How to sleep your way to top performance

Although most of us spend approximately one-third of our life sleeping we are not particularly good at it.

Sure, we can lay down and fall off into a more or less unconscious state, occasionally interrupted by dreams, yet in order to get the best quality sleep, and maybe even cut off an hour or two from our daily sleep studying how to sleep may prove to be very helpful for you. 

What I want to present here are some of the most important aspects to integrate into your sleep routine. Please see them as guidelines and adapt them to your needs.

1. Establish a fixed sleep period. 

The best is if it is from 22.00-06.00, however, if for example, your job prevents that then choose another period, as long as you stick with it.

You will notice that it becomes a lot easier to fall asleep fast, and thus get more hours of sleep if you sleep at the same time interval every night.

2. Cut down on the things that you (probably) use to keep yourself awake and energised during the day hours before you go to bed.

I am not in any way recommending drinking coffee or other “energising” drinks, yet if you have to do it, start cutting back on it so many hours before that their effects won’t interfere with your ability to fall asleep in the evening.

The same goes for alcohol. It does make it easier to fall asleep, however, your sleep won’t be as deep, and thus you will probably wake up not feeling completely rested. 

3. Do things that relax you the last hour or two before you go to bed. This makes your mind calm down, and it’ll be a lot easier for you to fall asleep.

Write a letter to a beloved one, meditate, go for a walk, read a good book, etc. Most of our clients tell that one of their largest challenges is that they can - paradoxically enough - not relax when they finally have time to relax. It might also be that you simply don’t feel that you can take two hours out of your evening program “just” to relax. The best solution we have found to this is a conscious relaxation technique, I emphasise “conscious”. By making a conscious relaxation, instead of just laying down and doing nothing, the mind is bypassed and thus does the relaxation become much deeper, much faster. 

4. Don’t eat anything for preferably four hours before you go to bed. In this way, the digestion will be completed when you go to bed, and your sleep will be better. The only exception to this is fresh fruit. That you can eat up to an hour before you go to bed. So if you feel hungry in the evening, try to solve it with a little bit of fruit. 

5. Don’t drink anything before going to bed either. Once I reached a certain age I started waking up, sometimes even several times, every night having to go to the bathroom. It did not do anything good to my sleep, and eventually, I figured out (I never said that I am the most intelligent person on the planet) that it might be a good idea not to drink before going to bed. Now I seldom drink anything after 17.00 and I sleep the whole night without waking up. 

Here it is very important to remind you that it is strongly recommended to drink around two liters of water or fresh fruit juice per day. That can easily be done, and the earlier you do so the better. Try for example to drink half a liter to a liter of water when you wake up. It really does something good for your body. 

6. Sleep in a completely dark room.

Light during the night can completely destroy your production of melatonin this will then give you the feeling that you didn’t recover during your 

If you have to use the bathroom during the night should you also make sure that you can do so in complete darkness.

7. Sleep in a room with a moderate temperature.

Remember how challenging it was to fall asleep last time it was really hot? Now you know why to sleep in a cool room.

This is pretty much it, for a good beginning. You can, of course, include many more aspects that will make your sleep even better. However, these are the main parts. Integrate these parts and your sleep will be at an 80% efficiency