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#156 - Improving Sleep For Fat Loss & Building Muscle
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You know sleep matters, but how often are you actually getting a good night’s sleep?
When it comes to losing fat, building muscle, and improving your health, sleep is one of the most overlooked pieces of the puzzle. But it plays a huge role in how you look, feel, and perform every single day.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- How improving your sleep can make fat loss easier
- Why not getting enough sleep can hurt metabolism, muscle building, fat loss, and recovery
- How better sleep can help you build muscle and perform better in your workouts
- Practical tips you can use right away to start sleeping better tonight
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Transcript
Introduction to Fit Fish Project
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to the Fit Fish Project with your host Latham Bass, where we make fitness and health simple for regular people like you and I. We got the weekly episode for you as we always do. Before I get into this, if you can leave a review if you have not done so, continue to help get this show out to more people who could use this information to look better, feel better, get healthier, all those good things that we all want to have.
00:00:28
Speaker
But without any further ado, let's get right into the topic for this week.
Is Sleep the Magic Pill for Health?
00:00:32
Speaker
What if I told you there was a pill you could take that would help you lose fat easier, build muscle faster, improve your mood, give you better energy, improve your focus and productivity, help you have better workouts, improve your mental health, reduce your food cravings, help you live longer, help you lose weight?
00:00:50
Speaker
Would you take this? The obvious answer is yes. Unfortunately, I don't have a pill to give you or to sell you or to tell you about, but the good news is you do have access to this thing and you're actually already doing it.
00:01:03
Speaker
If you haven't figured out what this is, I'm talking about sleep. Yes, sleep can do all those things that I just listed and many more things. And it's one of those things that I have really tried to learn more about and start to prioritize and just educate people on because I see the value in it.
00:01:20
Speaker
For a very long time, we thought that sleep was just something that was nice to do or nice to have. But with a lot of education and just new resources and just the research coming out around sleep, I think most people understand just how important it is, but it's still not a huge priority for lots of people. And that's for a lot of different reasons.
00:01:40
Speaker
Phones, technology, those sorts of things don't help. Being busy, stressed, working, all those things start to make getting good sleep a little bit more difficult. You throw a couple of kids in the mix, you throw a couple other issues or things that you have going on in your life into the mix, and it makes getting sleep or getting good quality, sufficient amount of sleep more difficult.
00:02:03
Speaker
But there are a lot of simple, slight little tweaks that you can start to add in or mess around with or just experiment with to start to increase your sleep quality and just to help you with all those things that I listed. So with this podcast, what I want to do is talk a little bit more specifically about how this directly applies to both building muscle and losing fat.
Sleep's Role in Fitness: Muscle and Fat
00:02:25
Speaker
And then also, as always, give you the practical tips along with this so that you can start trying some of these things out right away in order to increase your sleep quality and get all those awesome benefits that we all want to have.
00:02:38
Speaker
I thought that this would be a good place to start with this is just to give you a study about sleep. Because again, as I said, I used to be the guy who didn't think that sleep was super important. And I think the big reason for me, especially around things like building muscle and losing fat, when I thought about sleep, I didn't really even give it much thought at all, is because when I lost most of my weight, I was fresh out of college. So I was in my early 20s. I was like 22, 23 in that range when I lost a good majority of my weight.
00:03:07
Speaker
and when you're that age you really don't give a crap about sleep at all like you're so used to living that college lifestyle of just getting very minimal sleep you have a lot of late nights you go out you party you drink you go to social events you study all night you do these different things where you're not really focused on sleep and you can get away with it for a really long time when you're in your early 20s like it just doesn't affect you the same way as it does as you get older And so you have a lot of those nights where maybe you do get a little bit of sleep, but you like, you can get four hours of sleep, three hours of sleep, have a couple drinks, not have anything to eat and wake up the next morning and go hit some PRs in the gym. Like you can get away with those things when you're in your early twenties. And so for me, especially around just weight loss and those sorts of things, I didn't ever prioritize sleep or think about sleep or even just focus on getting good sleep. And I was still able to get really good results. So I never really thought that sleep was all that important. But the more that I've learned just with going over different studies and just more research and also just with working with regular people who are no longer in their early twenties, like a lot of the people that I work with are in their late twenties. early 30s, mid 30s, that sort of thing. So sleep becomes a much more vital piece of this.
