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Month: August 2019

5 ways to improve your sleep today

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Good sleep is the basis of good health. Waking up refreshed, well rested and ready to take on the day is truly one of life’s pleasures, but unfortunately isn’t experienced by many.  Too many people experience challenges with their sleep and it doesn’t need to be this way. There can be many reasons why someone isn’t sleeping properly but a great place to start is by addressing some basic sleep hygeiene.  

Here are five things you can do to improve your sleep from today.   

1. Avoid caffeine after midday

Most people understand the effects of caffeine, but what isn’t common knowledge is just how long the effects caffeine can remain in your system. Research indicates caffeine can stay in your system for about eight hours, and in some instances up to 14 hours. Caffeine is found in coffee, tea, soft drinks, energy drinks and chocolate. Try not having caffeine after midday consistently and see if your sleep improves, and be sure to not squash in extras before midday! There are many delicious replacements you can use instead, including herbal teas. And if you cringe at how watery this will be – and hence not appealing – then it’s likely it’s the milk you want and you are most likely hungry when you are seeking a mid-afternoon coffee. Take some nuts from home to have as a snack instead. 

2. Take up a meditation practice

Daily meditation has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety, and may even have an effect on pain. Research suggests mindfulness meditation practice is particularly effective for improving sleep in people with sleep disorders such as insomnia. Guided meditations designed to encourage relaxation can be particularly helpful for beginners. There are many different places you can try meditation courses, which can guide you through the basics and help you find a style of meditation that suits you.

3. Relax in a bath

Soaking in a nice warm bath can be a great way to de-stress and signal to your body the transition to rest time has come. Light a scented candle or use some lavender oil and invite the calm into your evening. Beyond the stress reducing effect, a warm bath also slightly changes your body temperature which can also promote better sleep. It’s best to take your bath about one to two hours before you sleep, to help support your body to transition into rest. 

4. Keep your space tidy and wash your sheets often

It’s difficult to relax in a cluttered or messy room. Make your space sleep friendly by keeping the space clear and tidy. Healthy bedding is also important. Wash your sheets regularly and dry them on the line whenever possible as the UV, helps to kill bacteria and keep them naturally crisp and clean. Also consider the age of your bed as research suggests kiwis keep them too long for good support. Also, due to perspiration and skin sloughing off, dust mites can take up residence in mattresses and promote allergies.

5. Avoid back-lit electronic devices at night

TVs, computers, smartphones and tablets emit a sleep-disrupting light, yet many people still habitually check their social media or email before they go to bed. Create a new habit of not using backlit devices for 90 minutes prior to sleep if sleep quality is a problem for you. If you must sleep with your phone near you, switch to airplane mode or equivalent to prevent any notifications or noises in the middle of the night.  

Hunger vs appetite: what’s the difference?

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When it comes to managing your food intake, hunger and appetite are two very different things. Hunger is the physical need for food whereas appetite is the desire for food. Hunger typically occurs with low levels of glucose in your blood, several hours after eating – it is a protective mechanism that ensures your body is adequately fuelled. Appetite is the conditioned response to food – it is a sensory reaction to the look or smell of food.

It is appetite that can lead to your eyes being bigger than your stomach.

Where does appetite come from?

Appetite is closely linked with our behaviour but also takes cues from our digestive tract, brain and fatty tissue. Appetite is influenced by the sensory reaction to food, so your appetite can increase or decrease depending on your taste preferences, what food is available to you, your health, and emotional state. Appetite can be increased or decreased by hormonal factors and stress.

There is a saying that it is best to eat until you are just full, or still a little bit hungry and there is some truth to this. Most people are “nourished” well beyond when their natural satiety signals kick in. In the hectic world we live in now many people eat when they are distracted or on the run and they have literally lost the ability to listen to intrinsic satiety signals.  

The brain receives signals from a number of different hormones that indicate when food is needed or not. These signals converge on dopamine-producing neurons in the hypothalamus of the brain. This changes dopamine output to the brain’s reward centre, which in turn controls motivation for food. Dopamine transmits reward signals and low levels of dopamine have been associated with over-eating.  

How do we regulate our appetite?

Regulation of appetite has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. The hypothalamus in the brain is the main regulatory organ for human appetite. Leptin, a hormone produced by our fat cells, provides a negative feedback loop to signal when we need to stop eating. However, the excessive and relentless production of insulin which occurs so often today, leads the body to become deaf to leptin, missing its appetite regulatory message. This then impacts thyroid function and alters metabolism detrimentally even further.  

Increased appetite has been linked with hormonal imbalance, mental disorders and of course stress. Self-regulation is ideal however many people can no longer differentiate between true satiety signals and psychological influences and of course hormonal imbalance will also influence appetite. Any woman who has experienced PMT knows how out of control sugar cravings can feel in the lead up to menstruation. 

Here are some specific strategies that can help you to manage your appetite and prevent you from overeating.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is an essential component of appetite management. So many of us eat at our desks, in our cars, as we’re walking and so on. Sit down and be present with your meal.

Slow down

Eat slowly and chew your food well; allow time for the digestive processes to work optimally. If you’re a food inhaler, try putting your knife and fork/spoon down in between bites. Allow time to reconnect with your feelings of satiety. So often we override this by finishing what is on our plate, talking or generally being distracted.

