Biohacks for Better Sleep

Sleep is the single most important thing you must do to improve your health. Shockingly, 40% of Americans get less than 5 hours of sleep per night! Time to biohack your way to better sleep!

Sleep scientist, William Dement, has said that sleep, “is the most important predictor of how long you will live – perhaps more important than smoking, exercise or high blood pressure.(1)” People getting less than six hours of sleep per night were 12 percent more likely to die over a 25-year period than people getting 6-8 hours per night.

Chronic sleep loss contributes to health problems such as weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease and a decrease in the immune system’s power. In other words, we need sleep (2,3,4,5)!

Why Aren’t You Sleeping Well?

Woman with insomnia

There are so many factors that contribute to poor sleep. These are just a few reasons why your sleep isn’t the best:

  • Bad Habits: You’re going to bed too late! I hate to be the be
    arer of bad news but you should be in bed by 10 pm. Additionally, all your caffeinated drinks throughout the day are keeping you up in the night too. One cup of caffeine per day is fine, but you can’t drink stimulants all day and expect rejuvenating, restful sleep.
  • Adrenal Fatigue: Welcome to the club! Lack of sleep, fast paced lifestyles and living on caffeine and sugar are fatiguing your poor adrenals. They produce stimulating hormones like adrenaline and cortisol at the wrong times, keeping you from the very thing you desperately need – sleep.
  • Bad Foods: Bad foods include gluten, sugar, processed food, fast food, industrial seed oils, etc. These foods disorder hormone, gut, and brain function and cause an inflammatory immune response in the body. Solution: Listen to your body and rethink your diet to avoid the consumption of the wrong foods.
  • Poor Sleep Environment: A few critical errors? Not blocking out ALL light, making the bedroom too warm, sleeping on an old mattress or pillow or not using a sleep mask.
  • Gut Bugs: The reason you’re not sleeping well can be due to gut bugs. Parasites are a very common problem and are an often overlooked cause of night waking.

Biohacks for Better Sleep

1. Be in bed by 10pm

I realize this is a tough one. But you have to be disciplined and set up your lifestyle so that you can reset your sleep cycle. I am amazed that I sleep so much longer when I go to bed earlier. Your body creates a cortisol surge after 11 pm to keep you awake.

2. Avoid Light at Night

Newsflash: Technology is disrupting your sleep. Light exposure before bedtime can suppresses melatonin by more than 50 percent. This means limiting or avoiding all screen time two hours before bed or use f.lux.com or blue light blocking glasses. Fat chance; I know.

Ideally, avoid ‘exposure’ to any bright lights two hours before bed so your body will be cued to produce melatonin and induce sleep. This means less bright lighting at night, as well eliminating, or at least dimming, computer screens and TVs (6, 7).

3. Sleep in Complete Darkness

Eyelids are translucent for a reason. They perceive light and signaled to our friendly cavemen when it was time to begin the hunt. Today, translucent eyelids serve mainly to disrupt our sleep! Even a small amount of light at night can disrupt circadian rhythms and sleep quality (8).

Create darkness by using a sleep mask and sleeping in a darkened room by removing even the tiniest, dimmest light sources. Blackout curtains are a great solution. Remove or cover night lights, LEDs and alarm clocks. Just one pulse of light can suppress melatonin production and wake you up. Don’t turn on lights if you get up to go to the bathroom. Sleep walk Helen Keller style to the potty. Resist the urge to look at your phone!

4. Daytime Light Exposure

Exposure to light during the day, as our fellow caveman would have experienced, is essential to improve sleep. Since our eyes cue melatonin production, avoid wearing sunglasses when performing a primal sunbathing session. Get at least 30 minutes of exposure to bright sunlight every day. It’s best to get sun exposure several times per day, especially in the early morning to cue our circadian clock (10). Can’t get sun exposure? Sit next to a window, turn your computer to maximum brightness and turn on as many lights as you can during the day!

5. Create Your Cloud

Your pillow, sheets and mattress should be high quality. Treat yourself to new pillows and a comfy down comforter and silky sheets. It’s makes a huge difference! Sheets made with formaldehyde, which include all permanent press sheets, are shown to cause insomnia. It’s time to invest in some high quality, natural, organic cotton sheets!