00:04:19
Speaker
So this study looked at two different groups. It looked at a group who slept 5.5 hours in a group who slept 8.5 hours. In the study, the goal was to lose weight. So both groups were focused on losing weight.
00:04:34
Speaker
After they measured the weight loss in both of these groups, after a certain period of time, they both lost a similar amount of weight, which makes sense because they were eating the same diet and controlling calories and had the same calorie deficit, all those things.
00:04:49
Speaker
But the big finding in this study was that the people who slept more, the people who slept in that 8.5 hour group, they lost more of their fat mass than the people who slept less.
00:05:02
Speaker
And so what that means is that the people who slept less, they still lost the same amount of weight, but more of that weight came from muscle and less of it came from fat, which is obviously not a good thing if you care about your body composition. We've all heard of that term skinny fat. And this is something that you'll run into when you see people starting to lose weight very, very quickly.
00:05:21
Speaker
Maybe it's through a GLP-1. Maybe it's through just cutting their calories really low. And typically when people are doing this, they aren't incorporating strength training. They're just trying to increase their activity as much as possible, which is typically done through cardio because that's ultimately the fastest way that you're going to burn the most calories is by doing a ton of cardio. And then they cut their calories really low. So they might see this weight flying off of them. They see that scale going down quite a bit. But the bad thing about this is that a lot of that muscle mass or a lot of that weight loss is coming from muscle mass, which obviously is not good if you want to look a certain way, because if you're losing a bunch of weight, but you're also losing a substantial amount of your muscle mass, you're going end up looking like that skinny fat that nobody really wants to look like. So you're losing weight, you're smaller version of yourself, but you don't really have any muscle to show for it. So from that aspect, muscle becomes really, really critical. But also for other reasons, muscle is super important in the whole weight
Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Cravings
00:06:14
Speaker
loss process. When it comes to your metabolism, muscle plays a very vital role in that. So if you have more muscle mass, your metabolism is typically going to be higher. So if you're losing muscle mass as you're losing weight, you're
00:06:26
Speaker
metabolism is going to be slower than if you hang on to that muscle mass as you're losing weight. Obviously, that doesn't make long term weight loss very easy if you're losing a bunch of muscle mass and your metabolism is getting slower because now you can't eat as many calories to maintain that weight in order to keep that weight off because your metabolism is now slow.
00:06:45
Speaker
with losing muscle, you're also losing strength, which is not good for your longevity. It's not good for your functional fitness. It's not good for your everyday life. It's especially not good if you are aging and losing muscle and losing strength.
00:06:57
Speaker
So for many reasons, losing muscle is not a thing that you want to let happen as you lose weight. And there's obviously some things that you can do to combat that, which I'm going to get into a little bit later in this podcast.
00:07:09
Speaker
But with that being said, I think this study just really highlights the importance of sleeping. Yes, you can lose weight even with very little sleep or even if your sleep isn't perfect. But if you're sleeping less, you may be losing more muscle than you are losing fat. And that is not a good thing long term.
00:07:26
Speaker
Now, with this study, there was definitely some limitations with this. It was a shorter study and it didn't have a huge population of people. But again, I think it gives you some good insight into just showing the importance of sleep. So when we think about sleep and fat loss, like what are the reasons that sleep is so important for fat loss?
00:07:43
Speaker
Well, for one thing, when you get good sleep, you're typically going to have less cravings around food. you've ever stayed up really late, maybe you had a late night out, went to a party, you had a social gathering, you're on vacation, maybe you pulled an all nighter for whatever reason back in high school or college or maybe even for your job.
