12/13/2021
Dr. Stacy Sims is dropping reality bombs again.
Sleep is like breathing. You can't decide to not breathe today and that you'll catch up tomorrow. The research is showing us that the cost of not sleeping well is much higher than originally thought.
Sleep quality has a huge impact on your performance, your immune system and your mental health.
Make a sleep a priority and your body and brain will reward you.
While we sleep, our bodies do a few incredibly important jobs. First, our bodies solidify memories and cognition. 🧠 It's also time to repair tissue and recover from your physical work during the day. 💪
In addition to aiding memory and tissue repair, sleep also is important for maintaining appetite and body composition and reducing cortisol.
Most of us can identify if our sleep is "good" or "bad" just by how we feel, but do you know how to read sleep data and adjust to get longer and/or better quality sleep? Here are a few things to know:
😴 One thing that we often forget about when talking about sleep is sleep consistency. This means going to bed the same time of day and waking up the same time of day. We want this in order to keep a consistent circadian rhythm & avoid phase shifting.
😴 We spend about 50% of our night in light sleep -- the time preceding REM sleep and slow wave sleep. We technically say light sleep is a transitional sleep between the really reparative sleeps.
😴 Around 25-30% of your total sleep should be in slow wave sleep. This is when your body is in it's full reparation mode. This phase is the most important for athletes...but also is the phase that's easily affected by anything that accelerates your sympathetic nervous system (ex: jet lag, eating before bed, consuming alcohol, consuming caffeine, etc.). Not great.
😴 REM is when we dream and when the body focuses on memory consolidation. For healthy sleep, we're aiming for about 20% of the night spent in REM.
Okay great, now you know a bit about what sleep is, but how does that help you get better sleep? This is why I created a Sleep Biohacking Activity Guide that walks you through how to conduct your own sleep improvement experiment using this sleep knowledge & researched sleep strategies.
This guide includes 2 exclusive podcasts discussing the science of sleep, my own sleep experiment results, and a discussion of results from people who have also participated in this experiment. This holiday season, I'm giving this guide away for FREE as a gift to all of you! 🎁
Download it at 🔗 www.drstacysims.com/BiohackSleep