Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success

by Shawn Stevenson

It’s really as simple as that. As a matter of fact, sunglasses with improper UV protection can be far worse than not wearing sunglasses at all. In bright sunlight, your eyes will naturally try to protect themselves from too much UV light getting in by shrinking the size of the pupils. But when you artificially create darkness over your eyes with stand...

Cutting out some screen time at night is likely the number one thing you can do to improve your sleep quality immediately. Computers, iPads, televisions, smartphones, etc., kick out a sleep-sucking blue spectrum of light that can give you major sleep problems.

we are hardwired to continue to seek.

Dopamine is a brain chemical that’s all about seeking. It’s about the hunt. It’s about finding out what’s coming next. And the Internet is a perfect trap for a brain that loves the slow drip of dopamine.

Dopamine itself is tied to being alert and being awake. Drugs that increase levels of dopamine in the brain (including drugs like cocaine, amphetamines, meth, and Ritalin) also increase feelings of wakefulness.

Dopamine is tied to motivation and alertness, whereas serotonin is tied to contentment and relaxation. These two are operating on two different channels in your body—and which one you’re tuned into depends on whether you’re watching your television before bed or not.

Your brain is the greatest drug producer on the planet

If you want to give your body the deep sleep it needs, make it a mandate to turn off all screens at least 90 minutes before bedtime in order to allow melatonin and cortisol levels to normalize.

When the participants consumed caffeine 6 hours before bedtime, they had a measurable objective loss of 1 hour of sleep

To their own knowledge they were fast asleep, though they weren’t actually dipping into normal ranges of REM and deep sleep according to the sleep monitor.

Caffeine doesn’t “give you energy” in the way that most people believe. All day everyday while you’re awake, neurons in your brain are firing and producing a neurotransmitter by-product known as adenosine. Please understand, adenosine is more than a simple waste product. Your nervous system is constantly monitoring for adenosine in your body, because once the levels of it rise to a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body starts to nudge you to go to sleep (or at least to relax). Then, in comes the caffeine . .

Caffeine has the unique ability to fit into receptor sites in your body for adenosine because it’s so structurally similar to the real thing. Normally, when your receptor sites are filled with real adenosine, your body shifts into rest mode. The issue with caffeine going into those receptors is that it simply sits there like a distant relative overextending their stay on your couch. It doesn’t actually turn on functions, like adenosine would, to make you tired. As a result, your brain and body are still trucking along and you don’t realize that you’re actually sleepy.

Your body is still producing more and more adenosine because of all the “awake” activities you’re doing, but the adenosine never gets properly metabolized. As a result, your body literally has to change the way it normally functions, stress hormone levels increase in your system, and your brain and organs get overworked because they aren’t getting the accurate cues to rest and recover. Because of caffeine’s long-term effects, it can take several days for its aftermath to wear off. Caffeine has a half-life of around 5 to 8 hours (depending upon your unique biochemical makeup). Half-life essentially means that after a specific amount of time (say, 8 hours), half of the substance is still active in your system. So, using the 8-hour half-life as an example, if you consumed 200 milligrams of caffeine (which is equivalent to about one or two cups of standard coffee), after 8 hours, you’d have half of it (or 100 milligrams) active in your system; after another 8 hours, you’d have 50 milligrams; after another 8 hours, it would be 25 milligrams; and so on. This is why having caffeine even 6 hours out from bedtime still caused sleep disturbances in the study.

Caffeine provokes your adrenal glands to produce two anti-sleep hormones: adrenaline and cortisol.

Though adrenaline can be temporarily entertaining, there’s also a big downside. With a spike in stress hormone production there will also come the crash. You don’t go back to the baseline you were at before the adrenaline spike; you go below it. You tend to feel more tired, have more brain fog, and feel even more irritable than before the adrenaline did its little party trick.

Caffeine causes something called vasoconstriction—essentially a tightening or narrowing of your blood vessels. If your body is conditioned to having caffeine, and suddenly you stop taking it, you will likely experience a significant shock from something called vasodilation—an instant widening of the blood vessels.

Suddenly, where blood flow was once restricted, blood comes rushing in and pushing through more freely. This is typically felt most in the head and neck region and, like migraines, can manifest as a hemicrania, or a headache on only one side of the head.

