Welcome back to the Ask Dr Annika Blog where I bring you my knowledge and experience as a leader in business and as an MD to help you manage your daily stress levels, become healthier and be a better and more successful leader.
Today I want to talk to you about the most important thing to get in order to be less stressed, to get good energy and to do all that good work that you want to do. I am not talking about time management or about meeting management or about how to take care of your staff or any other thing that may be on your list. It’s not about taking care of the to do list. It’s about taking care of your sleep!
Yes, sleep is really the basis of a healthy life, of a good life and the way you get to reach your full potential.
So why is that?
Well because when we sleep we do some housekeeping in the brain so to speak. That’s the time when all those waste products are supposed to be flushed out when you are in the deep sleep and all those impressions that you had during the day you kind of reworked them in the back of your head.
You don’t know about it most of the time but that’s how it works and science is clear about this; Sleep is groundbreakingly important to good health.
If we don’t sleep for a very long time in the end you actually could die from it so it’s extremely important.
The first thing is that everything your body wants is in regularity. It wants a regular sleep, every night. The same hours. That may seem a bit boring because you might want to do things on the weekend but your brain does not know about the weekends when this system was set up. I’m talking about way back then when this system was set up they didn’t have weekends, all they had was work days.
They said maybe they had a lot of food one day and they could take a day off but it was not the two days a week that we call weekends where you could sleep late or do something different to your “working week”.
So your brain actually feels the best if it does get the same over and over and over again and science says that you need seven to eight hours per night.
I know a lot of people telling me that they they don’t specifically need that but I’m telling you as a medical doctor that most people actually do need this sleep for a seven to eight hours a night.You might be able to cope on 4 or 5 hours sleep but you will thrive on 7 or 8!
If you haven’t done it before if you start doing it you will feel so much better. And as I said same time on weekdays as on the weekends. Yes, you can make exceptions of course if there is a cool party to go to something else you really want to do sometimes of course you can do it, just not on a regular basis.
Your brain wants to have the clean up session at the same time every 24 hours. That’s simply how we work.
What more can you do to get that good sleep?
Well, after regularity the second thing that is very important is to take all the electronics out of your bedroom at least one hour before you’re going to bed because, the light from your mobile phone or from your ipad etc. kind of tricks with your sleeping hormones and suppresses them so that you don’t get tired enough to go to sleep. It then takes longer and you will lay down and take some time just scrolling until your brain is set again so all electronic devices out of the bedroom for at least one hour before going to bed.
You say “well I use my mobile phone for as an alarm” and then I suggest go and buy a simple my alarm clock that is just the alarm and use that instead. That’s going to help your brain. That’s how it is. Sorry if it seems a bit boring.
Third thing you can do is to take out all the work from your bedroom because the bedroom is for sleeping, it’s not for working and your brain kind of knows that you have the work right beside you so it can’t really let it go. You want to let it go because then you’re going to sleep so much better. So, you take the work out of your bedroom. Don’t work in your bedroom. That’s as simple as that.
I know that you do get bright thoughts or you get this big idea that you really want to save at night time so, of course, you can have a pen and paper right beside your bed and you just write it down and then the next morning it will be remembered. You don’t miss out on that but it hasn’t taken or stolen your energy during the night.
Another quick tip is to turn down the temperature a little bit in your bedroom because we sleep better when it’s a little bit cooler. I would say like 18 degrees Celsius which iss somewhere around the ideal temperature for a good sleeping so that the brain gets its best rest.
Also, one more thing you can do is to de-clutter your bedroom in a more general way and we already did take out the work things right, and now I want you to take out all of the other stuff that’s just lying around because it’s kind of takes up energy in your brain and you need that energy to go to sleep, to get new energy the next morning.
So a quick recap on these tips:.
Regular sleeping hours.
No electronic devices.
No work in your bedroom.
Cool it down a little bit.
Clean up the clutter.
This is not a quick fix. It’s going to take some time before you get that really good sleep every night but, this is a very good start. Just pick one thing and change it then move on to changing the second and then a third til you are doing all of the above.
If you did need help with this, feel free to click the link below and we can get connected so that I can help you on the way to your best leadership.
Book a Free No Obligation Call With Dr Annika.