00:08:01
Speaker
when you are staying up super late, you're typically not reaching for chicken and broccoli or something that's like super healthy. You typically want something that's going to be like high sugary, salty, savory, that sort of thing. Like you're looking for a processed foods, you're looking for a restaurant food, you're looking for takeout food, maybe going through that Taco Bell drive through late night, that sort of thing. So when you are more sleep deprived, when you don't have as much quality sleep, your your cravings are typically going to be higher. And this goes for that night, but then also the next day, like if you wake up the next day after having minimal sleep, you're typically just not going to be reaching for the super healthy stuff. You want stuff that's going to wake you up, that's going to give you that dopamine hit. So the sugar, the salt, all the highly processed stuff, those are the things that we're typically reaching for when we have poor sleep. Good sleep is going to help with having less of those cravings, which again is important for fat loss. It's important for being able to sustain your weight loss and just to make better decisions around food.
00:09:02
Speaker
Second thing is better sleep leads to better fullness and satiety with your meals. Sleep plays a role in our hormonal function. And when it comes to weight loss, hormones do play a role. So there's specifically these two hormones called ghrelin and leptin. These hormones affect how hungry you are and how satiated you are after you eat.
00:09:23
Speaker
When you've been dieting for a long time, or if you cut calories really low, or if you have really bad sleep, these hormones start to get affected even more. So you start to notice maybe you are more hungry. You start to notice even after you're eating your normal meals that you typically would, you find yourself not being as full and satiated and making you want to eat more. That is not good for weight loss. That's not good for long term sustainability. And it just makes being dialed in with your nutrition that much tougher. If you're feeling like you are more hungry and you're less satisfied after eating, that's just not a good combination.
00:09:58
Speaker
Number three on the list. Better sleep helps you to make better food choices. Again, similar to the craving thing, but if you have a poor night of sleep, you're not really waking up and reaching for the healthy stuff. Like all the choices that you're making throughout the day, making good choices, not just around food, but just in general, become a little bit more difficult because we all know after a bad night of sleep, we're typically not our best self. You might be a little bit cranky. You might be more liable to snap on somebody. You might make worse decisions when it comes to your job or maybe talking to somebody or whatever the case may be. Like you're just more likely to make poorer choices or maybe not the choices that you would typically make if you had better sleep. Understanding that and just really realizing that better sleep makes a huge difference in just the choices that you're making is just another reason to prioritize
Stress Management and Recovery Through Sleep
00:10:45
Speaker
sleep. And then the last one is just better sleep helps with managing stress.
00:10:49
Speaker
Sleep is important for allowing you to be able to handle all the different stressful things that life is throwing at you. And we're getting stresses from different angles all the time.
00:11:00
Speaker
If you're trying to lose weight and specifically focus on fat loss, that is another stressor to your body. So if you're getting poor sleep, you're adding this stressor of putting your body in a calorie deficit.
00:11:10
Speaker
You have other stresses, maybe it's work, maybe it's family, maybe it's kids, maybe it's some stuff going on in your own social life, maybe it's other things going on. So you have all these different stresses. getting thrown into this bucket and this bucket might be getting super full and starting to overflow. Well, sleep allows you to sort of let that bucket mellow out a little bit so you can pour some of the stresses out of that bucket. But when you're not getting enough sleep, that bucket just continues to fill and fill and fill and fill and you never get a chance to actually empty that bucket.
00:11:40
Speaker
and eventually you get to a point where it's just overflowing and all these stresses are coming at you from different ways and you just can't really handle it so now you're struggling to stick with your weight loss plan you're struggling in your social life you're struggling at work you're struggling at home like all these different stresses have started to just have an impact on you and just the things that you're able to do and it just makes it hard to manage so having a good night's sleep just helps you to be able to handle those things better When you're sleeping less, those cortisol levels start to rise, which again, is not a good thing. Like if your stress levels are just constantly getting raised up and you're not able to actually give yourself a break and recover and allow sleep to give you the best shot at handling all the things that are being thrown your way. it's going to be hard to make good decisions and to continue to stick with your fitness goals to continue to just feel good and just live a life where you feel like you're able to handle things if you've ever gone through like a super stressful period with a lack of sleep i think parents who have kids this is a perfect example of that like it's just hard to keep up with everything when you are so sleep deprived like if you have that newborn and you're having to get up multiple times per night and your sleep is just out of whack
00:12:49
Speaker
It's hard to show up in different areas and it's hard to be your best at work and it's hard to be your best in your social life and it's hard to stick to your fitness goals. We've all been through a different stressful period. Maybe it wasn't having kids, but we've all been through some sort of stressful period where we just weren't sleeping great and stress was really high. And we know how difficult that is. Well, one thing that you can do to help yourself out is just to focus on getting more sleep. Sometimes it's easier said than done, which I'll get into some practical tips about how to actually sleep a little bit better and make it a
The Necessity of Weight Training
00:13:19
Speaker
priority. But just understanding these things, I think, is the first step to really starting to change that behavior and just making sleep more of a priority.
