Prioritize Your Sleep

Today, March 14th, 2025, is World Sleep Day. So, in honor of this special occasion, I wanted to share with you some great tips to help you improve what is the most important thing you can do to improve your overall health and well-being. Getting more sleep!

Everyone I know loves sleep, but hardly anyone gets enough of it. If you want to be a healthy human, you have to make sleep a priority.?

Let’s get right down to brass tacks. Sleep?is the?#1?way to naturally strengthen your immune system.

When we sleep, our bodies?repair?and?restore?vital systems that help keep us alive. This includes muscular, skeletal, and cellular repair during our REM stages of sleep.

If we're not getting?adequate?REM sleep, our bodies will not recover, and we will be more susceptible to illness.

A consistent lack of sleep will disrupt hthe ormonal balance in the body and depress the immune system. And the last thing we need is a depressed immune system!??Too little sleep over time can put you at greater risk for obesity, heart disease, and diabetes (all diseases). Or another way of saying a?body that’s not at ease.

Tips on Getting A Good Night's Sleep:?

• Avoid/limit caffeine?after 2 p.m.- Hey, I love my morning coffee as much as the next guy. I can't live without it, but I know that I have to cut off caffeine by 3 p.m. (the latest), otherwise, it will have a negative affect on my sleep. Even a piece of chocolate late in the day will disrupt my sleep. Here's why.

• Caffeine has a half-life of about six hours. That means if you have a coffee after 3 p.m., you’ll still have half the milligrams of that coffee drink floating around in your bloodstream at 9 p.m. (when you’re supposed to be winding down and getting ready for bed). This will surely disrupt the first sleep cycle, which occurs between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. (the time when the immune system repairs itself).?
• Avoid These Other stimulants: nicotine, sugar, and exposure to artificial light and electromagnetic pollution. Electromagnetic pollution is coming out of the electrical outlets in your wall and all the plugged-in appliances in your home. Not much you can do about that these days. But you can limit or eliminate exposure to artificial light. Start to turn down the lights in your home an hour before bedtime and shut off the TV, computer, iPad, and cell phone as well. Constant exposure to light signals the brain that it’s time to wake up. Get in the habit of shutting things down and spend the last 30 minutes of your day winding down. Roll, stretch, meditate. These all have a parasympathetic effect (repair and recovery).?
• Entrain Your brain- your brain doesn’t know the difference between a Monday and a Saturday. When we were younger, we could get away with staying up late on Friday or Saturday nights and get back to normal rather quickly. Not so much anymore. Your body does best on a consistent rhythm so aim to get to bed around the same time every night no matter what!

Brett's Bottom Line:

The facts are irrefutable. Adequate sleep is crucial to crushing all your goals. Whether you’re looking to build strength, lose weight, run farther, play golf better, bag that promotion, write that book, or just feel better, all strategies come back to shut-eye. Your brain requires it to imprint good form as you forge neural pathways, endure, react more quickly, and anticipate sooner.

The key to your best performance on and off the golf course lies in quality sleep - Catch your Zzzzzz's