Consider your emotions

It’s also important to consider when you are connecting with food emotionally. Food is unfortunately often used as a comfort, yet it can’t actually do that. It can’t hug you or offer words of appreciation. Be mindful of when you eat emotionally, ask yourself the question, “what do I really want?” – the feeling you are seeking may be found in connecting with a friend or loved one, going for a walk or simply having some space to yourself.  

How stress impacts your hormones

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We all have moments of stress in our lives and our bodies are designed to cope with small bursts of it. However, in our modern society where the pace of life seems to be progressing full speed ahead, many people report feeling stressed on a regular, if not daily, basis. 

When we feel stressed quite consistently, it has a flow-on effect to all of our body systems and can send our hormonal balance out of whack. This is because our body is wired to perceive stress as impending danger. It doesn’t understand that you’re feeling stressed because it takes so long to get the family out the door and now you’re late to your meeting, for example. To your body, stress—whether perceived (i.e. based on your thoughts) or real (i.e. based on actual physical danger)—means that your life is under threat.  

Since your body’s primary objective is to preserve your life, it hijacks your biochemistry and sends messages to prioritise the production of stress hormones and vital processes over everything else.  

Here’s how this can impact on your other hormones.   

Progesterone 

The female body links progesterone to fertility however, its production is impacted by stress as it is made in small amounts by our adrenal glands, where our stress hormones are also made. Not to mention that if our body perceives the message that there is persistent danger in our lives, it won’t want us to bring a baby into the world and so it downregulates reproductive system function. Chronic stress can contribute to irregular ovulation, and ovulation is what stimulates the surge in progesterone in the second half of the menstrual cycle.  

Insulin 

Insulin is a hormone that is produced in response to an elevation in our blood glucose levels. Its role is to help glucose move from the blood into our cells, which helps to bring our blood glucose back down into the normal range. However, it is also a fat storage hormone. When we are churning out stress hormones, biochemical changes that lead to an increase in our blood glucose levels are triggered, as the body thinks it needs an ample supply of a fast burning fuel to allow us to fight or flee the danger it perceives we are in. Chronic stress may contribute to the development of insulin resistance.  

Thyroid hormones 

Stress promotes the formation of reverse T3, which is the inactive form of T3, our thyroid hormone. Reverse T3 does not have the same metabolism-driving effects of T3, which every cell in the body relies on.  

Prolactin 

Chronic stress can contribute to elevated prolactin levels, which interferes with other hormones involved in the menstrual cycle. When prolactin levels are too high, we may experience irregular periods or they may stop altogether for a length of time.   

So how do we reduce the impact that stress has on our hormone balance? Quite simply we need to look at our stress response. Unless we stop our body from perceiving stress, it is going to continue sending the message to our body to prioritise our survival and downregulate the function of other body systems—including the production of various hormones.  

When I suggest this to people, they often share with me how it feels impossible to reduce the stress in their lives. And while it’s true that some periods of our lives are genuinely and unavoidably stressful, we often forget to consider that a lot of our stress is created by how we perceive the world and the way we need to be. Reducing stress can be aided by simply exploring our perception of pressure and urgency and becoming aware of any tendency to run ourselves ragged because we don’t want to let anyone down. I say simple because it’s not a complex solution, but it certainly can be easier said than done to change our beliefs. Yet, it may be that nothing in your life needs to change except your perception in order for your body to stop responding to certain external stimuli as stressful. And this may lead you to experience your life in a whole new way, that better serves your health and happiness.  

The smallest caring step

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One of the smallest and often most rewarding steps you can take towards self-care is to let yourself experience joy.

And best of all, it’s free! 

The key words in the sentence above are to let yourself. 

Sounds simple, right? 

So, why don’t we do it? 

As adults, many of us are conditioned for struggle. We’ve learned to focus on things that are hard in our lives and to do our best to overcome these. Or we see them as insurmountable, too difficult to face and feel we lack the tools to tackle them.

Or perhaps it’s not a matter of struggling but continuously striving — to do more, learn more, have more, be more; never quite being happy with what we have right now. 

But what we’re not taught, or rather what we forget as we grow up, is how to focus on joy.

Joy can seem like something you’ll get to experience once you overcome your current challenges or once you’ve achieved that goal. As though it sits on the horizon, waiting for us to get through all the more ‘important’ things. But joy can be experienced alongside your current challenges or desires.

We have the capacity to experience both tough things and joyful things simultaneously. It’s just that often the tough things feel so overwhelming that we don’t believe there is space for joy, so we don’t let ourselves experience it. 

But even amongst immense sadness and overwhelm, there can still be little moments of joy. They don’t even have to be little.

You just have to be willing to let it in, create space for it.  

It’s a way of showing yourself that you care.

When you allow there to be joy in your life, you fire off a bunch of delicious neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin which have a lingering effect in your body, long after the joyful experience has passed. 

So, I encourage you today to put the spotlight of your mind onto something joyful. To choose to let yourself have those little moments where you are not focused on your struggles or your strivings. Even if you don’t feel you deserve it. Even when you feel like your life is so full of stress there couldn’t be space for joy. Find it anyway.

Find it in a puppy’s face, a child’s giggle, a deep conversation, the flit of a bird’s tail, the light in the sky. Find it, and let yourself have it.

Even if it’s just for a few seconds.

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