00:13:27
Speaker
With this study, one of the things that it did not address that is super important when it comes to fat loss and more specifically just like building muscle is they didn't have these people in this study weight training.
00:13:39
Speaker
When it comes to building muscle and even just retaining muscle, the strongest signal that you can send to your body is to lift weights. And if you're not lifting weights, even with fat loss being the goal in losing weight, then obviously some of that fat loss is going to start to come from muscle, which is not a good thing.
00:13:56
Speaker
So how does sleep actually affect building muscle? Well, when we think about weight loss or fat loss specifically, with our body wanting to lose weight and get rid of some of this excess that we're carrying around. One of the things that it typically is going to go to first, unless you give it the signal otherwise, is to get rid of muscle. Because muscle is a more expensive tissue metabolically to hang on to, which just means it takes more energy for the body to keep up with it and keep it on our frame and make sure that we're using it and all that sort of thing.
00:14:27
Speaker
it's more expensive for the body to do that. And since the body is a super efficient machine, it thinks, well, we're losing weight. Why don't we get rid of this muscle so that we can conserve energy because you're losing weight, you're in a calorie deficit,
00:14:39
Speaker
It already knows that we're not getting enough energy through food. So why don't we get rid of something that is going to be more expensive to hang on to, which is muscle. So to combat that, we need to lift weights.
00:14:51
Speaker
When it comes to sleeping, some of these are very obvious about why sleep is important with building muscle. But when you think about being able to build muscle, obviously you need to have good workouts. Like you need to lift weights or strength train. And in order to have good workouts, you need to have good sleep because sleep directly affects your energy levels. So that allows you to go harder in your workouts.
00:15:11
Speaker
It affects your strength levels. So we know that if you have poor crappy sleep for even one night, but especially when it starts to turn into a longer term thing where you're just not getting enough sleep. The amount of weight that you're able to lift is going to be less like you're just not going to get as strong and you're not going to be able to use your strength to the fullest when you are under slept all the time. Same thing goes for your endurance levels. If you're getting crappy sleep all the time, you're just not going to be able to go as hard and as long. which is going to directly affect your workouts. And if your workouts are crappy, that's going to affect your progress. It's going to affect how much you can build muscle. And so it just starts to be this big snowball effect of just not a lot of good things adding up to give you crappier results.
00:15:52
Speaker
When you think about sleep and how important that is for recovery, you know that the reason we get into the gym is to give our body a stimulus to hang on to that muscle or to build that muscle. And then once you're out of the gym, it's time to recover. So you give your body that stimulus in the gym. But when you're outside of the gym, that's when you're actually repairing. That's when you're covering. That's when you're adapting is outside of the gym. And a ton of that repair is done when you are sleeping.
00:16:17
Speaker
But if you're not sleeping for a long enough period of time, or if your sleep is just crappy, well, you're starting to hinder that whole process. So now you're not recovering super great in between workouts. So maybe you're putting the work in and you're getting your workouts in and you're seeing some benefits, you're seeing some progress. But if your sleep was a little bit better and you could recover better, you'd have better workouts.
00:16:37
Speaker
could build muscle a little
Hormonal Effects of Poor Sleep
00:16:38
Speaker
bit quicker, have better overall general health and just feel better, look better, all those different things by focusing on just getting better sleep. And then the last thing I would say is poor sleep affects our hormones, which I already mentioned. So it starts to affect things like muscle protein synthesis, which is important for the muscle building process. It starts to affect your testosterone, which we know is super beneficial for building muscle.
