weight. That most of us could do with improving. There are a number of methods we can use to improve our quality and length of sleep. Which you can use will depend on what your daily routine looks like.
