A couple of days ago, there was a really interesting article out on the internet talking about how sleep deprivation, chronic sleep deprivation is actually killing us.

It went so far as to say that.

Now, I know, we wanna get shocking headlines so people actually read our articles but I am here to tell you after years of researching this specific topic that chronic sleep deprivation does affect your health, your emotional health, your physical health, all aspects of your health, all the way from cancer to obesity to depression, you name it.

If you’re not sleeping well, it’s going to increase your risks of those things.

So okay, what are we gonna do about this, right? We talk about it. Everyone knows now that they should be getting better quality sleep, better sleep without always reaching for pharmaceutical help, right? How do you naturally teach your body how to sleep well? I’m gonna give you a few tips here today to get you started at least.

The first thing you wanna do is have a look at your light source close to bedtime. We know that light and dark play a crucial and vital role in cuing our body clocks about the difference between daytime and nighttime.

Now, the trouble is since the invention of the light bulb and televisions and iPads and iPhones and computers, all of us are taking in much more light than we normally would in the evening hours, right?

So instead of giving your body a nice two or three hour period to get melatonin going, get enough melatonin in your body to fall asleep and sleep all night, we’re just blasting our eyes full of blue light and we know that that is the one that interferes the most with our melatonin production.

So my advice would be for one hour before bed, let’s just start there. Turn it off, right? I know it’s hard but turn it off. Turn off the extra lights in the house. Close the curtains if the sun’s still out. Power off your phone and do something else, right?

Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could say to you, listen, I’m gonna give you one hour a day to do whatever you want. Take a bath, read a book, look at magazines, start that novel you’ve been wanting to write. There’s a lots of things that you can do that don’t involve a screen.

Although, right, we’re pretty addicted. I get it. But try to think of some things that you could do instead just for that one hour and if you need a light source to do it, you can go right onto Amazon and purchase a light bulb that blocks the blue. They’re called blue blockers and that’s gonna just give out a nice, warm yellowish light that’s still easy to read by and write by if you’re writing but it’s going to allow your melatonin to start being produced to a high enough level to get you sleeping through the night.

So that’s, that’s one easy thing you can do. Another thing you wanna do is make your room a sleep sanctuary, right? Make sure it’s nice and dark. It should kinda be a little bit like a cave when you go into it.

It’s gotta be nice and dark, no little light source, no light from your TV screen, no light from your alarm clock. So put all those things away.

Make sure you’ve got nice, comfortable sheets that feel inviting. You want your room to kinda rise up to greet you when you walk in. So clear out the clutter. Make the bed in the morning just so that when you walk into that space, your body goes, ah, right? Your body goes, it’s nice in here. I’m not stressed about that pile of laundry. I’m not worried about my work papers over there. I’m being welcomed into the experience of going to sleep for the night. Very, very, very important. So easy to do.

One last little tip is to watch your caffeine consumption and everybody gets it, right? You really shouldn’t have a cup of coffee at dinner if you wanna go to bed well at night but for some people, we all metabolize caffeine a little bit differently so for some people out there, even having a cup at three o’clock in the afternoon is going to interfere with you going to bed at an appropriate time.

For some people, caffeine can stay in the system for eight to 10 hours. So play with that. Put some limits on that. For me, I try to have my last cup of caffeine by two o’clock in the afternoon and never any later than that because I found that when I do, it does interfere with my ability to fall asleep well at bedtime.

So tinker around with that. So just three real easy ways to get your sleep a little bit better on track.

Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.