The Magic Pill You've Been Waiting For

Sleep: if you are looking for a magic pill this is it! Lack of sleep affects us humans so deeply.  You probably have heard the statistic that lack of sleep can impair your judgment as much as drinking alcohol. But no one seems to be taking lack of sleep as seriously as drunk driving. There are multiple ways that lack of sleep affects us including increased stress and anxiety, increased blood glucose levels, and of course decreased brain function. We're going to dive into each of those things today in order to understand the seriousness of lack of sleep on a deeper level and we're going to connect that to your ability to go after your goals.  And I will give you tips that have worked for me to get better sleep.  

Ironically, I am writing this blog post on a lack of sleep. So, if it seems a little off you'll know why. 😆 I will start by saying this because it's true: you are always going to experience moments where you can't get enough sleep.  It might be that you have a newborn or it might be that your dog was sick (like mine was last night) or it might be just life in general like you're up too late or you gotta get up early for work. You may even have a job that requires you to have interrupted sleep like a firefighter or being on call.  All of this is super normal AND we can still do things to mitigate lack of sleep overall. We have to understand that while life will always happen, there are also ways to increase your sleep and your quality of sleep so that you can show up better for yourself, for your family, for literally everything in your life.

Let's start with how lack of sleep truly affects us. The other day I was listening to a story on Instagram from Kelly Leveque, also known as Be Well By Kelly. She is a celebrity nutritionist and I've learned a lot from her teachings. One of the things that she talks about most is blood sugar balance. So in her story the other day she said, “if you don't get enough sleep your body is already operating like it's pre-diabetic.”  I've also heard similar statistics from doctor Mindy Pelz who is an expert on fasting for a woman's body. Just to drive the point home, I did a quick Google search and the first thing that comes up is the National Institute of Health which cites that lack of sleep, irregular sleep or even excessive sleep will decrease the body's tolerance for glucose AKA sugar. So what does this mean for you? This means that your body is not going to be functioning at its optimal level if you are not getting enough sleep. And if your diet is not normally a low carb or ketogenic diet you're going to be increasing your blood sugar levels day in and day out. This means that those increased blood glucose levels are forcing your body to hold on to the fat that it has. So if you are a woman whose goal is to lose weight or inches or to lean out or anything health related that you're working on, you're going to be inhibited by these higher glucose levels. If you've been struggling to lose weight take a quick second right now to analyze how your sleep has been over the last couple of weeks. Has it been very little sleep? Has it been interrupted sleep? Up too late? Up too early? I know you are probably thinking OK you made your point. How do I fix it? I will get to that later, I promise! 

The other thing that sleep deeply affects in us is anxiety. I found in myself that my increased anxiety will affect my ability to sleep well and my inability to sleep well will affect my anxiety. Again if you are stressed and anxious and you're trying to work on a health goal, your stress and anxiety is literally going to prevent your body from releasing the fat that it's holding on to. And I want to say before I go any further that this isn't about shaming you for looking or feeling the way you look or feel. I don't want you to take this as you're screwing your body over and it's all your fault. What I want you to take from this is tips and tricks to decrease anxiety, increase sleep and therefore see increased results within your health goals. I also want to say on a very personal level that these things are things I have been struggling with recently and I can see just how freaking impactful it is on my body. That doesn't even include the impact that it has on my ability to show up for everyone else. So when it hit me that sleep and anxiety were so closely related and basically created a vicious cycle, I knew that I needed to share this information. A lot of times anxiety comes from stress and worry because we're just spending so much time thinking about what might happen or truly just worrying about things in our life. And if you're in a constant state of worry you are increasing your stress hormone cortisol and cortisol is not going to let you sleep. A little later in the blog post I will get into how we handle this but I'd like you to take a minute to ask yourself if anxiety and/or stress keeping you from falling asleep?

The last big thing I want to talk about related to lack of sleep is how it affects our brain function. Lack of sleep means your brain is going to be tired. It's going to decrease your ability to handle normal amounts of stress, your ability to problem solve, your ability to be creative, your ability to concentrate and of course it will also affect your memory. There is no way with all of those things that you can expect to feel motivated to go after your goals. There is no way that you'll have the energy to put in quality work on your goals. Essentially, your lack of sleep is overworking your brain. And according to sleepfoundation.org regular lack of sleep can actually put you at an increased risk of dementia. This makes a lot of sense as well since there's evidence to show that dementia can also be related to continuously high blood glucose levels which we already covered earlier. I hope that you can see just how detrimental this lack of sleep is to your overall ability to show up for yourself, for your goals, for your health, for your husband, for your kids, for your dogs and your chickens. Lack of sleep has the ability to run your life if you let it. So let's dive into some ways that we can take back control of our sleep so that we can be the ones in control of our life.

