My 10 Sleep Hygiene Tips to Support Weight Loss and Fitness Progress

Have you ever thought about the importance of sleep before? Or is it only something that you think about after you’ve had a poor night’s sleep and are completely exhausted the next day?

Sleep wasn’t something I really thought seriously about for much of my life. In fact, I only started trying to take it seriously within the last year.

As part of my health and wellness journey, I’ve spent a lot of time researching and learning about all the things that can potentially impact my health. I knew diet played an enormous role, as did exercising, specifically strength training. I had always heard people talking about the importance of reducing stress because stress increases the risk of cardiovascular incidents such as heart attack or stroke. However, I never tied improved sleep into that.

Historically, I had always had trouble sleeping and, therefore, always felt tired. Because of that, I always drank a lot of coffee, and I really mean a lot. Like one full pot a day just for me. If I didn’t have coffee on hand, I would seek out some other source of caffeine, whether that was tea, green or black, soda, or energy drinks, to get the energy that I needed to get myself through the day. So, my lack of focus on sleep, as well as my other health problems, caused a cascade of health issues for me.

• How do I improve my sleep?
• What’s the real impact of not focusing on my rest and recovery?
• How does sleep really impact my overall health?
• How do I stay energized and awake without coffee or caffeine?

I’ve asked myself all these questions and, honestly, many more. What I’ve learned is that any wellness journey must include a focus on sleeping better. Better sleep means better recovery, not just for your body but for your brain as well. Sleep is a critical component of mental, physical, and spiritual health.

What does God say about sleep?

God created all creatures to rest in some way, shape, or form, including humans. Even God rested after making the whole of creation.

Genesis 2:2-3, “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So, God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

Rest is so important that God mandated rest for people and land in Leviticus.

Leviticus 23:3 – “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the LORD in all your dwelling places.

Leviticus 25:4 – but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the LORD. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.

The beautiful design behind rest is the ability for repair and regeneration. That’s the reason behind letting land stay fallow, and the mandate in Leviticus for the land to rest was so that it could repair and regenerate the soil to allow it to become fruitful again, or at least maintain its fertility.

The same is true of all people. Not only do we need to have a means of recovering from work every week, but we need to have an opportunity for our brains and bodies to recover daily.

So why is sleep so important? What happens if we don’t get enough of it?

So, our bodies and brains only have one opportunity in the day to recover and repair themselves, and that only happens when we sleep. When we exercise, we aren’t building muscle at that moment, regardless of the exercise that we are doing, whether it’s strength training or cardio. All we are doing is breaking muscle fibers down and causing inflammation in those parts of our bodies. When we sleep is when the repair and recovery of our bodies happens.

Sleep happens in 3 stages:

1. Light sleep
2. Deep sleep – also known as Slow Wave Sleep (SWS)
3. REM sleep

The first two stages of sleep are for the body to repair itself, whether it’s rebuilding muscle tissue that was broken during exercise, scrubbing out old or dying cells, or rebuilding new ones. Of the two stages where the body heals, deep sleep is the most important. This is when the majority of human growth hormone is released, which helps the body repair and rebuild its cells and structures.

The final stage of sleep is REM sleep, and it is critical in the repair and regeneration of our brains. This is the only time the brain ever has an opportunity to rest and repair itself. Think of it as the human body’s version of running a computer defragmentation cycle.

REM sleep is so important that if your body feels as though you didn’t get enough of it, it will just force you to sleep without you realizing what’s happening. This event is known as a “micro nap,” and they result in thousands of deaths every year.

If you don’t enter REM sleep for three days, you can experience hallucinations or demonstrate symptoms of schizophrenia.

In 2021, just in the United States, drowsy driving and associated micro naps resulted in 1221 crashes with fatalities. According to a recent study from the CDC, which looked at over 150,000 drivers across 19 states, 1 in 25 adult drivers had fallen asleep behind the wheel in a 30-day period.

Disasters such as Chornobyl, Challenger, and 3-mile Island have all been tied to lack of sleep.

The other disastrous effect on the body when it doesn’t get enough restorative sleep, REM, and SWS, is hormone dysregulation.

What’s hormone dysregulation, and what is its impact on me?

Hormone dysregulation is just a fancy way of saying your hormones become unbalanced. The results of hormone dysregulation can be impactful, especially when it comes to hormones such as insulin, cortisol, leptin, and ghrelin.

Weight loss really comes down to balancing hormones, specifically the ones that I just listed.

