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

Sleep Procrastination: What It Is and How to Stop Doing It, Pronto!

Sleep procrastination. Have you ever heard of it? Even if you haven’t, chances are you’re doing it, at least some of the time. Let’s dive into sleep procrastination so you can spot this snooze-wrecking habit—and bust it for good! What Is Sleep Procrastination? According to this Instagram post by our friend Dr. Michael J. Breus, AKA The Sleep Doctor, sleep procrastination is when you put off bedtime to reclaim personal time.  You might find yourself: Scrolling social media Watching Netflix (or an endless loop of cat videos) Reading Online shopping Engaging in an abundance of other non-productive, time-sucking activities Not that all of these things are non-productive, of course. But if you’re not careful, before you know it, you’ve lost track of time and you’ve cut into your precious sleeping hours. As we know from the Sleep Deep pillar of the 8 Pillars of a Nutritious Life, poor sleep quality and quantity trickle down into our daily lives. No bueno! So what is one to do? How to Avoid Sleep Procrastination Your first step should be to calculate your bedtime, then work backward from there. This article shares with you the exact process that Dr. Breus advises, based on REM sleep cycles. Once you have your ideal bedtime, use these tips to create a plan for avoiding sleep procrastination: Make time for yourself throughout the day—and earlier in the day!—so you’re not trying to squeeze in “me time” late at night Set an alarm to turn off your TV or electronics Have an accountability partner who will make sure you’re sticking to your plan Try a “power-down” hour before you go to bed More from our founder Keri Glassman, RD, and Dr. Michael Breus Want even more sleep procrastination tips? Check out this discussion between Nutritious Life founder Keri Glassman, who is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN), and Dr. Michael Breus:   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by NUTRITIOUS LIFE (@nutritiouslifeofficial)   (Image: Shutterstock)