Ask any doctor, nutritionist
or health expert and they will tell you that sleep is crucial for the human
body. Not sleeping enough dramatically decreases your performance and
accelerates the aging process. The first step someone should take in order to
be healthier, live longer and perform better is to sleep adequately. In the
following text I shall touch on the scientific proven benefits of sleep and
finish off with talking about the idea of improving your sleep with the help of
external factors.
Why we need to sleep Reading time: 5-10 mins
The most crucial and well-known
benefit of sleep is the recovery for our brain and body. During sleep our body
can repair damaged muscle tissue and process the things we learnt and experienced
in the day. What does this mean? This means we actually learn and improve
during our sleep. When I’m practicing an advanced new kick in my martial arts
training or a new rhythm on the drums, I’m often able to do it better the next
day then after the practice session. A study published in the Journal of
Neuroscience (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/36/14288.abstract) showed that the genes that help myelin production
and that are involved in maintaining cell membranes are more active (turned on)
when you are sleeping. Myelin is essential for learning new things and having a
healthy, functioning brain.
Good, high quality sleep is
also a great stress reducer. The risk of becoming stressed is a lot higher when
you are lacking sleep. Sleep makes us more active and keeps our brain working
at a higher level, which makes it harder for us to become stressed in the first
place. I feel unhappy and stressed when I haven’t slept enough, yet still have
a lot of work to do at the end of the day.
Another great benefit of
sleep is that it plays a major role in fat loss. Your body has a way of telling
you that you have enough fat stores: it releases leptin. Also known as the
“satiety hormone”, this hormone is released when sufficient fat store levels
have been reached. Leptin decreases hunger and increases energy expenditure in
the body. It is has been proven that leptin levels are decreased when you are
lacking sleep. On the top of that, the release of the hormone called gherlin is
increased during periods of sleep deprivation. In short, gherlin is a hormone
that regulates overall body weight/body fat. High levels of the hormone lead to
a larger appetite. Increased levels of gherlin have been found in people that
are sleep deprived.
How can we improve the quality of our sleep?
Adequate sleep is becoming
more popular in health and wellness magazines, yet most people only talk about
the quantity of sleep. In the following few paragraphs I will talk a bit about
improving the quality of your sleep through diet, supplementation and more.
Aside from these negative
effects of increased cortisol, stress aka cortisol hinders your sleep. In the
following I’ll show you some methods of the reduction of cortisol. (Note: a)
and b) not only reduce stress, they also directly improve sleep)
a) Exercise. By exercise I’m not referring to running mindlessly
on a treadmill (that’s not to say that you can’t get good workouts in on a
treadmill), I mean practicing martial arts, doing yoga, lifting weights etc. I
name these forms of exercise since they are the “flagships” when it comes to
reducing stress and becoming calmer. I personally train in martial arts and
lift weights so I have tested these cortisol reduction methods and they work
amazingly well. In fact, training has become like a “happy pill” for me; if I
don’t work out enough I become agitated and unhappy. There are many factors
that play a role in the fact that these forms of exercise make you happy
(increased endorphin sensitivity post workout, confidence etc.) but that’s not
the topic of this article.
b) Eat Happy
foods. “Happy foods” is a term that
I’ll call foods that increase serotonin production. Serotonin is a
neurotransmitter that plays a key role in mood, sleep, appetite and body
weight. Low levels of serotonin have shown to decrease the quality of sleep whilst
normal levels of the neurotransmitter are tied to wakefulness and proper sleep.
Although there are numerous benefits of having healthy serotonin levels and
several side effects that occur whilst being deficient, I’ll be only talking
about the ones that are directly correlated to sleep.
Serotonin is synthesized by the pineal gland into
melatonin, which is known as the “sleep hormone”. This means that Serotonin is
important for calming the body down in order for it to slowly transition into
sleep (http://www.livestrong.com/article/136959-how-does-serotonin-affect-sleep/). I’ll provide a list of foods that increase
serotonin production further down the blog post.
Other stress reducing methods include meditation,
relaxing in front of the TV on occasion and spending quality time doing
something extraordinary with family and/or friends.
2. Avoid bright, blue lights before bed.
The effect of artificial ‘blue lights’ on sleep has become the center of
attention for many health gurus recently. Bright lights have been deemed the
devil as to why so many people suffer under sleep diseases such as insomnia.