Insulin is a powerful hormone with a lot of responsibilities in the body, one of the main ones being controlling the level of blood sugar within the body into a very tight range. It acts as an energy regulator, ensuring that there is never too much energy in the bloodstream at any given time.

When blood sugar increases, insulin is released so that the body can take the excess energy from the bloodstream and store it away, keeping the body from becoming overwhelmed with energy. That energy takes the form of either sugar or fat.

When insulin is present in the body, the body stops using fat for fuel and instead focuses on burning the excess sugar that’s in the blood or shunting it to the liver to store it as fat in the fat cells.

So, what’s all of that have to do with not getting enough sleep?

When your body doesn’t get sufficient sleep, it impacts the release of insulin, cortisol, human growth hormone (HGH), and ghrelin. HGH is normally released and at its highest concentrations in the body during the first hour of sleep, which coincides with when SWS usually occurs. However, HGH is not released in the presence of insulin.

So, if you happened to eat within an hour or 2 of falling asleep, the presence of insulin would interrupt the release of HGH, which would then make SWS less productive in the restoration process of the body.

Numerous studies, such as this one from 2010 and this one from 2013, have shown that impaired sleep showed an increase in cortisol which is a stress hormone and increases inflammatory markers in the body, and increased release of ghrelin which caused increased hunger and therefore increased caloric intake throughout the day, and increased insulin resistance of cells which cause the body to release even more insulin in an attempt to regulate blood sugar levels appropriately.

All these hormonal changes impact the body and brain’s ability to repair itself in a dramatically negative manner and decrease the body’s sensitivity to insulin. When there’s a decrease in sensitivity to insulin, the body has to release more insulin than it previously did to take care of the same amount of blood sugar.

My sleep story…

I’ve always struggled with sleep and feeling exhausted even after sleeping for 8 to 10 hours. I just thought that’s how my body was and the only way to feel energized was to drink caffeine. I was a soda addict when I was a kid and a teenager, and that addiction shifted over to coffee when I got to college. After I graduated, I was commissioned into the Navy, and that’s when my relationship with caffeine went completely overboard.

In the Navy, I would be up for 16-18 hours doing my normal job and then have to stand to watch for 4 to 6 hours at a time, and that watch section would rotate to a different time every day. I lived on coffee; it was rare for me not to be drinking coffee, which was pretty normal on the ship. If I wasn’t drinking coffee, I was downing cans of Mt Dew since it had the highest level of caffeine of any soda we had onboard.

I never slept well, my circadian rhythm was completely non-existent, and there was rarely a moment when I wasn’t ingesting large amounts of caffeine no wonder I was always exhausted.

Things didn’t change after I got out of the Navy either. I had my son and was even more tired. Over the next six years, I had two more kids, and so I never really got out of the cycle of crappy sleep enabled by over ingestion of caffeine. I always made an excuse in my head, though, that I was a parent of young kids, and being tired all the time was normal.

It is not normal to be exhausted all the time. It was an indication that my body wasn’t rested, wasn’t repairing itself, and the impact of those things had real physical and mental impacts on me.

I had headaches every single day. I always feel too tired to work out, so I didn’t. I was gaining weight and was always moody. I was always hungry, so I would eat constantly, usually, something that was super carby and sweet, and the result of all of that was a complete hormonal trainwreck that was making me metabolically sick.

Moreover, I found out that I had obstructive sleep apnea, which became one more thing that I blamed for me being constantly tired and cranky.

How I finally started to turn things around for the better…

Making changes to my dietary lifestyle really helped me get a handle on my health. Reducing the amount of carbs that I ate and keeping my body in a constant state of ketosis to ensure that my body used my fat for fuel was a game-changer for my health and wellness. However, I was still tired, and when I worked out, I would feel exhausted, which impacted my ability to workout effectively.

My issue was that I still wasn’t focusing on my rest and recovery.

I was still drinking a pot of coffee a day as well as the occasional caffeinated energy drink on top of all that when I was especially tired. I didn’t have a consistent sleep or wake time, often going to bed anywhere between 10 pm to 1 am and would wake up anywhere between 6 am to 7 am when I was at home or between 2 am-3 am if it happened to be a travel week for me.

Even though I had improved my food choices and my overall strength, my lack of focus on improving my sleep was still causing a hormonal wreck inside of me. My headaches hadn’t gotten any better, and I was still cranky after I woke up until I had consumed at least 2 cups of coffee.

