Has lockdown ruined your sleep?    

Are you feeling more tired and less productive as a result?    Have you started noticing changes to your overall health and mental well being? 

Check out this video where our coaches give you their top tips too:

• Get your sleep back on track

• Improve your productivity 

• Improve your health, fitness, and body composition.   

Firstly, let us start by understanding why sleep is important;

Our body has been designed over millions of years to wake when the sun comes up and sleep when the sun goes down. When this rhythm is broken is can affect EVERY system in the body. Having quality sleep duration and rhythm are important for helping your body to function properly. Reduced sleep has been shown to:

• Decrease mental acuity, and concentration.

• Affect Balance 

• Affect hormones making it easy to overeat and store fat

5 Tips to improve your sleep

Set a consistent time for sleeping and waking.

• To allow you to have a deep restorative sleep aim to become consistent with the time bed and the time you wake in the morning.   

Create a sleep haven!

3 things that can help with creating your sleep haven are :

• Darkness - It should be so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

• Quiet - This can be difficult but if you can eliminate most noise watch your sleep improve. (That said white noise can help some people)

• Cold - Did you know that the body has to drop 1 degree to go into quality sleep. A room at 16-18 degrees is the ideal temperature.

Be energised by your morning routine! 

• You lose water throughout the night by sweating so make sure you re-hydrate - (Check out this mineral cocktail for levelling up your morning hydration)

• Try to get exposure to natural daylight as soon as possible. This is super important for kickstarting your body clock.

• Adding some morning movement can be helpful to get the body energised and warmed up for the day.

 Relax into your evening

• Find an activity that helps you wind down in the evening (read, have a bath, listen to music).

• Limit screen time - Looking at your phone (or other screens) before bed will make it harder to go to sleep. You'll be less likely to feel like going to bed even if you are desperately craving sleep.

• Avoid eating a large meal close to bedtime.

Avoid increasing your alcohol and caffeine intake 

• Drinking caffeine past midday has been shown to suppress melatonin and reduces sleep need in the brain which leads to less quality sleep.

• Even though alcohol may make you fall asleep faster, it damages the structure and quality of our sleep.