Also remember to keep your bedding up to date. Mattresses need to be changed every 5-10 years. Change pillows every 6 months to a year. Our bedding absorbs skin cells, bacteria, perspiration and more, which is affecting your health and causing daytime sleepiness.

6. Reduce Body Temperature

Ideal sleeping temperature is between 60 and 68 degrees. Of course, everyone is different, but this is the ideal. You can reduce your body temperature by taking a bath. Even though the bath heats you up, the cooling of your body temperature afterwards makes you sleepy (11).

I love to take Epsom salt baths. Put 4-5 cups of Epson salt in your bath. The magnesium in it will relax your muscles and induce sleep. It’s relaxing, therapeutic and will guarantee you a trip to lalaland.

7. Minimize EMF

EMFs (electromagnetic fields) can disrupt your body’s natural rhythms by impacting your body on an energetic and electrical level. That’s right, your body’s electrical currents and energetic field are the basis for pretty much every function it carries out[12]. EMFs affect everything from your body’s ability to produce melatonin to your brain’s theta waves to causing dysregulation in your sympathetic nervous system. I go a lot more in depth on the EMF – sleep connection in this article.

It is very important to reduce your exposure to Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs). This entails unplugging anything electrical near your bed, especially near your head, not sleeping with your cell phone near your bed (ideally a few rooms away in airplane mode), moving your computer to another room, turning off wireless internet, and ideally not having wireless internet in your home.

I also highly recommend the Harmoni Pendant for minimizing the stressful effects of EMFs. The Harmoni Pendant is a wearable pendant that can help mitigate the impact from EMFs when you’re not able to eliminate them entirely in your environment.

It not only helps you combat some of the stress caused by EMFs, it can also help you release negative energetic blockages in your field caused by physical and emotional stress.

8. Food Timing

Don’t eat within the three hours before bed! Your last meal should be between 6-7pm. A common cause of nighttime waking is eating a big meal or a sugary or refined grain snack before bed. This will increase insulin, causing hypoglycemic or low blood sugar crashes at night. When you have low blood sugar, the body releases cortisol to increase it. What’s even worse is that it causes a dysregulation of your circadian rhythm with your two master hormones, ghrelin and leptin, that control your metabolism and hunger cues the following day.

9. Caffeine

This may go without saying, but a lot of people break this cardinal rule. You cannot enjoy quality sleep if you have stimulants in your system! Avoid caffeine after 2pm, but ideally be done by noon.

The half life of caffeine is six hours, so a good majority of it is still in your system many hours later. Any consumption after 2pm is likely to interfere with sleep.

10. Alcohol

Avoid alcohol before bed. You may have to give up alcohol if you want to rehab your sleep. Alcohol may help you relax and fall asleep faster, but the metabolic process of clearing it from your body causes a withdrawal period that’s significant enough to disrupt your sleep. Not all sleep is good sleep!

Alcohol is also known to disrupt the sleep cycles, preventing you from achieving normal periods of REM sleep. When you drink alcohol close to bedtime, you can go straight into deep sleep, missing out on the usual first stage of sleep, called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. As the alcohol starts to wear off, your body can come out of deep sleep and back into REM sleep, which is much easier to wake from. That’s why you often wake up after just a few hours sleep when you’ve been drinking.

11. Sleep Apps

Download my favorite iPhone sleep app, called SleepCycle, in order to track your regular sleep patterns. You just put your phone on your mattress, under your top sheet, and set the alarm. It will track your sleep quality using the microphone on your phone, and wake you feeling more refreshed at the top of a sleep cycle. Do it for at least a week, so you get a sense of your baseline sleep quality.

Important: Make sure you put your phone on airplane mode so you don’t cook your head with EMF’s!SaveSave

Click Here for References+

  1. Greene, Gayle. “The Case for Sleep Medicine.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 24 Mar. 2012. Web. 06 Sept. 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/the-case-for-sleep-medicine.html
  2. Mcewen, Bruce S. “Sleep Deprivation as a Neurobiologic and Physiologic Stressor: Allostasis and Allostatic Load.” Metabolism: Clinical and Experimental 55 (2006): n. pag. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16979422?dopt=AbstractPlus
  3. Spaeth, Andrea M., David F. Dinges, and Namni Goel. “Effects of Experimental Sleep Restriction on Weight Gain, Caloric Intake, and Meal Timing in Healthy Adults.” Sleep 36.7 (2013): 981-90. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23814334?dopt=AbstractPlus
  4. Blask, David E. “Melatonin, Sleep Disturbance and Cancer Risk.” Sleep Medicine Reviews 13.4 (2009): 257-64. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19095474?dopt=AbstractPlus

