The Free Super-Supplement: Sleep
Believe it or not, there is a free super-supplement accessible to everyone that has colossal positive effects on every aspect of your life. What is it? Sleep.
Before we dive in to the why’s and z’s of sleep, I’d like to ask you to do something a little strange: put your tongue to the rough of your mouth, and now imagine right above here is a ticking clock. There is actually a group of neurons here, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) that controls your biological clock.
This biological clock is known as your circadian rhythm and is defined as the physical, mental, and behavioral changes your body undergoes during a 24 hour period.
Now, this is very important for us to understand because of the alarming impact this can have either positively or negatively on our daily energy levels, athletic performance, overall quality of life, and aging.
SUPER-CHARGE PERFORMANCE
A study done on the Stanford Men’s Basketball team published in 2011 revealed incredible findings about how sleep directly impacted athletic performance of the eleven players who participated. Important to note, because the study was done between January and March, all of the participants self-identified as being in “peak shape” as they were in-season.
The findings of this study were incredible.
Participants were required to increase their sleep duration per night, but not exceed 10 hours per night. This ended up averaging to 8.5 hours per night for 5 - 7 weeks, which resulted in the players dropping nearly a full second of a 282ft sprint (baseline to baseline, baseline to half court), and improving their free throw percentage and 3 point percentage both by 9%.
That is an unbelievable improvement in performance over less than two months! With results like that, if sleep could be bottled and sold it would be one of the leading sales supplements in the world!
“These improvements following sleep extension suggest that peak performance can only occur when an athlete’s overall sleep and sleep habits are optimal.”
On top of the significant improvements in their sprinting and shooting, the players also reported less daytime sleepiness, better mood, and had better scores on a reaction test.
Academically, another study published in 2019 involving collegiate athletes across the nation, shockingly revealed that “The presence of sleep difficulty was associated with a 47% increased likelihood of a B average, compared to an A. Also, sleep difficulty was associated with a 118% increased likelihood of a C average and a 111% increased likelihood of a D/F average.”
Studies have also linked lack of sleep to an increased likelihood of concussions. This could be a result of lack of sleep affecting coordination and decision making. In general, the risk of injury as an athlete goes up 1.7x if you are getting less than 8 hours of sleep.
Over-Worked, Under-Rested
In our culture, we are often programmed to believe that in order to be successful we need to work harder, and to do so, sleep less. This lack of respect for sleep has directed our culture to a strange dichotomy regarding hard work that reduces our overall quality of life and lifespan.
When you don’t sleep well, you utilize only a fraction of what you’re capable of, and underperforming, like your lack of sleep, becomes your norm. Many of us then compensate with pharmaceuticals or caffeine (which, though delicious in the form of a cup of coffee, is still a drug), to keep ourselves functioning.
With drug use, there are of course side effects, which makes dosing sleep like medicine even more appealing, because there are no side effects.
You inject more sleep in your life you end up better protected against depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease. Furthermore, if you’re trying to lose weight, optimal sleep is a mandatory supplement to be taking.
Read on for six clutch ways to boost your energy starting today.
Move Over Sandman, Summon a Sleepicorn
ENERGY HACK #1: LIGHT IT UP
Light, specifically sunlight, helps our bodies release day time hormones and neurotransmitters that help regulate our biological clock. Our sleep cycles, or circadian timing system, is highly impacted by the amount of light we get during the day. Too little daylight exposure, and too much artificial light exposure during the day, results in poor sleep at night.
“Many of us are not aware that we are light deprived and suffering from the effects of light deprivation. Because of our eye’s extraordinary ability to adapt to changes in brightness, we tend to not be aware of how little light we actually receive when indoors. Typical indoor lighting is 100x less bright than outdoor light on a sunny day. Even a cloudy day delivers 10x more brightness than ordinary indoor lighting.”
Serotonin in particular is a powerful neurotransmitter known to make us feel happy and is a major player in sleep.
Production of serotonin is influenced by our diet, activity levels, and you guessed it, sunlight exposure. Sunlight exposure also promotes vitamin D production in our bodies, which shares the burden with serotonin or our mood, immune health, energy levels, and sleep health.
Daily Do: within the first 30 - 60 minutes of waking, if possible, get sunlight exposure to your eyes.
On a clear day, you want to get sunlight exposure to your eyes for about 5 minutes (no sunglasses). Obviously, avoid staring directly into the sun and burning your retinas.
On cloudy days, you especially need to get outside and view sunlight. You’ll want to get about 10 minutes of sunlight exposure to your eyes on these days. Rainy, or very densely cloud covered, you want to get as much as 20 - 30 minutes of sunlight exposure. As you may expect, it doesn’t count if it’s through a window or windshield.
