A few weeks ago I wrote about nutrition and how do use it to get a good night’s sleep. I had a few people asking me for more information about it so I have decided to delve a little deeper. Sleep has to be one of the most important factors in maintain metabolic health along with nutrition and training and most people neglect it which shows.

Realistically you should be getting between 7 and 9 hours sleep per night, in fact a study by Heymsfield and Gangwisch in 2004 showed that you were 73% more likely to be obese if you had 5 hours or less opposed to the required 7 to 9 hours.

Sleep is important for a few reasons but essentially, it is when your body repairs itself from the damage done during the day and resets for the next day.

The first 3 or 4 hours of sleep are when your body repairs physical damage, so wear and tear on your joints and muscles and organs. The next 4 hours are when your body does neurological repair, getting your brain sorted out, making sure your nerves are all function properly and embedding what you have learned from the previous day into your memories.

So just from this alone you can start to see why it’s so important to have a full night’s sleep. If you cut your sleep short, your brain cannot recover properly which down regulates your ability to think properly, remember stuff and feel good and hampers your overall performance.

So how do we get a good night’s sleep?

Well our bodies sleep wake cycle or circadian rhythm is pretty much controlled by 2 main hormones, cortisol and melatonin.

Melatonin is created in the brain from serotonin, which you probably have heard of as one of the happy chemicals we have in our brain. Anti depressant medications often act to slow the re-uptake of serotonin so that it builds up and that’s essentially how they act to stop people feeling sad.

Any way so the trigger for the body to make melatonin is darkness, back in the day the sun would go down, it gets dark and we would get tired go to sleep then wake up when the sun rises. These days we have electric lights, computers, TV’s mobile phones etc. All this messes with our ability to activate melatonin production and therefore disrupts our sleep.

So what do you do?

Firstly is to make sure the lighting in your house is not too bright, use lamps or less intense bulbs especially in the bedroom. Unless you are reading at night, there is not a lot of need for anything above about a 60-watt globe.

Secondly, avoid work on computers, phones, or tablets at night. The light emitted from LCD screens is really disruptive for melatonin production, if you must there is a free program called F.lux that dulls and warms the tone of your computer screen so it becomes less disruptive. If you must use a computer at night, try to give yourself at least an hour away from the screen before you go to bed.

All of the above-mentioned things should also be kept out of the bedroom, and the same goes for televisions. The bedroom should just be used for sleep and sex, unless you are married then it is probably just sleep. If you use your phone as an alarm, put it on aeroplane mode while you are asleep, the world is not going to end if you do not receive a text until the morning.

So long story short, you need darkness to trigger a melatonin release so once the sun goes down, try to limit exposure to bright lights.

Now let’s look on the other end of things, cortisol.

Cortisol is a steroid hormone, a mild form of adrenalin made by your adrenal glands and is your primary stress hormone, it’s super important for regulating metabolism and helping your body deal with stress.

Typically cortisol should peak in the morning to wake you up then gradually decrease over the day. At night melatonin kicks in, cortisol is inhibited and you go to bed before it starts all over again, the problem is we get stressed.

Once again, back in the day we would hang out maybe go for a hunt, get chased by the odd man eating animal then chill out again. Now days its rush rush rush, boss is yelling, sponsors need updates, partner is angry, the news tell you the world is going to end, and this all creates stress. However, this is all from external stressors, what about inside the body?

Digestive health is affected by the quality of your food but also by drugs and alcohol, this includes prescription and over the counter meds. Lots of these are harmful to your digestive system, take Nurofen or Advil for example; they are made from a chemical called ibuprofen, great pain killer but terrible for your digestive system. This is why on the packet it says to be taken with food. Another pain killer, Panadol or paracetamol, is hard on the liver. Your liver is super important as one of its roles, along with your digestive system, is to remove toxins from your system. I’m not saying don’t take these things but just be mindful they are damaging to your body and should be taken with caution and only when necessary.

All of this damage drives up your cortisol levels and we end up with cortisol levels through the roof!

As a stress hormone, one of the roles of cortisol is to dump stored sugars or glycogen into your blood stream because essentially its purpose is to give you a burst of energy to run away from a predator or fight for your life.

When you run out of stored glycogen and you’re still stressed, cortisol causes your body to do a thing called gluconeogenisis, which is when your body actually starts to break down muscle tissue to make more sugar to keep you alive.

Are you starting to see how all this stuff can cascade and work against you? The worst thing is this is just one of the many things that can go wrong in the body when you are stressed and have poor sleep.

Now enough doom and gloom what the hell can you do about it all?

Well you are here, that’s an amazing start, knowledge is power!

Resistance training has been show to help regulate stress and lower its effects, eat a whole food diet and get a good night’s sleep. Remembering food is your fuel, we have all been told you are what you eat and that is the truth, if you put highly processed crap in your body then guess what? That is all your body has to work with when trying to keep you alive.

Another big issue these days, even if our nutrition is spot on, it’s a struggle to get all the nutrients our bodies needs. This is simply for the fact we are demanding a lot more of them that we have evolved to cope with. Things like Vitamin D and Magnesium, which play a pivotal role in stress control, have some of the highest deficiency rates in western society. If you have ever had an insatiable craving for chocolate that is a good sign that you may need more magnesium in your diet. Now just because you are craving it, don’t go out and scoff a heap of chocolate because it’s mostly processed crap, full of rubbish. You are far better off taking a high quality supplement like Poliquin Uber Mag.

Another way to further take care of your gut health is eating probiotic foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt and kombucha tea. I would also suggest taking a high quality probiotic to top up, as things like alcohol, pain meds and chlorinated drinking water can all have a negative effect on your gut health.

These tricks will go a long way towards lowering stress and performing better. To find out more about how you can achieve your potential and get the most from your body and performance, or would like some guidance on what are the best supplements for you head over to my contact page and book a consult.

Train hard and be safe.

Your strength coach,

Cam