  5. Goel, Namni, Hengyi Rao, Jeffrey Durmer, and David Dinges. “Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation.” Seminars in Neurology Semin Neurol 29.04 (2009): 320-39. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15798944?dopt=AbstractPlus
  6. Figueiro, MG, and B. Wood. “The Impact of Light from Computer Monitors on Melatonin Levels in College Students.” Neuroendocrinology Letters 32.2 (2011): 158-63. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21552190
  7. Wood, Brittany, Mark S. Rea, Barbara Plitnick, and Mariana G. Figueiro. “Light Level and Duration of Exposure Determine the Impact of Self-luminous Tablets on Melatonin Suppression.” Applied Ergonomics 44.2 (2013): 237-40. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22850476
  8. Fonken, L. K., T. G. Aubrecht, O. H. Melendez-Fernandez, Z. M. Weil, and R. J. Nelson. “Dim Light at Night Disrupts Molecular Circadian Rhythms and Increases Body Weight.” Journal of Biological Rhythms 28.4 (2013): 262-71. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23929553
  9. Shuboni, D., and L. Yan. “Nighttime Dim Light Exposure Alters the Responses of the Circadian System.” Neuroscience 170.4 (2010): 1172-178. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20705120.
  10. Czeisler, C., J. Allan, S. Strogatz, J. Ronda, R. Sanchez, C. Rios, W. Freitag, G. Richardson, and R. Kronauer. “Bright Light Resets the Human Circadian Pacemaker Independent of the Timing of the Sleep-wake Cycle.” Science 233.4764 (1986): 667-71. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3726555.
  11. Murphy, PJ, and SS Campbell. “Nighttime Drop in Body Temperature: A Physiological Trigger for Sleep Onset?” Sleep 20.7 (1997): 505-11. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9322266
  12. Pall, Martin L. “Electromagnetic fields act via activation of voltage‐gated calcium channels to produce beneficial or adverse effects.” Journal of cellular and molecular medicine 17.8 (2013): 958-965.

in Articles/Lifestyle/Sleep/Survive

Dr Wendy Myers, ND is a detox expert, functional diagnostic nutritionist, NES Bioenergetic Practitioner, and founder of Myersdetox.com. She is the #1 bestselling author of Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals to End Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue . Additionally, Wendy is the host of The Heavy Metals Summit, the Myers Detox Podcast, and the Supercharged Podcast. Passionate about the importance of detox to live a long and healthy life, she created the revolutionary Myers Detox Protocol , and Mitochondria Detox kit after working with thousands of clients, as well as a range of supplements to help you detox from everyday living and maintain a healthy lifestyle!

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Kelly Williams
Kelly Williams
8 years ago

I get a full nights sleep (10pm-7am) but wake up sluggish, then need a nap in the afternoon. Any hacks for staying more awake and alert. I’m tired of being tired!

Wendy Myers
8 years ago
Reply to  Kelly Williams

It’s good that you’re getting a good amount of sleep but the length of your sleep isn’t everything! You need to get quality sleep too. Try out some of the biohacks I have listed here and see how you feel

MarieLine
MarieLine
7 years ago

Hi Wendy, Great article. I noticed that you stated in item 7 that we should not have our cell phones in the room and yet in item 11, we have the app. Which would you say is more valuable. Thanks

Wendy Myers
7 years ago
Reply to  MarieLine

well you don’t track your sleep forever. IT’s just for a week or so to track what’s going on with your sleep and then you remove it from the room.

Bill
Bill
7 years ago

Hello

I am looking to sell my magnetico sleep pad. Have had it for about 7 months and love the sleep with it, but really need some cash now. I have the queen size booster pad (https://magneticosleep.com/products/booster-pad/double-3/) and would be willing to sell for $600 + whatever shipping costs to send. Pads are in awesome condition!

Reply to this if interested!

Thanks.

Dee cee
Dee cee
7 years ago

Hi I was searching for the app SleepCycle but found an Alarm Clock Sleep Cycle, is it the same? (Apple) thanks for all of the info! Hard to keep up but it’s great!!