1. Make sure you can't see your hand
The room must be dark enough so that you can't see your hand, otherwise your body will not be fully resting. It will keep you on alert out of protection from perceived threats. Remember our brain has evolved for thousands of years, and artificial light was only invented in the last hundred or so. Our brains want darkness to know its time to sleep.
2. No water 3 hours before bed time.
The more you drink water at night, the more likely you are to wake up to go to the toilet.
3. The "When I wake up I will feel" Magic Trick
Our brain has all these rules to navigate the world.
For example: We think "When it's raining outside, I'll bring my jacket so I stay dry."
But what if we could create our own rules to influence the result we want?
This is the placebo effect in action.
As scientists know the placebo effect is the power of how much we believe something. Here's an example.
So here's what I do, and in my experience, it's worked.
When it's bedtime I write down three things that I did today that made me feel good to focus on a good feeling.
Then I finish this sentence three times:
When I wake up I will feel ________
I'll write something like "When I wake up I will feel energised, revitalised or fully rested.
When I write this last thing before bed, my brain goes to bed focussing on these good feelings all night long. And if you don't believe this will help, ask someone if they ever had nightmares after watching a horror movie at night.
When we go to sleep, we are still focussing on the most influential feelings, sights and sounds we experienced most recently.
You can use this to your advantage.
4. Belly breathe
One of the things I teach in my corporate leadership programs is "Chest Breathing first equals Stress first.
How we're breathing acts like a dial for stress on the body.
We can turn stress up, or down.
If you've ever seen someone have a panic attack, they're breathing all through their chest.
So if you want to prepare your body for sleep, how would you breathe to relax?
Belly first.
This might take practise.
Place your hand on your belly button and expand it as much as you can before your chest moves at all.
Then once you've done that, fill your chest up with air, without it rising higher.
Because when your shoulders rise, you're over-breathing (Which creates more stress in the body.
For ease of learning, practise this laying on your back.
5. Go to bed at the same time.
Our body likes routine.
And when we create that routine, our brain starts expecting it and when you're in the same environment, so many thing you see and hear, will begin to trigger these relaxing hormones that will help prepare your body for deep rest.
6. Use NSDR
Non-Sleep Deep Rest is scientifically proven to help you get back to sleep better, and recover from having less sleep, in as little as 10 minutes per day.
Here's a link to one of many free guides to learning how to do this on Spotify.
This is a game changer for me especially with kids who unexpectedly wake up.
7. Eat low sugar at night
When we consume high sugar food it can keep us awake at the time when our bodies are getting ready to rest.
We might not notice how tired our body is because the sugar in our blood masks the tired feeling.
Which then will catch up to us days or weeks later.
I have 1-2 small pieces of flavoured dark chocolate without disturbing my sleep.
8. Caffeine before 10am
Caffeine stays in your system for up to 10 hours.
I rarely drink caffeine anymore because I noticed that I was no longer feeling the effects.
After two weeks of needing it I felt I had just as much energy without it.
I think if you're reliant on caffeine, you may not know how to manage your energy well. And that is a skill I teach my high achieving clients due to having lots of responsibility.
9. Use blue light
When we had our babies and were getting up throughout the night, I bought this portable light the size of my hand.
It shone a blue light out of it the size of a pin.
That was all the light I needed to feed the baby and go back to sleep.
I got back to sleep quickly because the light was not the natural yellow light in most homes which when your eyes see, they think it's daytime and your sleep hormones plummet.
Once again, the old part of the brain signals threat and floods your body with waking hormones.
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