The recent cycle of news cycles have been hard to avoid, a lot has changed in the world over the last few years. It is no wonder more people are finding it hard to sleep.
Good sleep often is actually affected by your environment and your overall health. Many people with Covid have found trouble sleeping. Often struggling from common aches and pains as well as the anxiety that comes with contracting the illness. We have all had friends and family at this point who have contracted the illness adding to the fears that only make it all worse to deal with.
Stress has also become one of the largest causes of poor sleep. Many people are worried about more than Covid, it seems jobs shifting away from the office has added a new layer of complexity to the common day. Working from home for some means working 24/7 along with balancing kids and normal life. The changes in structure from your 9-5 routine will take time to adjust and will also require you to find a balance point for your own wellness and sleep.
Fitness or lack of fitness is another reason we are not sleeping well. Many people have fallen behind on physical fitness while working from home during the pandemic. It is so easy to brush off that walk or run when you have extra work or dinner to cook or soccer practice to attend.
What are some ways we can make changes even if they are small that will improve our health and sleep? The answer is easy, but hard to put into practice. How about we start with a challenge? If you are ready, we challenge you to read the 5 tips to sleep better below and share them with 1 friend who you can use as an accountability partner to sleeping better. You can both circle back and see if you are noticing changes in more than your sleep but also your mood and overall mental health.
Let's get right to it:
1. Diet - Change your diet! Everyone can make positive changes even if they are small. Don't make a massive change that you won't stick with, make the changes small enough that you can keep them up over time. These compounding choices that you can make every day will add up. Maybe for you a balance is taking one cookie vs two at night or skipping an extra soda you don't need. These small changes are more about focus than about lbs, can you make the mental shift towards health for yourself and your family. If your goal is to sleep better, step 1 is to look at your diet!
2. Exercise - This one can be as small as taking a few more steps each day. One of the best ways to clear your mind and also add a few steps is to take a walk. We don't notice it but we have so many modes of transportation in the year 2022 that we never normally choose to walk, because it is so slow! But this slow connection to movement can be a great reset for your mind as you take slow steps and enjoy the moment. There is a great book you can read called “ In Praise Of Walking” new science about why walking is so good for us!
3. Meditation - Take away any preconceived expectations or ideas you already have around meditation. At its most simple form it is you taking time to stop thinking. It is that easy. Find a spot to sit undisturbed for 5 minutes and do nothing, think about nothing and see how you feel! I bet this is the hardest out of the 5 steps for most of you, because it is so hard to shut down a busy mind racing from thing to thing. Most of us live either in the future or in the past, thinking about the next days work schedule or something that happened the previous day. It is hard to actually be right here now in the moment. Meditation is a way for you to slow down, a good practice might be to find a journal where you can write down anything that bubbles up in your thoughts. If you find yourself getting stuck in a loop of thinking you can use a technique called “Noting” and just simply note that you are having that thought and then simply let it drift back away.
A great app you can use to try out meditation for newbies ( like us ) is Headspace. They have a free 10 day trial that makes getting started easy! https://www.headspace.com/
4. No phones before bed. This one is simple! Make yourself a calendar invite that starts 2 hrs before bed that says “ NO PHONES BEFORE BED'' and make it a habit to SHUT. IT. DOWN. before you go to bed. It is important because physically your body becomes more awake as it absorbs all of the blue light illuminating from your phone. It also adds to the stress and signal intake from all of the noise online. It's like junkfood for your mind and you can shut it down early.
5. Set Limits - Limit the messages / signals to your body each day ( ie be mindful of what you watch on tv or what you read on the news as they make impressions on your subconscious ) Most people see between 4000 and 10,000 ads per day, this does not take in to account all of the other messages you see in TV, Movies and Social Media all are signals and things you will end up thinking about and processing. This is why you might sometimes find yourself dreaming about something that happened that day or something you saw, these impressions will keep you awake at night so limit what you see. This can be as easy as turning off the TV early, setting up ad blockers, and reading more books. Again the goal is to make simple changes you can live with and keep doing daily!
Some fun suggestions outside of our 5 tips for sleeping better “from the experts”
Why we sleep book, highly recommend:
Get the book
Yoga For Complete Beginners - 20 Minute Home Yoga Workout!
Ok, here are the bonus points of this blog post. If you really want to see a noticeable change, you have to measure it. You can never make changes if you can't see progress and adjust. One way you can do this is by keeping a sleep journal.
Journal your health and sleep patterns
• Do a daily journal of your sleep patterns - how do you feel each night before bed
• Write down 3 things you are thankful for / three things you are good at
• Write down anything you are worried about or ruminating on that you need to let go of for the the day
• Review your journal each week to see if you are finding any patterns that might need to be adjusted
Tracking health is important because
• It allows you to see patterns
• You can see your progress and find motivation
• You are focused on making change
• You build in your own accountability to health
• You might find tracking other areas of your life helpful ( eating habits, fitness etc)
CBD for Sleep
CBD is not a miracle cure but for sure an amazing kick start to sleeping better. We have heard from many of our customers that they have been finding their best nights sleep using our full spectrum gummies 30 minutes before bed.
The difference between full spectrum and isolate products are that our full spectrum gummies have more cannabinoids giving you what some call the entourage effect. An isolate product only contains the one single cannabinoid.
CBD won't make you feel high, but will help you relax. It is hard to say what the right dose of CBD is for you as everyone is different. The best way to start would be to add a small dose once per day for a week and then make adjustments at the end of the week increasing or decreasing the dose as needed.
The best way to consume it is again you guessed it, whatever way is easy for you that you can stick with. There are a variety of ways to consume CBD products, the two most popular being CBD gummies and CBD Tincture. The gummies are an easy on the go CBD choice that comes pre dosed so you can just eat one or two depending on your needs. The tincture allows for a bit of flexibility of your dose or also allows you to add it to a topper on your favorite foods or drinks.
Our goal is to make sure you are feeling your best, hopefully this blog post helps in a small way, if so share it with a friend!