Sleeping your way to the top | Dave Gibson

Along with food and exercise, sleep is essential for a healthy mind and body and a key component of performance. Sleep expert, Dave Gibson share his five top tips for getting good quality sleep. 

With cognitive processes, and coordination impaired by a lack of sleep, it’s now proven that those athletes who enjoy a better night’s sleep get fewer injuries than those who don’t sleep as well.

What’s more, as Growth Hormone is secreted in the deeper parts of sleep, the body’s natural recuperative ability is also dependant on getting a good night’s sleep.

Outside of these key components emotional balance and creative thinking are just some of the other benefits to a good night’s sleep. So, here are five simple top tips to help you optimise your sleep.

1) Get up at the same time every day

Getting up and going to bed at the same time seven days a week will help strengthen your circadian rhythm (body clock). This means the end of those late lie-ins at the weekend, which create a side-effect call ‘social jet lag’. This is basically a minor dose of the traditional ‘long-haul-jet lag’ which knocks our body clock out of cinque and reduces performance. Catch up with short naps in the day rather than making up for lost sleep at the weekend. This leaves you with a consistent morning routine which will help you get to sleep more easily at night.

2) Try to exercise in the outside in the morning if you can

Exercising outside, to get a dose of sunlight first thing, sends a signal to your brain to increase your production of serotonin (the wake up and feel good hormone) and boosting cortisol production which gets your body going. Cortisol levels rise in the first 30 minutes after you wake and signals the body to become more alert.

3) Avoid caffeine first thing and drink water with your breakfast instead

Water is the best drink to have when you wake up, instantly hydrating you. However, tea and coffee are diuretics, which encourage you to lose water through urination. In addition, if you have caffeine first thing its effect as a stimulant is being added as a pick me up on top of your body’s peak level of cortisol production.

This natural stimulant is already working to wake you up naturally its own right. In terms of the most effective timing for coffee it is best to time your first cup of coffee for around 60 minutes after you wake. This then gives you a mid-morning boost after you natural Cortisol is declining. Remember to always stop your caffeine intake after lunch to prevent it keeping you awake at night.

4) Don’t tech yourself up in bed

With 80% of us now using a phone as an alarm, it’s a big ask to leave your phone charging overnight outside of the bedroom. However, this would be perfect sleep hygiene, with all sleep specialists advising to use the bedroom for sleep (and sex only) and to keep all technology out of the bedroom. Putting dimmers or night time modes on tech will reduce the effect of the blue light from screens (which stops your sleep hormone from being produced).

However, it is the stimulation of tech and the association it generates to activity other than sleep which you need to avoid. By eliminating the use of tech from the bedroom your brain then ‘re-learns’ to associate the bedroom with sleep and not work or social media. This then makes it easier to switch off when you enter the bedroom, rather than overstimulating you and preventing you getting to sleep.

5) To nap or not to nap – that is the question.

Napping is a natural way of catching up on lost sleep. Equally, it is something we are designed to do with the Siesta period after lunch still observed in many parts of the world. However, there is a time and place for naps and some simple suggested guidelines. The first rule of napping is that if you suffer from insomnia then you should not try napping to top up your sleep.  Instead, work with your GP or specialist to build your nightly sleep pattern back to normal.

The second is to not nap close to your bedtime as it will make it harder to get your nightly sleep. We all need to sleep at night as it appears that the gold star quantity of deep sleep occurs late into the night around 2am to 4am.

Finally, get the length of nap sorted. We now know that people sleep in 90 minute cycles – not hours – and typically have about 5 full cycles a night (give or take – around 7 ½ hours on average for adults). These cycles go from light to deep to light sleep. If you are napping in the day, go for either 20 minutes (light sleep) or 90 minutes (a full cycle) which avoids you waking in the deeper (groggy) part of the sleep cycle.

To find out more about Dave, or for more information on how to transform your sleep, visit: thesleepsite.co.uk

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