00:17:04
Speaker
It starts to affect some of those other hormones that I mentioned. So when it comes to sleeping in general, it's just not a good thing for you if your sleep sucks, because if your sleep sucks, your workouts probably aren't going to be great. Your recovery is not going to be great. you're already making something that's a challenging process like building muscle, which takes a lot of effort and energy to do. You're making that more difficult. So if like you had to run a mile, would you rather want to run that mile on a flat surface? Would you rather run that mile straight uphill?
00:17:35
Speaker
Obviously the answer is you would rather run on a flat surface. Like running a mile as hard as you can is already going to be difficult. You don't want to make it twice as hard by running that mile straight uphill. Give yourself the most benefits that you can by starting to improve and just really start to prioritize your sleep. The take home message with all of that is that you can still build muscle. You can still lose fat even when sleep isn't great, because I don't want to send the message of if you are not getting enough sleep and or you're going through a stressful time or Maybe you're a new parent and you're just wondering, like, is it even worth getting my workouts in or focusing on fat loss when I'm getting crappy sleep? The answer is you can absolutely still make progress. It's just more difficult when your sleep isn't on point.
00:18:18
Speaker
So let's talk about some practical tips to help you out with getting better sleep and ultimately just getting better progress, feeling better, looking better, losing more fat, building more muscle, all those sorts of things. The practical tips.
00:18:30
Speaker
The first thing is just you want to be aiming for at least seven to eight hours of sleep, which we've all been told for a very long time. So this varies a little bit from person to person, like some people do a little bit better with that eight hours, maybe even a little bit more. Some people can do just fine with six and a half or seven hours of sleep.
00:18:47
Speaker
The big thing with this is just understanding if you don't have a sleep tracker, which a lot of people do at this point, but even if you do, just understanding that if you're trying to get seven hours of sleep, you probably want to aim for being in your bed for at least eight hours. If you're trying to get eight hours of sleep, you probably want to aim for being in your bed for at least nine hours.
00:19:06
Speaker
Just because you're in your bed for, let's say seven hours, that does not mean that you're getting seven hours of sleep because you wake up throughout the night, it takes you some time to fall asleep. And so all that time spent in your bed does not necessarily mean time that you are spent sleeping. A good rule of thumb is whatever you want to get for your sleep, if that's six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours, whatever, you want to add an extra hour to actually get that amount of sleep.
00:19:30
Speaker
that you're trying to aim for. And one more point about just the amount of time that you are focusing on with getting your sleep. Lots of people will say they feel good on five hours or five and a half or even six hours of sleep. A lot of the studies show us that even if you feel okay, like you can get away with getting that much sleep, especially on a night or two, like things are going to happen, life's going to happen, whatever. But if you're chronically sleeping five hours a night,
00:19:55
Speaker
By the studies, like we can just see that a lot of things are happening and you're not getting the best benefits that you could be if you were sleeping a little bit more. So yes, you can maybe make some progress on your goals and be all right with sleeping five, six hours. But when it comes to just other effects that not having great sleep or having that little amount of sleep is having on you, Those things are showing up, maybe not today, but they're going to show up at some point. So maybe it starts to affect some of your health markers, or maybe it starts to affect your energy levels over time, or maybe it starts to affect how well you can lose fat or build muscle. Like some of these things, they don't always show up like in the moment and it takes a compounding effect of months or years of these things happening. But if you're not getting a good sufficient amount of sleep, that lack of sleep is going to start to show up at some point. So it's just better to be more proactive about this whenever possible and just really make sleep that priority that it should
Creating a Sleep-Friendly Environment
00:20:50
Speaker
be. Number two is setting up your environment to make sleep easier.
00:20:55
Speaker
So you don't just want to sleep for a long time or sleep for that seven or eight hours. You want to have quality within those seven or eight hours or that time that you're spending sleeping. Simplest thing you can do for your environment is just to remember cold, dark, and quiet. You want your room to be somewhere between like 60 to 68 degrees because when you go to sleep, your body needs to cool down like your body temperature needs to cool down in order to sleep comfortably. If you've ever tried to sleep in a really hot environment, it sucks and your sleep is not very good, especially if you're used to sleeping in a colder environment. So keeping your room cool is important.