Once I started to research the impact of sleep, which only started after I decided to get my CrossFit Level 1 trainer, I realized I had a ton of work to do to continue to improve my health. It was at that point that I decided to really take my sleep health seriously.

Goodbye coffee and caffeine

I decided that the best thing that I could do to improve my sleep was to ween myself off all caffeine. This was an 8-week journey from start to finish.

The first thing I did was drop the number of cups of coffee I was drinking from 12 down to 10. I did that for a week. Then, I lowered the total number of cups from 10 to 8, and instead of using eight tablespoons of coffee, I substituted two tablespoons with roasted cocoa nibs. I just followed this process, knocking down the total number of cups by 1 cup each week, and as I did that, replacing one tablespoon of the coffee I was using with a tablespoon of cocoa nibs until I was just drinking 2 cups of just brewed roasted cocoa nibs instead of coffee.

It was a tough process for me, and I was genuinely cranky for most of that time, given I had been drinking coffee almost every day since I was 18.

Part of what I came to realize was that I wasn’t just addicted to caffeine but also to the morning ritual of drinking a hot beverage first thing in the morning when I woke up. Keeping the ritual really helped with the process of weaning off coffee.

I stopped drinking caffeinated energy drinks as well, which was an easier habit to stop, and shifted from black or green tea to herbal teas.

Once I got my caffeine habit kicked, I shifted into trying to establish a consistent nighttime and morning routine, including consistent wake and sleep times and a consistent wind-down about an hour before I went to bed. For me, I wind down through reading, so I would just do that while drinking some chamomile tea with some magnesium added to it to help me relax before bed naturally.

Establishing a nightly sleep routine and practicing good sleep hygiene is critical to getting the rest you need to restore your body and mind.

Here are some tips that you can follow to improve your sleep hygiene and improve the quality of your nightly sleep:

1. Start winding down your brain 30 minutes to an hour before going to bed.
As I mentioned previously, I like to read to wind down.

2. Stop drinking caffeine by noon or at the latest 2 pm.
I stopped drinking caffeine altogether, and it has helped my ability to go to sleep dramatically.

3. Avoid blue light from electronics 2-3 hours before going to bed.
Change the settings on your phone and computer to night light settings so that they will shift on a blue light filter on your device. Blue light negatively impacts the release of melatonin, which is the hormone that helps you fall asleep.

4. Try to avoid bright lights after sunset, especially fluorescent lighting.
Bright light prevents the body from producing melatonin. Melatonin is a light-sensitive hormone that is released after the sun sets and it starts to get dark. When light is present, melatonin production slows down or stops altogether, making it more difficult to go to sleep.

5. Avoid working out or eating 2-3 hours before trying to go to bed.
Working out releases cortisol, which is a stress hormone that negatively impacts the body’s ability to relax and therefore sleep. Eating triggers the release of insulin which will prevent HGH from being produced. HGH is needed to help repair and restore the body during SWS sleep.

6. Keep your bedroom cold, less than 67 or 68 degrees.
Sleeping in a cold environment helps the body enter SWS sleep faster.

7. Keep your bedroom as dark as possible.
Cover up any small LED indicator lights that are present. Again, melatonin is a light-sensitive hormone; any lights that you see can disrupt the release of melatonin and, therefore, could negatively affect your ability to go to sleep and stay asleep.

8. Minimize noise.
I think we all know what it’s like to be awoken in the middle of deep rest. 😉

9. Use your bedroom for sleeping only.
Try to minimize electronics usage in your bedroom. This helps your brain and body associate your bedroom with only sleep.

10. Pick a time to go to bed and wake up each day.
Stick to those times every single day. Having consistent sleep and wake time helps your body enter SWS and REM sleep more easily.

I never realized how valuable sleep was until I started focusing on it and realizing that being exhausted all the time wasn’t something that I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

What I learned was that I didn’t have to depend on caffeine for energy every day once I started improving the overall quality of my sleep. Since I stopped drinking caffeine, I’ve had more energy than I ever remember having as a coffee drinker, primarily because my sleep quality has improved dramatically, and my body and brain are getting the rest and repair that they both desperately needed.

God meant for humans to rest, and He designed our bodies to restore themselves only after we follow His command to rest. It is not easy to improve your sleep, but it is 100% necessary to improve your overall health and wellness. We cannot make any significant, lasting gains in fitness or wellness without the proper recovery, and that truly means getting the proper sleep.