 Sleep is the foundation of productivity and happiness. When I'm well rested I'm a better colleague, a better father and a better husband. Today we'll go through a bunch of tips that will make you sleep a whole lot better, including some really surprising ones. There are three main components that determine the quality of your sleep. It's body temperature, body rhythm and light and they're all interconnected. But we'll start with the first one, body temperature. Our body temperature has a natural cycle throughout the day and it will drop a little bit when you sleep. So the first thing you want to get right is the temperature of the room you're in. 18.3 degrees Celsius is the perfect temperature and it's better to have it too cold than to have it too warm. This drop in temperature makes you become sleepy. What really helps about 90 minutes before you go to bed is a nice hot shower or bath. The core of your body will warm up but the reaction of the body will be to cool the body back down, making you sleepy. Making sure that your feet are warm is another trick. If your feet are too cold you will have trouble falling asleep. One study found that if you have warm feet your quality of sleep is also better. So after you get out of the shower it might be nice to put on some warm socks. Now you might think that keeping your feet warm is a good thing but I would advise against it. Your hands and your feet are a big part of body temperature regulation so take those socks off before you go to bed. This brings us to two surprising other tips. The first one is to not tug in your duvet. You need to be able to stick your feet out in the middle of the night to regulate your body temperature. The next one is to use single duvets so your body temperature regulation doesn't conflict with that of your bed partner. Now that we have slept it's time to wake up and a warm drink will help. It raises your body temperature and that is what wakes you up. Most people think it's the coffee but it's actually the warmth that does it before the caffeine does and will get to caffeine later. What really wakes you up in the morning and I thoroughly hate this one is a cold shower in the morning. Your body temperature cools down but every reaction your body warms you up and that's what's needed for your natural cycle. Now that we have covered temperature let's talk about light. Ideally you wake up to the natural light coming into your bedroom but for most of us that's impossible and bright light in the morning is really important for waking up. What might help is a wake-up light but those are rather expensive so for some of us a lead strip which is programmable and slowly brightens in the morning is a nice solution. A blast of daylight will really help you out next. Sit outside for at least 10 minutes and don't sit behind glass because it will shatter the light too much. You want natural light which is a great way to start the day even when it's overcast. Where bright light wakes you up in the morning it will also keep you awake at night so starting at around 8 try dimming the lights in your living room and start dimming the lights on your mobile phone and on your laptop. The debate on whether blue light is bad for you is still ongoing but that bright light is bad for you is a certainty. You might even consider putting away your laptop and your smartphone entirely after 8 which is also better for other stuff in your life. Now let's talk alcohol alcohol is one of the worst things you can do for your sleep it both screws up your heart rhythm and your body temperature so I don't want to promote day drinking but it actually might be a very good idea. Now that we've talked about alcohol let's talk about coffee it's good to stop drinking coffee at about two in the afternoon and it's good to minimize yourself to about four units during the morning. I often make the first pot of coffee straight when I get out of bed but it's actually better to wait about one and a half to two hours after you wake up to drink your first cup because you balance out the caffeine intake better throughout the morning. There's loads more you can tell about food or even about medication but it's so extensive that we've decided to do that in a blog article and the link to that you can find in the video description down below. The afternoon dip may make you consider a power nap if you take a nap take a cup of coffee before you do so and nap a maximum of 20 minutes putting something in your hands like your keys for example will prevent you from napping too long because as soon as the body really relaxes your keys will drop and you'll wake up. The power nap brings us to sleeping during the day and the short answer is don't it will disrupt your natural sleeping cycle and for a solid night of sleep regularity is key. Let's zoom into regularity and that starts with waking up at a regular time even in the weekends. You know that you've gone to bed early enough when you don't have to wake up to the alarm clock in the morning that's how you know that you've had enough sleep. Now let's talk about the amount of hours we sleep for most of us it should be between seven and nine hours for myself it's eight hours and 20 minutes for my wife it's almost an hour more. Now there will be somebody typing in the comments I'm