00:21:28
Speaker
Dark is pretty self-explanatory, but you want your room to be dark. You don't want a ton of light in the room just to help you out with being able to fall asleep and stay asleep. Blackout curtains, eye masks, those sorts of things can be pretty helpful with that. And then quiet, you want to keep your room quiet so that you're able to stay asleep. Sometimes people like a little bit of background noise or a noise maker or there's different apps or like nature sounds or things like that that help you fall asleep quicker or something like that, which is perfectly fine.
00:21:55
Speaker
in general cold dark quiet is a pretty good rule of thumb to remember the third thing be consistent especially with your wake-up time you want to keep that consistent as possible monday through friday especially but even on the weekends if you can keep that somewhat similar you're probably going to be better off keeping a nice consistent wake-up time than that wake-up time being all over the place so that your body can get in routine and you can start to really get that biological clock in order because if you're waking up at different times every single day, it's just hard for your body to get in a good routine and a good rhythm. So you may find like if you're sleeping an extra hour here or there, like multiple times per week, like you may find that you're getting more sleep, but then you don't actually feel rested when you wake up. So keeping that consistent with your wake up time is important. And
00:22:40
Speaker
to help you with keeping a consistent wake time, having a consistent bedtime routine, I think can also be super helpful. Lots of people set morning alarms, not a lot of people use what I call a bedtime alarm. So just having some sort of alarm, whether it be 30 to 60 minutes before you go to bed, just to remind you that it's time to start to wind down and then have some sort of routine so that your brain can start to make some associations about when it's time to go to sleep so that you can fall asleep a little bit quicker and get into that whole rest and recovery process sooner. So you're not just sitting there scrolling on your phone or you're not just in there ruminating when your but head hits the pillow or anything like that. Having a routine can help you to get in that mindset of just getting ready to sleep.
00:23:21
Speaker
With your consistency and just bedtime routine, quick thing that you want to implement whenever possible is to stop eating roughly three hours before bed. Digesting food is not ideal while you're trying to sleep or when you're trying to go to sleep. It takes a little bit longer for your body to actually get into that restful state when you are focused on digesting food. So if you can stop eating roughly three hours before bed, that's going to be a benefit to you. Obviously, this isn't always ideal. And sometimes you just have to do what you got to do. Like if you got home super late, or you hadn't eaten yet, or just need a meal, and then you have to go pass out and go to sleep. It is what it is. But for the most part, if you can, if you can eat three hours prior to bed, and then cut that off, you're going to
00:24:08
Speaker
be a little bit better off just as far as getting quality sleep. Fourth on the list, I know I've mentioned this several different times on different podcasts, but leaving your phone outside of your bedroom, probably one of the quickest ways to improve your sleep just about instantly. Lots of people take their phones to bed, they scroll on their phones for a very long time, and that ends up just not only taking time away that you could be sleeping, but you're also getting your brain excited, you're getting kind of wired so you don't necessarily feel tired when you're scrolling on your phone and when you're doing that in bed.
00:24:37
Speaker
Now you're also creating that association in your brain about when i lay down in bed, now I want to scroll, I want those dopamine hits. And that's not the kind of association that you want to have when you get into bed is you don't want your brain to be all wired up and ready for these dopamine
Avoiding Sleep Disruptors
00:24:52
Speaker
hits. You want it to be the opposite, relaxed. You want it to be ready to go to sleep. You don't want it to be, have all these thoughts whirling around and looking for these crazy videos or anything like that. This happened to me just last night. Like I was getting ready for bed and I was reading, winding down and I was getting so tired that I could literally
00:25:09
Speaker
barely keep my eyes open like I could have put my book down and go and brush my teeth and just went to bed and fell asleep in probably less than two minutes. Well, for whatever reason, I decided to get on my phone as I was brushing my teeth and I started scrolling and scrolling and going down the rabbit hole as we all do. And I wasn't in my bed yet like I was just brushing my teeth. But then I sat back down on my couch and I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
00:25:32
Speaker
45 minutes later, I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm not even tired anymore. Like I'm wired up because I was looking at my phone. I was getting stimulated through all these different videos and just reading into different things and looking at fitness stuff and all that kind of crap that like I didn't need. And I was just tired, like super tired 45 minutes ago. But for the simple fact of me looking at all these videos and just being stimulated by all the different inputs that are coming in through our social media apps and our phone and that sort of stuff. just wired me up and got my brain going. And then so I had to put my phone down, go put it on the charger. And then I went upstairs and went to bed. But again, it's just one of those simple reminders, like, if you can start to set yourself up and just make things like this a little bit easier on yourself by keeping your phone outside of your bedroom, plugging that in maybe 30 minutes before you go to bed and just leaving it alone and not getting on your phone. making that part of your bedtime routine, something as simple as that can go a long way. And again, this is just a good reminder for me as well that I need to be a little bit better about that sometimes because it is a super slippery slope. Those phones are, they're tough. Like they're they're they're made to keep us using those things. They're the content on there, the social media apps, like all those things are made for us to just continue to consume and be on those things. So you just have to be more intentional about those things, especially around sleep.
