Why We NEED Sleep

1: Technology And Sleep (Love/Hate)

2: Removing Blue Light In The Right Way

3: Video Games And The Brain!

4: Use The BEST Alarm

5: Distraction Elimination

6: Bedrooms ONLY For Sleeping

7: Body Temperature Regulation

8: Optimising Your Mattress

9: Inclined Bed Therapy (IBT)

10: Keeping Things Clean

11: Embrace The darkness

12: Silence Is Golden

13: Leaving Stress Behind

14: It’s All In Your Mind

15: Breathe In… Breathe Out

16: See The Light (Visualisation Methods)

17: Exercising For Better Sleep!

18: Yoga For Resting

19: Wear Yourself Out!

18: Routine is KING

19: Using Natural Sleep Aids

20: Kava Kava

21: Passion Flower and ‘Sleep Tea’

22: Melatonin

23: Don’t look at the time

24: Wear your socks to bed

25: Dip your face in freezing water

26: Try Binaural beats

27: Make a dreaming pillow

28:Use the 4-7-8 method

29: Don’t eat heavy foods just before sleep

30: Get your partner to massage you

31: Wear something comfortable

32: Get your posture right

33: Get a GOOD mattress

34: Your sex life

35: Stop napping!

36: Drink something warm

37: Get lots of sunshine

38: Limit your caffeine intake

39: Tense all your muscles and then relax them

40: The staircase technique

41: Drink enough water

42: Stop the snoring!

43: Reset your body clock

44: Breathe only through your left nostril

45: Wear a sleep mask

46: Write in a journal before bed

47: Set goals and follow them

48: Cold water therapy

49: Get up earlier

50: Subliminal learning at night

Conclusion

Free bonuses for readers!

Further Sleep And Energy Optimisation

Why We NEED Sleep

Sleep is a strange beast. Despite DECADES of study, there’s still so much we don’t know about it.

The sleep cycle was only really discovered in the 1930’s, and the four stages of that cycle were identified years later. And even though research continues, the sleep cycle proves largely impervious to the tamperings of modern medicine.

Sure, there are pills to make you sleep sooner, longer, or with fewer dreams, but none of them really make your sleep BETTER, or at least not without side effects.

Luckily, you don’t actually need fancy pharmaceuticals to sleep well every night! Instead, you can rely on simple habits and a few powerful lifestyle changes. When all else fails, there are a few natural remedies that will improve your sleep health and help get you on the right night-time track.

Look, I get it:

There could be any number of reasons you might not be getting a great night’s sleep. It might be as simple as drinking caffeine too late in the day- your last cup should be at least eight hours before bed- or as complex as a mood disorder. Identifying the reasons you aren’t sleeping well is a vital step in improving your rest.

And that’s what this book is all about. This is based on a lot of researching how to sleep better, sleep hacks, and methods that you can use TONIGHT to sleep better, and feel better in the morning.

You don’t have to read this all the way through the first time, and many people will probably read a section here and there. It’s arranged into 50 tips, techniques and hacks for sleeping better, along with some bonus material at the end.

But why is sleep important?

Sleep affects almost every process and system in your body and mind. It’s absolutely essential for our survival and it helps us do all sorts of amazing things.

Specifically though, it multiplies any force you’re trying to put out. If you’re trying to achieve something whether it’s becoming an athlete, writing a book or creating some art, getting better sleep will make it easier.

Sleep helps us recover from injury or exercise, it rejuvenates our minds and helps us think faster. It’s pretty important, but most of us don’t give it the attention or respect it deserves.

We’re busy, we think we have to work during the night, and we keep ourselves awake at night with films and phone screens.

In the perfect world, we should be waking up when the sun rises in the morning, and going to sleep soon after it sets at night..

But how many people do that?

You’d be laughed at if you went to bed at 8:30PM in most social circles, but as we’ll explore, it’s important for a huge number of reasons.

This isn’t as much a guide as it is a collection of useful tips and tricks you can use to sleep better. We’ve written this with the busy person in mind, so you can pick it up whenever you have a spare 5 minutes and just bite off a small section. Maybe you can just read one tip a day, and put it into practice! Let’s go!

1: Technology And Sleep (Love/Hate)

One of the most common reasons people lose sleep in today’s society is their technology.

