Ten Steps to Healthy Sleep | Chris Masterjohn Lite #120

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Here are ten things to do for better sleep.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about ten
different things that you can try to get better sleep.
So, number one, get morning sunshine at
the same time every day. Do it when it's bright out,
do it when it's not so bright out, do it when
it's cloudy, as long as it's not raining.
Go out. Even if it's cold, go out. I do this every morning,
even in the winter. Some people think I'm
crazy, but, hey, if you have the luxury of
having awesome sleep all the time, you
don't have to worry about it, but if you
could improve your sleep, then get
outside every morning at a consistent
time of day. It doesn't have to be
immediately upon waking, but it should be
in the first couple hours after waking,
and it should be extremely consistent, as
consistent as possible. If your waking
time ranges from 6:00 to 8:00, then make it
8:30 that you get your morning sunshine
in so you can get it at a consistent time every day.
Number two, eat enough food. If you're on
a diet and you're trying to
lose weight, don't be surprised if it
hurts your sleep. You need to be in a
caloric balance in order to have
high-quality sleep, and if you are
chronically dieting or you're just so
used to trying to lose weight, you might
have-- you might not be perceiving
correctly what your food needs truly are.
So, try an online calculator that I'll
link to in the description of this
episode to estimate what you should be
eating for calories. Try tracking your
calories with MyFitnessPal or
Cronometer, and make sure you're
actually eating enough food.
Number three, eat enough carbohydrate. Now, I'll say up
front, some people sleep better on a
high-fat, ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diets are
low in carbohydrate. But the thing is,
ketogenic diets help relax certain-- relax
you in certain ways by their actions on
GABA in the brain. They also help your
brain reduce its requirement for glucose
by feeding it with ketones. But if you
are not on a ketogenic diet, then you
need-- you might need more carbohydrate
than you think. You might need about 200 grams of
carbohydrate a day, and that's because
when you're not on a ketogenic diet, your
brain consumes 120 grams of carbohydrate
every day. And so if you're eating 90
grams of carbohydrate, you're eating too
many carbs to be ketogenic, and you're
not eating enough carbs to feed your brain.
On top of that, your liver stores
about 90 grams of glucose that it
releases into your blood in order to
sustain your blood sugar between meals.
The greatest challenge on your liver to
do that is overnight when you're sleeping
because that's the longest you go
without a meal. And that means that you
might need 120 grams of glucose to feed
your brain, 90 or 100 grams of glucose to
make sure that your liver is topped off
at the end of the night, to make sure
that your brain is getting fed and that
your blood glucose isn't dropping.
So, I would think of 200 grams plus more if
you are-- if you engage in a lot of
high-intensity physical activity.
If you're a heavy athlete, you might need 400
or 500 grams of carbs a day. But 200 grams
for someone who's sedentary, who is not
on a ketogenic diet, might be what you need.
Number four, eat enough nutrients.
There are so many nutrients that can
impact your sleep that any one that's
missing could be the thing that's
compromising your sleep. So, I'll link to
an episode that I did called "Five Rules for
a Healthy Diet" that is designed to make
sure that you're getting all your
nutrients in without thinking too much
about it, but you can also try tracking
your nutrients with an app called
Cronometer. I'll link to an episode I did
about how to do that. And then of course
if you want to really geek out on it, you
can do testing to manage your
nutritional status. If you're going to get
into that, you should get a copy of my
Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet,
which you can find at
chrismasterjohnphd.com/cheatsheet.
and which you can get five dollars
off with the code: LITE5
that's LITE and the number 5, LITE5.
Number five is avoid blue light at night.
There are different ways that you can engage
with this concept. I recommend if you
have sleeping trouble to engage
with it intensely and regularly and
consistently for a few weeks to see if
it helps you. If you don't have a lot of
trouble sleeping, then you don't need to
be too mindful of it. But the simplest
things to do are to not stare at a
screen at night, like not staring at your
phone for hours before bed, and to reduce
the intensity of the light
that you're surrounded by. So, if you have
really bright overhead lights, and you
have some warmer colored dimmer lamps,
use the dimmer lamps instead of the
overhead lights. But to really get into
it, I would recommend a few things.
Number one, if you have software on your
computer or phone that warms the screen
at night, use it. Next, get a pair of
blue-blocking glasses so that at a minimum
you can use it when you're going to go into