00:26:49
Speaker
Fifth on the list, stop caffeine before noon. This is pretty simple, but a lot of coffee drinkers or caffeine drinkers out there, you wanna try to cut that off by noon so that caffeine doesn't start to affect your sleep. Caffeine stays in your system for a really, really long time.
00:27:03
Speaker
And if you're drinking caffeine after noon, it's typically going to show up in your sleep. So even though you don't feel it, or maybe you are able to fall asleep very quickly, caffeine could be affecting the actual quality of your sleep, even if you're able to fall asleep after having like an energy drink late at night or a pre-workout late at night or anything like that. Like if you're able to fall asleep, but that caffeine is still in your system, it's very likely still affecting the quality of your sleep. So you just want to be conscious about that and just make good choices around caffeine and to help you have better sleep.
00:27:35
Speaker
And the last thing that I would say about sleep is just to make it a priority. Sleep is one of those things that, again, just like eating, you're going to do it for your entire life. You are going to sleep, hopefully every single day for the rest of your life. And so it makes sense to put something that can be so beneficial.
00:27:54
Speaker
as a priority to figure it out. Like a lot of people will say things like, oh I'm not a good sleeper or i have trouble sleeping. And there's very real things that affect our sleep. But I think it's worth putting in the effort to figure out how you can change that and start to really improve and prioritize your sleep. Because it literally does have that many benefits, like people who sleep more and who have better quality sleep, they live longer lives than the people who don't.
00:28:19
Speaker
They have all these other health benefits that I listed towards the beginning of the podcast that happen by prioritizing sleep. So it just makes sense. It's one of those super high leverage things that once you start to get it right, it affects literally everything else in your life. It affects your relationships. It affects your work. It affects your fitness. It affects your health. It affects just everything from a day-to-day basis by getting better sleep. So it makes sense to continue to prioritize sleep and continue to focus on it. and even if you're not great at sleeping right now or you have a really bad track record with getting to sleep or falling asleep or getting good quality sleep or feeling rested it's definitely worth putting that effort into figuring it out because having good sleep and just doing it on a consistent basis can change how well you feel and just give you so many benefits so it's definitely worth sticking it out and continue to make it a priority to you do really feel like you have a good handle on your sleep
00:29:13
Speaker
And with these tips, you can start trying some of those things right away. Like you don't need to do all these different things, but pick one or two things that you could try right away. Maybe it's plugging your phone in outside of your bedroom. Maybe it's setting up some sort of bedtime routine. Maybe you're committing to getting up at the same time every single day. Maybe you are going to go out and buy some blackout curtains.
00:29:35
Speaker
little noise machine to help you fall asleep whatever it doesn't matter just start to pick one or two things that you can start to implement and start to really ingrain some of these things and make sleep a priority so you can start reaping some of these benefits because it really is that important not just from a muscle building perspective or fat loss perspective but just from a general life and health and enjoyment perspective sleep is that vital and with that being said as always i do appreciate you listening If you can leave a review, if you have not done so, or if you found this valuable and you think somebody could get some value out of this, you can always share this with them, share it on socials, all that good stuff. If you're interested in one-on-one coaching, that link is in the show notes as well. But I appreciate you listening and we will see you next week.