Phones for example, make our lives simpler in many ways. We can talk to anyone at any time. Texting and instant messaging make communication simple and immediate. Calendars, emails, jobs, games...everything is available. However, that constant access also creates a new expectation of constant availability:

You never get to “turn off.”

Many people also use their phones as their alarms, so whenever they wake up, they check their phone for the time and get pulled in by the many notifications on their phone instantly.

Change up your technology habits for a better night’s sleep. It might not be easy and there will certainly be pressure from all your iPhone apps and desktop bookmarks to consume more content, for longer, more often but TRY and break the cycle!

The best way of starting to do this is to separate your phone from your alarm clock. Buy a cheap alarm clock online and leave your phone in another room. This will help you think about it less, and not worry so much about notifications in the middle of the night. Even if your phone is on silent, you’ll still THINK about checking it if you KNOW it’s under your pillow.

And this leads to bad sleep habits, so put it in another room, and use an actual alarm clock to wake up. It makes a big difference! And you’ll be able to wake up slowly and peacefully, maybe even say good morning to your partner first as well!

Lots of people often say they ‘have’ to use their phone as their alarm, but I would disagree. There’s no special alarm function on a phone that you can’t get on a real alarm clock, it’s just an excuse. Try it for a few nights! Put your phone on to charge either across the room or in a totally different room of the house.

You could even go one step further with this, and just avoid social media entirely as well. Social media is a tool used to keep up with your friends and see what people are up to. It sounds good in theory, but what’s actually going on?

Well, you likely don’t even USE it for that any more.

The amount of adverts on big social media platforms has risen steadily month on month for years. If you really take a moment to scroll through and LOOK at what content you’re being shown, most of it is adverts, and videos from pages you didn’t even follow.

You rarely use it to actually share your life, and even when people do, it’s a fake version. It’s the ‘best’ version, the version of your life that looks best for the camera, for the ‘likes’. It’s rarely about your actual life, and everyone’s just scrolling through these social media websites not really concerned with WHAT they’re being shown.

It’s because social media is addictive. The chemicals we get in our bodies when we scroll through or get attention on one of our posts are addictive. So that’s why we keep coming back, but I challenge you to go a week without looking at social media.

I gave up all social media years ago, and it was the best thing I’ve done! I don’t concern myself with adverts, or low vibration things like gossip and drama. I just focus on my life, the people I love, and experiencing the moment.

2: Removing Blue Light In The Right Way

One easy change you can make, is to use a blue light cancelling app when you use your phone or tablet before bedtime.

There are also apps that allow you to read with a ‘blue light filter’.

Many of these will make your phone screen seem orange or yellow, but this is a good thing (although it takes some getting used to). Some tablets, like Kindles even come with built-in blue light filters, and you can set a schedule so that it always turns on when you’re nearing bedtime.

Blue light is a recent topic of many academic studies. They’re finding that blue light actually changes the frequency of your brain waves. When you’re getting close to sleep, your brain waves get longer and slightly slower.

Blue light entering the eyes actually causes your brainwaves to shorten, as though you are still AWAKE.

Blue light refers to the bright blue light emitted from things like TV screens, LED lights, phone screens etc. It’s not actually needed for you to be able to see a picture on the screen though, which means you can turn it off, or down!

By cancelling out this blue light, you can avoid this shift in your brain wave length and stay on track for deep, quality sleep. You need those long brain waves to reach all of the four stages of the sleep cycle.

Think of the blue light in your screens like an artificial ‘sun’.

Although it’s nowhere near as powerful, because it’s so harsh and artificial it DOES release the same hormones in your body that sun releases.

This means it keeps your body tuned to being awake. It stops you being able to relax, wind down, and start producing more ‘sleep hormones’ like melatonin.

Luckily, it’s very easy to change this, and you can download or use apps and functions to stop blue light after certain times of the day. I use Fl.ux (not a typo, that’s the name of the program) which works with Windows or Mac. It works on a timer, and once you’ve told it your wake up and bedtimes, it automatically takes the blue light down in the evenings.

You won’t really notice it until it gets to about 9PM and the screen looks noticeably redder, but it has an enormous impact on your sleep! You’ll be able to look at your laptop screen almost right up until bed time without it affecting your sleep too much.

Now, that being said I still wouldn’t suggest looking at a screen right up to bed time. I’d suggest turning screens off at last an hour before bed, but we’ll come to that later. If your work involves looking at screens at night or something like that, this is useful!