doing perfectly fine on six hours of sleep and to be very honest you probably don't but don't realize it if we do some serious tests on you we will find negative impacts of your lack of sleep in your performance. There's one exception to this and that means your one in 12 000 which has a genetic difference this difference means that you can perform well in less than six hours of sleep but the chances of you being hit by lightning are higher than you having this genetic difference something that can really help you find regularity in your sleep is an active lifestyle try to cycle to work or hike to work every day if you do so try to find the pace where you can hardly speak to other people this is zoned to cardio and you need about 150 minutes of it every week. Many of us get too little movement and too little exercise if you do start exercising first of don't over strain this is really bad for your body and for your sleep and two try to split at least two hours before you go to sleep otherwise your heart rate will be too high and you will have trouble falling to sleep. One last thing about rhythm sleep is part of your 24 hour cycle and that is part of the circadian rhythms the circadian rhythms are the physical mental and behavioral changes that happen throughout 24 hour cycles knowing what your preferences are is key to getting most out of your day and out of your life you can determine this via a blood test called the time signature test a simpler way to do is a chronotype test which is actually in the video link description and this will tell you if you are a night owl or an early bird and for lots of us living closer to our natural rhythm makes life a lot easier now that we've looked at all the factors that impact sleep it's time to look at the final two things falling asleep and staying asleep for some of us falling asleep is really hard and here are some things that might help you this starts with the bedroom being a place for sleep and its related activities keep your laptop and your workout both in the morning and in the afternoon your mind must learn bedroom is for sleeping this good bedroom is cool it's dark and it's quiet something else to look at is your mattress the lifespan of a mattress is about seven to eight years but most of us sleep on it way longer a good sign that you need a new mattress is either you take too long to fall asleep or you wake up in the morning with soreners in your body next up is your nighttime ritual the fixed ritual really helps you do this with kids as well you put them to bed at a fixed time you read them a bedtime story and you tuck them in a fixed ritual is basically your head telling your body it's time for you to tuck in one of the things my wife does is writing down her thoughts before she goes to bed that might be the things she did during the day but it also might be to do is for tomorrow this clears her mind and creates an empty space before going to bed now that your mind is addressed it's time for your body to slow down and something that can really help is active meditation and breathing exercises one of them is called PMR and it's actively relaxing each part of the body and it really slows you down reading also helps it fills the mind with new stories it reduces stress and it makes you sleepy where reading is one way to fill your mind with new stories another way to do so is daydreaming and it's actually a really fun technique to keep the mind busy but with irrelevant stuff which really can help you fall asleep what really helps me is breathing through the nose and a fixed body position and for me that's the half military crawl we might have done everything right to fall asleep but still wake up in the middle of the night having trouble to fall back to sleep let's talk about what you can do then not worrying about the fact that you woke up might be the best advice i can give you tell yourself that it's okay even if it's not going to be your best night of sleep some of us might be looking at the clock every time we wake up and be confronted by the time it is if that happens to you quite often it might be a good idea to remove the clock from the bedroom for some of us the mind is racing when we wake up and for those a pen and a notebook next to your bed might be a really good solution to dump your thoughts and creating a clear mind again if you are really awake it's perfectly fine to go out of bed and do some benign stuff like drinking a glass of water or reading a little and the same techniques that help you get to sleep like the breathing exercises or the daydreaming might also help you fall back to sleep it's also good to investigate why you woke up so it won't happen the next time for me for example it was often sound for example the paper boy dropping in the newspaper or the birds waking up in the morning air plugs really helped me out there for my daughter it was light leaking into her room so her face mask was really helpful for her and both of those things also really help you when you travel a lot I really hope this video helps you out and that you find better sleep and I would love to thank voice for supporting these videos and you can find out more about them in the video description thanks for joining us in this video and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers!