Sleep is among the most important lifestyle factors when it comes to health and ultimately, enjoying life. During sleep, our body is able to truly cleanse, detox, and heal. Whether you’re looking to improve your health or find relief from Chronic illness, your sleep will benefit greatly from proper sleep hygiene.

1. Bedtime Routine – make one!

We have to remember the hormone that helps us wake-up in the morning (cortisol), is also the hormone that is released when we are stressed! If your body is experiencing stress during the 1-2 hours leading up to bed, this may be a large contributor to your poor sleep.

First, consider what things may stress you most and stimulate your brain the most—this may be something larger in life like relationship stress (family, friends, or romantic), your job/career, something appearance-related, or finances. Your stressor may also be something short-lived such as something that happened that same day or something that is going on the next day.

Before beginning any sleep pills or medications, consider creating a peaceful bedtime routine. that gives you enough time to un-wind, spend time with God, meditate, read, do a puzzle, take a shower, etc. The overall point is to relax, not be in a hurry, and give yourself enough time to simply rest.

2. Late-Night Eating

When and what we eat (dinner and/or snacks) in the evening is very important because of its potential effects on  our sleep. Eating at night can greatly affect the load placed on the liver. This can then negatively effect your liver’s control of blood sugar as you sleep.

The liver undergoes self-cleansing (autophagy) through the night and is most active between 1-3am according to the Acupuncture horary clock — hence why most people wake up during this time of the night.  The liver is one of the main organs responsible for maintaining your blood sugar through the night. Thus, if you’re always eating within 2 hours before bed, you are not allowing your liver much time to self-cleanse.

This increased load on the liver can prevent it from properly releasing stored sugar (glycogen) when blood sugar decreases. If your blood sugar drops due to the body failing to keep it balanced, cortisol is released from the adrenals causing you to wake up.

To overcome this, I recommend avoiding any large meals or carb/sugar-based snacks at least 2 hours before bed. A little protein or fat-based snack before bed can be helpful for people that may be waking up throughout the night due to hypoglycemic tendencies. I recommend people intermittent fast most days (i.e. eat their last meal by 3pm) for optimal liver health. We’ll discuss more on great liver functioning in a different article.

3. Electro-Magnetic Frequency (EMF) Exposure

Electromagnetic Frequencies have been shown time and time-again to result in increased oxidative damage to your cells—similar to sugar, stress, hydrogenated (trans) fats, etc–and thus negatively affects your sleep as sleep is meant to be a time of healing.

The three (3) main sources of EMFs during sleep come from our phones, wireless-internet (WiFi), and sleeping near outlets. Side note: be careful of your local 4G and even worse, 5G towers). I recommend turning your phone completely off and putting it across the room (on a desk or nightstand) or in another room. Turn the WiFi off at night and avoiding sleeping near the wall outlets.

If you’re like me, you use your phone as an alarm so you can’t turn it completely off at night. Place your phone on airplane mode instead. When your phone is on airplane mode, it turns off the cellular reception which greatly reduces the negative radiation. While there is still more radiation compared to the phone simply being turned off, it will still reduce radiation massively. Avoid the harmful effects of wall outlets by sleeping at least 4 feet from the outlet, or by covering the outlet with a thick book or outlet wall/EMF protector. By avoiding these things, the lack of stress on your body can allow more quality repair time, better sleep, and ultimately better healing.

4. Screen Time

Screen time, specifically blue-light, is the highest in energy on the color spectrum. This results in much more stimulation of the brain (does your mind “race” at night?). Be careful of watching TV, looking at your computer, or looking at your phone before bed. Another effect that blue light has on the brain is negatively affecting our brain’s production of melatonin.

For a quick refresh, melatonin is produced by the pineal gland in your brain. It’s important for our immune system and its primary role is to make us sleepy! For sleep, I recommend people avoid blue-light screens at least 1 hour before bed. I also recommend people use a “color filter” setting on their phone to turn the blue light into red light. Red is the least energetic color on the color spectrum and thus stimulates the brain the least. This is what I use if I need to be on a device before bed–I recommend the same for you! This is a key component of quality sleep hygiene.

“A lack of adequate and quality sleep is like a broken water pipe – it will leak out into every aspect of your health; including your physical, emotional, spiritual, and chemical health.”

Dr. Joel Miller

5. Caffeine Intake

This one is pretty simple — for those lovers of coffee (caffeinated or decaf), cocoa beans (chocolate), soda/pop, energy drinks, and herbal teas (caffeinated herbals) — consider how much caffeine you are intaking and when. Remember that cortisol begin to steadily decrease starting ~12noon. When cortisol begins to steadily decrease, melatonin naturally begins to steadily increase. When we intake caffeine, this increases the adrenal gland’s release of cortisol and thus simultaneously suppresses the steady increase of melatonin. I usually encourage people to stop drinking heavily caffeinated drinks (coffee, soda, caffeinated teas) by ~12noon at the latest.

I know it’s delicious, but your sleep hygiene is more important! If you’re having challenges being sleepy at night, consider how much caffeine you are intaking. Last note here: if you’re in deep need of caffeine to get through the day, your blood sugar or adrenal glands likely need support. Check out our articles on blood sugar here.

6. Room Darkness

Ideally, we want our room to be as dark as possible for us during sleep. That means you might need to turn off all of the blue-lights in your room (alarm clocks, etc.), and get some some black-out curtainsor a sleeping mask. Similar to avoiding the blue-light at night because of it’s stimulatory effects on the brain, the level of light from an outside light or alarm clock can also prevent your brain from truly going into deeper sleep rhythms.

7. Weighted Sheets & a Fan

Using heavy or weighted bed covers and a fan have been shown to actually improve your depth of sleep! Consider using or purchasing a weighted blanket to imrprove your sleep hygeine.

A fan is also a simple way to improve sleep hygeine. Fans do 2 things primarily — the first thing is they keep the air circulating in your room. This can be helpful to simply keep the air from being stagnant, stuffy, etc. The other benefit is the background noise which is ultimately blocked out by the brain during sleep, allowing your brain achieve deeper levels of sleep. I recommend these as “sprinkles on top” — they’re not essential for great sleep but can make a difference. 

Lastly, if you have addressed all of the simple tips for sleep hygiene and yet still suffer from poor sleep, there may be significant underlying things that need to be addressed. In our functional approach, we utilize Systems Health Care to find the cause of dysfunction contributing to a patient’s problem. Check out our other articles on common sleep disorders here.

Suffering From Poor Sleep?

At Freedom Health and Wellness, we address all of these things and more through a personalized and functional approach. We help people with chronic diseases and illnesses regain their health by getting to the source of their health concerns.