If we don’t have access to sunlight (even through clouds), turn on artificial lights, but once the sun has risen you want to get outside and view the sunlight. Artificial light does not, unfortunately, replace the sunlight. Contrarily, artificial lights specifically from our devices are enough to disrupt our sleep by messing up our circadian rhythym.
“Light viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day and it has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep throughout the night.”
Energy Hack #2: Be Consistent AF
The quality and depth of your sleep is greatly enhanced by keeping a consistent sleep schedule, even on the weekends. Your “money time”, as Shawn Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, likes to refer to it as, is between 10pm and 2am.
This is when the secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), melatonin, and other hormones are at their peak. And trust me, you want as much of the “youth” hormone, as HGH is commonly referred to, as possible due to its restorative, anti-aging properties.
If we habitually stay up late (past 10 or 11pm) then we are robbing ourselves of the super-supplements golden powers. A sign that you are not benefitting from money time is if you feel fatigued in the morning even after a “good nights rest”. This further expresses the importance of hormone production our bodies experience during these hours for nighttime recovery translating to energy throughout the next day!
This is absolutely terrible news for overnight shift workers and a main reason why it has been classified as a group 2A carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. This is the same group that fried foods, lead exposure, chronic salon or barbershop chemical exposure, and red meat consumption are in.
This is a terrible and ironic reality, as many shift workers are on the job protecting the health of others - doctors, nurses, law enforcement officers - at the expense of their own. Though true money time may not be available for shift workers, keeping your sleep schedule as consistent as possible (even if that looks very strange on a day to day basis), will still make your biological clock happier than catching z’s at random opportunities.
Daily Do: Keep your bedtime and wake time as consistent as possible. On weekends, avoid sleeping in beyond an hour past your normal wake up time, even if that means getting less sleep than normal.
Athlete Bonus Fact: Have trouble sleeping before a big game or event? Good news is that if you bank a couple weeks of normal and optimal sleep before this one night of bad sleep, your performance won’t be that affected.
Energy Hack #3: Collect That Sweat
Time to stack two free super-supplements on top of each other by focusing on a routine to get the medicine of movement in your day on the regular. One mechanism that exercise provides our body is the increase in core temperature, which is an excellent way to stimulate wakefulness and energy early in the day. This in turn comes full circle and translates to sleepiness at night!
With strength training, the wonderful byproduct of muscle is a reservoir of anti-aging hormones. This is no exaggeration, other variables aside, you can stay younger longer if you have more muscle on your body.
Ironically, when you workout you are breaking down your body, so that money time regenerative sleep we discussed earlier is the frosting on the cake.
Daily Do: Evidence indicates that morning workouts are ideal for getting the best sleep at night, so if you can, get your workout in around 7am and watch the rest of your day unfurl like a sleepicorn farting a rainbow.
Energy Hack #4: Eat Early, Not Late
What you eat and when you eat are two equally important considerations in optimizing your sleep and energy. If you eat early in the day, you trigger an increase in metabolism and body temperature that make you more alert.
On the other hand, eating too close to bed, specifically food with high amounts of sugar, can cause sleep disturbances, including nightmares!
Certain foods, and this is likely highly individual as there is still quite a bit of research being done in this area, can wake you up during our lightest form of sleep, REM sleep, where we dream more.
Energy Hack #5: Time Caffeine Strategically
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman highly recommends that you wait 90 - 120 minutes after waking to consume caffeine (cringe!) because it minimizes the afternoon crash or dip in energy later in the day. Sub out your caffeine with a glass of water with a sprinkle of natural salt and you will feel better all day long.
Furthermore, consume your final caffeine dose earlier than 6 hours before bed. A study done at by Drake et al., exposed a hidden harmful misnomer of consuming caffeine within this window. Through analysis of brain activity from headband sleep monitors, the study revealed that participants lost a full hour of sleep, even though subjectively they thought they slept normally. Thus, even if you fall and stay asleep fine, caffeine can still negatively affect the architecture of your sleep.
Energy Hack #6: Stop with the blue light
In Sleep Smarter, Stevenson says that “Avoiding screen time at night is likely the number one thing you can do to improve your sleep quality immediately.”
The artificial blue light emanating from our devices confuses our body’s biological clock by making it think it’s daytime. In a nutshell, the bluelight makes it harder to fall asleep, creates shorter REM sleep, and results in feeling less energized the following day.
SUMMON YOUR INNER SLEEPICORN!
If you are suffering from poor energy, attacking your sleep habits is one of the quickest, and potentially easiest ways to set yourself on the right path. It’s free, painless, and produces near immediate benefits.