I want to start with addressing stress and anxiety because I feel like in today's society so freaking many of us are struggling with this. Whether you fully admit it to yourself or not, if you're not sleeping well there's very likely a level of stress and anxiety in your life that needs to be addressed. Depending on your specific situation you may want to implement all of these things or start with one and add on another as needed.

• Try therapy. I know that going to therapy has some stigma with it, however I think it can be super beneficial just to have someone to talk to. And frankly the therapist that I've been talking to has really significantly helped me. It's one thing to vent to friends or your partner but they're so emotionally connected to you that it can be frustrating for them to be involved in your day-to-day stress. And for me, I really didn't want to put more stress on my friends trying to help me through a hard time and in turn take the chance that that would hurt my relationships. Having my therapist to literally vent everything to has helped so much more than I initially realized to help me reduce my stress levels. Reducing my stress levels automatically helped me to reduce anxiety. If you need somewhere to start for therapy I recommend BetterHelp. It's a subscription based therapy program, it's virtual so it's easy to fit into your schedule and you can switch therapists if the first one you try you're not jiving with.
• Try a night time meditation. Whenever I was having a hard time falling asleep, which was happening often, by the way, I would turn on a night time meditation, shut off the lights in my room, lay in my bed and just play the meditation.  It worked every single time to put me to sleep. You can find these pretty readily on YouTube.
• Try a punching bag. I basically give this advice to everyone now because it's made such a big difference to me. One time I came home from work so frustrated I went down into my basement and I think it was only like 5 minutes but I just yelled and screamed and punched the punching bag and I told the punching bag all the reasons why I was mad. It was such a relief to get all that frustration out so that I didn't have to carry the anxiety with me into the rest of my evening. If you don't have a punching bag you can punch the cushions of your couch you can punch a pillow or your bed. Something where you won't injure yourself.
• Try analyzing the source of your stress and anxiety and then go change that thing.  In a shitty job? Find a new one.  Too many commitments?  Back away from some.  Just need to ask for help? Please, just ask for help.  You don’t have to do this alone. 

If you don't feel like stress and anxiety is the main reason that you're having trouble sleeping you may need to talk to your Functional Medicine Doctor. There are a billion resources, however, available to you to help you be able to fall asleep and stay asleep. Some of those things include:

• Avoid eating dinner just before you're going to go to bed.
• Avoid blue light - meaning your cell phone and computers especially - one hour before bed.
• Exercise. Exercise can help your body to feel more ready for sleep. This doesn't have to be anything crazy, even just going for a walk can help you.
• No TV in your bedroom!
• Make sure your bedroom is a sanctuary. Make it dark, quiet, maybe even with a little white noise, don't pick up your phone first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
• Make sure you're getting daylight. You wanna have sun exposure throughout the day to help regulate your body. I work in a place with no windows and I didn't realize how much that affected me until the winter hit and I wasn't seeing the light of day at all. I started making it a point to go outside during the day and actually see light. It will make you feel happier and it will help your body to know what's day and what's night.
• Magnesium. Taking a magnesium supplement a couple hours before bed can help you fall asleep. It also will help you be regular💩if you have a pooping problem. Definitely talk to a Functional Medicine Doctor about this before starting any supplement.
• Create a sleep routine.  Try to go to bed around the same time each night and wake up around the same time each day.  You need to have some boundaries with yourself to prioritize sleep.  You may want to watch your show, but you need to decide right now what is most important to you.  Going after our goals means prioritizing the goal and therefore prioritizing sleep.  Your show will still be there another day!

I can promise you that starting to get better sleep is going to be a total game changer for your ability to slay your goals. Not only that but when you get enough sleep you have biology on your side. Your body will be regulated. It will be burning fat the way that it's meant to burn fat. It won't be in a constant state of stress that prevents your body from doing what it was designed to do. You will have more energy and therefore more motivation to do the things you told yourself you would do. In the beginning of this post I called sleep your magic pill. Everyone is always looking for the easiest way to accomplish their goals and the truth is there is no magic pill. But people highly undervalue sleep and how it can help us achieve our goals. So while getting better sleep might not be as easy as a magic pill, once you start getting better sleep and/or more sleep, you will have more success in your goals and in your relationships. And the nice thing is, you probably already want more sleep and it's easier to do something that you want to do and that feels good. So my friends, let's get out there and start sleeping more! 😴 You’re welcome 🙂