The problem
with light exposure before bed is that it severely disrupts the production of
melatonin. As I already mentioned above, adequate levels of melatonin are
crucial for a good nights sleep. On top of being essential for your sleep, the
hormone also helps maintain proper function of your immune system, reduces
inflammation and even fights cancer cells in the body (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128103117.htm). The modern day lifestyle is based around working on
the computers into the evening, checking your Facebook in bed and having the
lights shining brightly just minutes before you go to sleep. Since melatonin
production is triggered when it’s dark, most people are deficient in this
crucial hormone nowadays.
Most of us
won’t make the sacrifice of not doing anything on the computer a few hours
before bed (although this would be optimal). That’s why I’ve gathered a few
methods on how to keep your melatonin production going even when you’re using
lights and gadgets.
a) Install
f.lux. This is the solution for
eliminating the blue light that is being shined at your face from your computer
screen. F.lux is an application that you can download for free from the Internet.
It basically switches the bright blue light with a dimmed dark yellow one,
which doesn’t have the detrimental side effects that the blue light possesses.
I strongly recommend installing this application and using it- after all, the
app is for free. Personally I don’t know what I would do without it. For more scientific
information on this topic, please visit https://justgetflux.com/research.html
b) Turn off the
bright lights. An obvious way of
avoiding excessive blue lights before bed is reducing the lighting in general.
There are a few good ways of doing this: diming down the lights, replacing the
“big lights” of the room with small lamps, or turning them off altogether.
While
there are many other ways of minimalizing your exposure to blue lights, the two
adjustments I mentioned above are the ones that I use and feel are the easiest
and cheapest to do.
3. Foods and Supplementation
In
the final part of my recommendations on tweaks that you can do to your
lifestyle in order to sleep better I shall talk about certain foods and
supplements that are shown to have benefits towards improving your sleep.
Nutrients that aid sleep:
a) Magnesium. Also known as the “relaxation mineral”, magnesium is
present in over 300 reactions in our body. Whilst there are many benefits of
magnesium including energy production and the stabilization of membranes, I’d
like to focus on the powerful muscle relaxation properties that it possesses
and also talk about the relationship it has with GABA.
Remember that time you had a
cramp in school PE or at the gym and your teacher/trainer told you to eat a banana? There are two reasons for why he/she told you to do this: bananas contain potassium and the they contain magnesium.
These
minerals work wonders in relieving cramps (cramps are the result of a
deficiency in most cases) and help relax the muscles. Magnesium does this
astoundingly well; therefore taking it before bed can help relax you from a
hard day of work. The other sleep related benefit that magnesium provides is
that it’s essential for proper functioning of GABA receptors. GABA is a
neurotransmitter that has a calming effect on the body. Without GABA we are
alert and have severe problems falling asleep. An important aspect that allows
the GABA to function properly is the balance between GABA and glutamate. GABA
is the “sleep inducing transmitter” whereas glutamate is the “activity induction
transmitter”. I therefore highly recommend taking a Magnesium supplement (pure
encapsultations are my brand of choice) before bed if you have problems falling
asleep. Furthermore, make foods high in magnesium (such as spinach, nuts, dark
chocolate etc.) a staple of your diet.
b) Eat foods
with moderate carbohydrate content. “Don’t
eat carbs before bed” is a common phrase often used by mainstream media when it
comes to the topic of weight loss. It turns out however, that carbohydrate rich
foods (I’m talking about sweet potatoes, yams, fruit etc.) are utilized to
produce serotonin in the body. As I mentioned above, serotonin plays a crucial
role in getting quality sleep. A study shows that eating high glycemic foods 4
hours before bed actually decreases the time it takes to fall asleep (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/2/426.full). In conclusion, you might want to consume your carbs
at dinner so you can get a more restful night of sleep.
There are too many nutrients
that aid in sleep, but the two that I mentioned above are my personal favorites
(others nutrients include theanine, zinc, melatonin and other foods include
turkey, sweet potatoes, yogurt, almonds etc.). If you want to dig deeper in
this fascinating topic here are a few articles I find helpful: https://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-hack-your-sleep-the-art-and-science-of-sleeping/
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