Get Better Sleep! - Premier Health Chiropractors

Hello you guys. Welcome to this week’s Wellness Wednesday. Today I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about sleep. One of the big things that I’ve been hearing a lot of is that people are not sleeping very well, which is not really shocking right now. One of the big things that interrupt sleep cycles is stress, and shocking, we’re kind of all stressed right now, which is not surprising. So I kind of wanted to talk about different ways that we can help to improve our sleep. Right now, people’s schedules have kind of been thrown off whether you had been furloughed, laid off, or you’re working overtime. Schedules have kind of been running a muck and one of the best ways to get your sleep schedule or your sleep improved is to get your schedule back on track. And I know for a lot of people that’s like, well, okay, but I can’t go shopping. I can’t do my normal things. Creating a new routine right now is really helpful, and that includes creating a sleep routine.

Right now with being completely off, a lot of people are staying up later, waking up later, but that completely throws our body off from what it’s known for how many years. So trying to create some semblance of what our body has known for so long as a sleep routine is really helpful and trying to create that consistency as well. I mean I know we all want to be looking at the news, checking our phone for the latest updates because things are literally changing by the hour right now, but making sure that as we are getting closer to the time that we’re going to be heading to bed, shutting down the electronics because the lights, the filters that come through will actually keep us awake for longer.

There’s a reason that on a lot of our phones we’ll have that ambient light setting that’ll come on at a certain point in time because the blue light that comes out of technology and screens will actually affect the brainwaves that we have going on that tends to keep us awake longer. So things like that to be aware of. It literally keeps your brain more stimulated and if you’re someone who’s like, “No, I need to have that,” okay. Just make sure that you’re using blue light filters on your phone. Turn on that ambient light. Things like blue light filter glasses are really helpful. And then when it’s time to go to bed, make sure you still have a routine. One of my favorite things that’s really helpful is yoga. There’s a lot of really good yoga out there that can help to put yourself in more of a mindful state of relaxation.

One of our favorite as a clinic favorite yogas that you can do from YouTube is Yoga by Adrian. And I can actually put a link in there too. She has a bunch of great bedtime routines that are anywhere from five minutes to 20 minutes that can just get your body into a better state of relaxation so that you’re more ready to go to sleep. If you’re just laying there thinking and your mind is racing, doing the five things where you’re laying in bed and you focus on five things that you can see, five things that you can hear, five things that you can touch, five things that you can smell. Maybe you don’t want to use smell when you’re in bed, but doing the five things and once you do that, then go down to four. So your mind is focused on something, but it’s not focused on racing. So you’re giving it that task. It’s that monkey brain. It’s giving that task to focus on something, but it’s not something that’s going to keep you awake. So that’s also really helpful.

If you’re someone who’s like, “No, I can fall asleep. I just can’t stay asleep,” oftentimes that can still be stress induced. But it can also be a chemical imbalance as far as a lot of times our GABA, which is a neurotransmitter, that can be low. So a lot of times people are like, “Oh, I take melatonin and I fall asleep but then I’m still waking up.” We know that melatonin helps us to fall asleep, which is the neurotransmitter that serotonin, which is our happy hormone. Serotonin converts into melatonin to help us fall asleep. So if you’re having an easy time falling asleep but you’re not staying asleep, oftentimes it’ll be GABA that we’re lacking in.

So supplementing with things like GABA can be really helpful to help us stay asleep through the night and things like that. So just being aware of our routine is really helpful. And then the last thing, like I mentioned last week, is allowing yourself to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling. Because one of the big things, like I said from the beginning, is stress. And if you’re feeling like, “Oh, well, I’ve got all these emotions, I’ve got all this stress, but what my experience is, what my condition in this pandemic is, is not nearly as bad as, person X, person Y, person Z, so I shouldn’t feel this.” You got to be able to get that out or it’s going to manifest in your sleep, in your health, in every other aspect of your life. So allow yourself to feel it. Let yourself get it out so that you can just sleep because sleep is when our body heals. It’s when it recharges. It’s when it regenerates. And if we’re not sleeping, it’s going to affect the rest of how we’re doing in the rest of our lives.

So I’ll post the Yoga by Adrian, because like I said, I love it. Check it out on YouTube. But if you have any other questions on this, let me know because it has been one of the most common things that I’ve been hearing and it is so vastly important. So hope you guys have a great week and I will catch you later. Bye.