I had her swap out her coffee for a strong caffeinated tea (like Earl Grey, pu-erh, yerba maté, or English breakfast) that has a nice lick of caffeine, but only one-third to one-half the amount that she would find in coffee. I told her she could even double up on the amount of tea for the first few days, because it’s not just about the caffeine itself, it also matters what form it is in. Caffeine from different substances impacts the body differently. The source, processing, and consumption method of any caffeinated product will determine how much caffeine your body receives and how quickly your body will metabolize

Having a temporary reduction in the gusto of your digestion is normal when you’re breaking the coffee habit, but upping your fiber and water intake will help move things along (pun totally intended).

Since caffeine incites your body’s production of cortisol, it can be utilized first thing in the morning to encourage a cortisol boost.

Products containing caffeine are among the top five most traded commodities in the world because people love them so much.

Caffeine can even be used strategically to enhance metabolism, increase alertness and focus, and even improve liver function if used in the right way.

To maximize your body’s potential benefit from caffeine, it has to be cycled.

Go 2 days on and 3 days off.

Go 2 months on, 1 month off.

The hypothalamus actually integrates the functions of your nervous system (which senses the internal and external temperature) and your endocrine system (which secretes specific hormones to either induce sleep or keep you awake).

Your hypothalamus is part of a very significant system in your body known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis for short. The HPA axis is critical in normal hormone function, sexual function, managing body weight, and more. The most important takeaway here is that the HPA axis is your body’s number one system for managing stress.

It’s been shown that human beings get the most beneficial hormonal secretions and recovery by sleeping during the hours of 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Melatonin, human growth hormone (HGH), and more are secreted in their strongest doses when your sleep is lined up properly.

Want to stay young and vibrant longer? Then you need to know that you get the best dose of HGH, the “youth hormone,” if you’re sleeping during those prime-time hours.

“If your body is chronically deprived of the regenerative sleep between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., then you may still feel fatigued when you wake up in the morning.

Around 10:00 p.m., your body goes through a transformation following the natural rise in melatonin. The purpose of this transformation is to increase internal metabolic energy to repair, strengthen, and rejuvenate your body.

It’s important to understand that your body’s ability to repair itself, remove free radicals, and maximize hormonal output is greatly inhibited when you allow yourself to stay up and move into that second wind. People who stay up past 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. and dig into that second wind energy often find that they have a harder time falling asleep when they want to.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has now classified overnight shift work as a Group 2A carcinogen. This means that staying up late repeatedly, and working overnight, is a strong enough cancer-causing agent to be lumped in with lead exposure and UVA radiation.

What’s also fascinating about melatonin is that it may be one of the most powerful anti-cancer hormones your body can produce.

Not only is it getting props for being an excellent free radical scavenger, helping to protect your cells and tissues from damage, but it has also been found to protect your body from cancer in another unique way.

melatonin has very strong antiestrogenic effects.

Many breast cancer drugs actually utilize synthetic antiestrogens because of their ability to inhibit breast cancer cell proliferation. Your body is producing one of the strongest antiestrogens every night—if you’re getting the sleep you really require.

Breast cancer is known to be strongly linked to excessive estrogen activity in the body. Because both men and women produce estrogen, too much estrogen activity, or th...

significant health challenges. In women it could show up as breast cancer, uterine ca...

A study published in the International Journal of Cancer found that women who worked the overnight shift had a 30 percent greater incidence of breast cancer. Other studies on female nurses who worked overnight found that the greater the number of years they worked the late shift, the more their rates of cancer would skyrocket.

night shift workers have significantly higher rates of diabetes—especially male workers. Authors of numerous studies suggest that the higher rates of diabetes in shift workers are because of the damaging effects this type of work has on insulin.

More injuries, more accidents, and a higher rate of mortality are seen consistently for those who are working overnight.

police officers who work during the night are 14 times more likely to be chronically sleep deprived.

To get the highest-quality sleep possible, you want to aim for getting to bed within a few hours of it getting dark outside.

For most people, this is going to mean somewhere between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. most of the year.

During the winter season, humans would naturally be sleeping more and going to bed a bit earlier. Conversely, during the summer months when the days are longer, you have a bit of a permission slip ...

To help reset your sleep cycle so that you’re actually tired when the optimal bedtime rolls around, make a habit of getting some sunlight as soon as possible when you wake up. This is going to help boost your natural cortisol levels and fully wake your system

The power lies in our decisions, not our circumstances.

Sleep cycles typically last for 90 minutes each and repeat four to six times per night. So, six normal 90-minute sleep cycles would equal 9 total hours of sleep.