Here’s How to Sleep Great and Stay Energized–According to The Sleep Doctor

NOTE: This post was written by our friend Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., a double board-certified Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Sleep Specialist also known as The Sleep Doctor. He’s the author of four books, including his most recent, “Energize! Go From Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days.” We asked him to share a post about his new book, which was released last month. The holidays can bring substantial changes to our routines. Amid all the festivities, the routine-busting nature of the holiday season can disrupt our sleep and drain our energy—even well after they’re over. Busy schedules translate into late bedtimes and crowd out time for physical activity. Parties present us with sugary foods and lots of alcohol. Time with friends and family brings up complicated emotions and sometimes puts us in close quarters with people who are toxic to our emotional health. The cram-it-all-in pressure of the holidays can leave us stressed, drained, and dragging—physically and emotionally—and way short on the sleep we need to stay healthy and feeling our best. Even with the holidays in our rearview mirror, we need strategies for keeping our batteries charged and our nightly rest protected. A Recipe For Keeping Your Batteries Charged Maximizing your body’s natural energy stores and elevating your sleep is the subject of my new book, “Energize!: Go From Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days.” I wrote Energize with Stacey Griffith, a founding instructor of SoulCycle. Stacey and I have known each other for years. Bringing together my expertise in sleep and chronotype and Stacey’s expertise in metabolism and movement was a fascinating journey for both of us and resulted in a book I’m excited to share with you. Energize! brings together the latest scientific understanding of chronotype and metabolic type (aka body type). Our chronotype and our metabolic type are both determined by our genes. And just as every chronotype has an optimal routine for the “when” of daily life—the timing of sleeping, eating, exercising, working hard, taking it easy—our individual metabolic types have different genetically-driven needs for movement, rest, and recovery. This is all in order to build strength, stamina, flexibility, and maximize physical and mental energy. Establishing daily routines and habits based on chronotype and body type is the remedy for the stress, fatigue, weight gain, low mood and restless sleep that affect so many of us. Don’t know your chronotype? Take this quiz: www.chronoquiz.com. “Energize! is a step-by-step guide to creating individualized routines and habits that help you shed fatigue, stress, sleeplessness, and low mood, and reclaim abundant energy and vitality in your daily life, using your body’s unique circadian and metabolic biology as a roadmap.” Together, Stacey and I dug deep into the scientific research (and conducted research of our own) to develop personalized daily protocols for sleeping, eating and activity for every chronotype and metabolic type. Energize! is a step-by-step guide to creating individualized routines and habits that help you shed fatigue, stress, sleeplessness, and low mood, and reclaim abundant energy and vitality in your daily life, using your body’s unique circadian and metabolic biology as a roadmap. Let’s talk about how you can navigate these times without depleting your energy and losing sleep. Protect Your Resting Energy Protect Your Resting Energy: Get ahead of jet lag to minimize its impact (and stick to your regular sleep routine if you’re staying at home). A lot of us are traveling for the first time in a couple of years. Remember jet lag? Jet lag can drain the fun right out of a journey. It leaves you feeling fatigued, irritable, foggy-headed, sleepless and out of sync with your circadian rhythms. Jet lag gets more severe the farther we travel from our home time zone. A guideline is that it takes a full day to recover from every time zone you cross. And traveling eastbound will have a bigger impact on your sleep and circadian rhythms than traveling west. For all chronotypes and body types, the best way to minimize the impact of jet lag is to adjust your schedule to your destination time as soon as possible. You can start this process before you leave home. The week before your departure, adjust your sleep times, wake times, and meal times closer to the times you’ll be sleeping, eating, and active at your destination. If you’re traveling through a single time zone, you can adjust over a couple of nights to be fully on your destination schedule before you set out. For two or more time zones, adjust your schedule incrementally over a few days, to get closer to your destination time. If you can, sleep during the trip so that you’re less tempted to take a nap before your destination bedtime. Do your best to nap during the times you’d otherwise be asleep according to your destination time zone. When you arrive at your final destination, be sure to follow your new schedule accordingly and don’t turn in for the night until it is bedtime in the current time zone. Don’t go to bed early! Here’s a pro tip that can make adjusting your schedule during travel so much easier: I travel constantly, and I use the Timeshifter app (www.timeshifter.com) to help shift my routine when I’m traveling long distances. Timeshifter takes information about your chronotype, your home base and destination locations, and your flight times and does the work for you to create a personalized schedule for when to eat, when to get light exposure, when to sleep (and nap), when to consume caffeine, and when to take melatonin. What else can you do to minimize the effects of jet lag while you’re on the road this season? Limit alcohol and caffeine. Both alcohol and caffeine will dehydrate you, which intensifies fatigue, exacerbates concentration issues, and can lead to overeating and/or eating at the wrong times for your new schedule. Dehydration also interferes with sleep. To help your body maintain energy, keep alcohol and caffeine consumption to a minimum, and