the refrigerator, or you're going to go into
the bathroom where you're going to be
exposed to bright blue lights while
you're otherwise blue-blocking. And then
lastly get ambient lighting for your
home that is low in blue light. I use
light bulbs from lowbluelights.com
that I turn on around-- I shift over to
them around 8 o'clock every night to get
a warmer, lower-blue lighting in my
apartment. So, I don't actually use my
blue-blocking glasses that much, unless
I'm going to spend time staring into my
phone or I'm using it to do things in
the kitchen that require me opening the
refrigerator and things like that. Most
of the time, I'm just in ambient lighting
that is low blue light. Number six,
have a routine to psychologically wind down.
You need to shut off your
problem-solving part of your brain, you
don't want to be thinking about your
daily tasks, you don't want to be thinking
about the things you need to do tomorrow,
you don't want to be thinking about what
could go wrong. You want to
create a routine that takes your mind
off of all those things.
Some things that have helped me are
writing down my to-do list for the next
day to get it out of my head and onto
paper, watching TV, watching movies,
playing video games, reading paperback
fiction. Find your thing that helps you
wind down that helps take your mind
off the day-to-day needs
and spend a couple hours in
that winding-down routine at the end of the day.
Number seven, sleep in darkness. Ideally in your room
you want to block out all the outside
light. What I do is I use inside-mounted
blackout shades and then outside-mounted
blackout curtains, and I also use a sleep
mask on top of that. The sleep masks that
cup the eyes are better than the flat
ones, and I'll link to the one that I use
in the description of this episode.
Number eight, sleep in a cool environment
Keep the room as cool as you can handle
without being uncomfortable. That's going
to be different for everyone, but you want
to sleep on the cooler side of what you
tolerate, not on the warmer side of what
you tolerate. If you want to get fancy if
you're married and you have different
cool tolerances on one side of the bed
than the other, there is a ChiliPad
option that has the ability to keep one
side of the bed at a different temperature
than the other. And I've heard that it
has saved many marriages.
Number nine, sleep with silence or white noise.
I don't sleep with white noise, so I don't
have good recommendations for it. I do
better with silence. I use earplugs every
night. One thing that I've always hated
about earplugs is the way that you go if
you lay your head down on the pillow and
they push back into your ear, so I started
using Mack's Pillow Soft Silicone
Ear Plugs, which you shape with
your fingers to be flat against your ear.
The downside that I've heard from the
ladies is that if you have long hair,
your hair can get stuck on them. So if
you have long hair, it might not be the
best choice for you, but if you have
short hair, it's a much better option
than the ones that stick out of your ear
in my experience.
Number ten, when you wake up to pee,
handle it properly. I just did an episode
that I'll link to in the description on how to not wake up
when you pee. But if you do wake up when
you pee, then a few things are important.
Number one, practice 100% blue blocking
on the way to and from the bathroom.
So, put on your amber blue-blocking glasses
on the way there, while you're peeing, and
on the way back, and then when you get back, if you
don't fall immediately to sleep, use an
abbreviated form of your
psychologically winding-down routine.
In other words if video games helps you
wind down, play video games on your phone
with blue-blocking glasses until you get
distracted. If reading helps you wind
down, then read a paperback book
either with your blue-blocking glasses
or with your ambient, amber, low-blue
light until you feel distracted enough
to go back to bed.
iI you feel voraciously hungry when you
wake up, then eat something, but keep in
mind that you're probably not eating
enough in general if you keep waking up
hungry in the middle of the night, and so
you should try to manage your daytime
eating in a way that will prevent you
from needing to wake up and eat in the
middle of the night. Finally, put these
ten steps into a rhythm. Especially with
the light issues, it's really important
to have the darkness, the low-blue
lights, and the morning sunshine at
consistent times of day. But it really is
important for your body to sleep at a
similar time every night. So if you
absolutely have to sleep at different
times in the weekdays than the weekend,
do what you can to bring them together
by shifting around your routines so that
at least if it's not the same, it's similar.
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For ad-free versions of these
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. This has been
Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.

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Ten Steps to Healthy Sleep | Chris Masterjohn Lite #120

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