Wits & Weights | Evidence-Based Fitness & Nutrition for Lifters Over 40 Ep 18: 25 Ways to Improve Sleep (The Missing Ingredient to Nutrition and Recovery)
Today’s topic may not seem exciting, but it could be the critical missing ingredient to your nutrition and recovery, whether everything else is dialed in or not.
I’m talking about sleep: too little sleep, low quality sleep, irregular sleep, and poor sleep habits.
Many people suffer from insomnia or a sleep disorder, and a lack of sleep can lead to terrible consequences like medical errors and car accidents. A lack of sleep can increase hunger, reduce your metabolism, impair memory, affect hormone balance, and even accelerate aging.
Yet there is hope. In a paper published in 2019 by Vitale et al., called Sleep Hygiene for Optimizing Recovery in Athletes: Review and Recommendations, the authors reviewed the effects of sleep deprivation and extension on athletes to see how applying sleep hygiene methods could improve their performance.
In this episode, I am shamelessly borrowing from their list of sleep hygiene recommendations. First, we talk about the tremendous benefits of improving your sleep, even just a little bit. Then, I review the list of 25 ways to improve sleep recommended by the authors, sharing some of my personal anecdotes and strategies along the way.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:56 - Benefits of sleep
03:49 - Mindset (changing just one habit)
06:02 - Top 10 ways to improve sleep hygiene
13:41 - 15 more tips and tricks to improve sleep
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