Biohacking on a Budget: 5 Simple, Low-Cost Biohacks For Better Health

These days, we’re all about learning how to DIY just about everything. The allure of finding and trying new methods for widely accepted practices in hopes of getting better or faster results is real. So, it’s no wonder we’re totally into biohacking, which basically refers to the practice of studying our diet and lifestyle and making changes to achieve optimal health and overall well-being. What is Biohacking? While some biohacking methods are very simple and might sound quite familiar—like meditation, intermittent fasting, and light therapy—some are extreme and meant to alter the biology of the body in order to enhance its productivity and performance level. Biohacking practices aimed at optimizing brain function have gained popularity, with individuals seeking ways to improve focus, memory, and overall mental well-being.  Some people will even use expensive and unproven technology to alter their body chemistry, with goals like living forever (or, perhaps to 150!), adding enhancements like night vision or the ability to pay for coffee with a flick of their wrist. For most of us, though, we just want simple and low-cost ways to improve our biology for better quality of life and health, right? Here are a few biohacks you can try without breaking the bank or implanting technology under your skin. These methods offer promising avenues for optimizing brain function and promoting well-being, empowering individuals to take charge of their cognitive health without excessive costs or invasive procedures. Here are a few biohacks you can try without breaking the bank or implanting technology under your skin. 5 Low-Budget Biohacks to Try 1. Eliminate refined sugar. You may already be aware that sugar is a leading cause of inflammation, which is the root cause of almost every condition and disease. Yet, the typical American adult consumes about 60 pounds of added sugar each year, or 77 grams of supplemental sugar (nearly ½ cup!) each day, according to the American Heart Association. That’s not doing our hearts—or our waistlines or brains—any favors. Human studies confirm the link between added sugar and higher inflammatory markers. Excess sugar consumption has been associated with heart disease, obesity, dementia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and many more wellness woes. Knowing all of the above, cutting out refined sugar seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? So, why are we still eating this stuff, knowing it’s not so great for our health? While scientists and nutrition experts have argued about this for some time, there’s evidence that eating sugar may cause symptoms similar to addiction. This explains why it’s so difficult for many people to stop. While not the easiest biohack on the list, it’s sure to have a positive impact on your health. Plus, it’s definitely not going to cost you any more to eliminate this sweet ingredient. It may even save you money in the long run. 2. Eat veggies multiple times a day. Eating lots of vegetables isn’t a new recommendation for improving your health. This has always been on the list of top things to do to get the nutrients your body needs to thrive. Veggies contain multiple antioxidants that fight inflammation in your body. So, the more vegetables you can add to your plate at every meal, the better. But for some reason, there is this misconception that making healthier food choices is more expensive than eating quick and less nutritious meals. Sure, you can spend a lot of money on fresh, organic vegetables that go to waste after sitting in your fridge for too long, but you don’t always have to buy fresh produce. Organic frozen veggies can be even more nutritious than fresh ones. RELATED: Are Frozen Fruits and Vegetables as Healthy as Fresh? So, next time you’re at the grocery store, why not add a mix of your favorite fresh and frozen veggies to your cart, and start plotting how to incorporate them into your meals for the week? Challenge yourself and see how many different recipes you can come up with using the same vegetables. You may be surprised by how many fun and healthy recipes there are out there. 3. Eat grass-fed beef (and butter) and low-mercury, high in omega-3 fish. So, what’s the deal with grass-fed and finished beef, anyway? What’s the difference between it and standard beef? Well, for starters, did you know that grass-fed beef contains up to five times as much omega-3 as grain-fed beef? Plus, it contains about twice as much CLA (conjugated linoleic acid)—a fatty acid associated with several health benefits—as its grain-fed bovine brethren. It shouldn’t be surprising then that grass-fed butter offers some added health benefits, too. It contains higher amounts of beta carotene—a potent antioxidant that’s been linked to a reduced risk of several chronic diseases—than regular butter. Again, some people automatically assume that eating grass-fed beef and grass-fed butter is going to be way more expensive. If you eat a lot of meat, then it might be, but one way to cut down on the expense of grass-fed meat is to eat less meat in general (but better quality). Then replace half of your typical meat intake with plant protein (like mushrooms and legumes). When it comes to fish, there’s actually no need to buy fresh wild salmon—unless you want to, on occasion—as canned versions are much less expensive. You can also replace wild salmon with canned sardines, which are high in omega-3s, low in mercury, and highly affordable. 4. Eat pastured eggs. All eggs are packed with important nutrients like protein, vitamin D, and choline, a compound essential for brain health. Eggs are affordable and their nutritional value can easily be taken up a notch by buying pasture-raised. In addition to being lower in calories and total fat, pasture-raised foods have higher levels of vitamins and a healthier balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats than conventional meat and dairy products. Specifically, eggs from poultry raised on pasture have 10% less fat, 40% more vitamin A, and 400% more omega-3s. In an ideal scenario, you’d buy your eggs straight