The 8 Innate Brain Tips to Get A Better Night's Sleep

Proper sleep is one of the most important factors for long term brain health and function. Small adjustments to your sleeping area and daily routine can go a long way toward ensuring you uninterrupted, restful sleep and thereby better brain health. If you're even slightly sleep deprived, I encourage you to implement some of these Better Brain tips tonight.

1) Maintain optimal light exposure

Your pineal gland produces a hormone called melatonin in response to the brightness of sun exposure in the day and complete darkness at night. If you're in darkness all day long, your body can't appreciate the difference and will not optimize melatonin production. I recommend getting at least 30 to 60 minutes of outdoor light exposure during the daytime in order to set your master clock rhythm, in the morning if possible. More sunlight exposure is required as you age.

2) Preparing for Rest

Once the sun sets, avoid bright light as much as possible to assist your body in secreting melatonin, which helps you feel sleepy. Avoid bright lights from computers, televisions, video games or e-books at least 1 hour before bed time. It can be helpful to sleep in complete darkness, or as close to it as possible. If you need a bit of light to navigate down the hall in the wee hours of the night, install a low-wattage yellow, orange, or red light bulb. Light in these bandwidths does not shut down melatonin production in the way that white and blue light does.

3) Prepare your Mind for Sleep

A disturbance in sleep is always caused by something, be it physical, mental or emotional, or all of the above. Anxiety and anger are two mental states that are incompatible with sleep. Feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities is another common sleep blocker. To identify the cause of your wakefulness, analyze the thoughts that circle in your mind during the time you lie awake, and look for themes. Regular meditation is one of the best ways to regulate proper brain wave patterns that promote deep sleep.

4) Temperature affects Brain Activity

Keep the temperature in your bedroom below 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Many people keep their homes too warm (particularly their bedrooms). Studies show that the optimal room temperature for sleep is between 60 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Take a hot bath 90 to 120 minutes before bedtime. This raises your core body temperature, and when you get out of the bath it abruptly drops, signaling your body that you're ready for sleep.

5) Follow Natural Rhythms

There are natural rhythms in nature just as there are rhythms in the body. Normally, your brain starts secreting melatonin between 9 pm and 10 pm. Staying up later than 10 pm can affect your ability to not only fall asleep but stay in the important deep delta wave sleep pattern.

Going to bed and getting up at the same time each day helps keep your sleep on track, but having a consistent pre-sleep routine or "sleep ritual" is also important. For instance, if you read before heading to bed, your body knows that reading at night signals it's time for sleep. I often suggest listening to calming music, stretching, or doing relaxation exercises.

6 ) Be mindful of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) in your bedroom

EMFs can disrupt your pineal gland and its melatonin production, and may have other detrimental biological effects . Ideally, you should turn off any wireless router while you are sleeping—after all, you don't need the Internet when you sleep.

7)  Avoid Alcohol, Caffeine, and other drugs, including Nicotine

Two of the biggest sleep saboteurs are caffeine and alcohol, both of which also increase anxiety. Caffeine's effects can last four to seven hours. Tea and chocolate also contain caffeine. Alcohol can help you fall asleep faster, but it makes sleep more fragmented and less restorative. Nicotine in all its forms (cigarettes, e-cigs, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, and smoking cessation patches) is also a stimulant, so lighting up too close to bedtime can worsen insomnia. Many other drugs can also interfere with sleep.

8 ) Monitor your Sleep Habits

I Use a Fitbit fitness tracker to help to get to bed on time, and track which activities boost or hinder deep sleep. Many fitness trackers can now track both daytime body movement and sleep, allowing you to get a better picture of how much sleep you're actually getting. Newer fitness trackers can even tell you which activities led to your best sleep and what factors resulted in poor sleep.

Take action NOW to set up your daily rituals and sleep will be a more natural process with very healthy results.

Toxic Brain Waste Management

The brain creates a tremendous amount of toxic waste through normal daily thought processes. A key finding on MRI scans of Alzheimer’s patients is the presence of altered proteins in the memory areas of the brain responsible for short them storage. There’s no cure for Alzheimer's disease, which makes prevention all the more important, and sleeping well appears to be an important part of prevention.

 Studies published in 2012 and 2013 revealed that your brain actually has a unique method of removing toxic waste during deep delta sleep patterns This waste-removal system has been dubbed the glymphatic system and operates in a way that is similar to your body's lymphatic system, which is responsible for eliminating cellular waste products.

However, the lymphatic system does not include your brain. The reason for this is that your brain is a closed system that is protected by the blood-brain barrier to control what can go through and what cannot. The glymphatic system gets into your brain by "piggybacking" on the blood vessels in your brain. (The "g" in glymphatic is a nod to "glial cells"—the brain cells that manage this system.)

By pumping cerebral spinal fluid through your brain's tissues, the glymphatic system flushes the waste from your brain back into your body's circulatory system. From there, the waste eventually reaches your liver, where it's ultimately eliminated.

The most important fact is that this system ramps up its activity during sleep, thereby allowing your brain to clear out toxins, including harmful proteins called amyloid-beta that create the buildup that has been linked to Alzheimer's.

During sleep, the glymphatic system becomes 10 times more active than during wakefulness. Simultaneously, your brain cells shrink by about 60 percent, allowing for greater efficiency of waste removal.

During the day, the constant brain activity causes your brain cells to swell in size until they take up just over 85 percent of your brain's volume, thereby disallowing effective waste removal during wakefulness.

More recently, researchers discovered that the blood-brain barrier naturally tends to become more permeable with age, allowing more toxins to enter. This combined with the reduced efficiency of the glymphatic system shows that damage in both your brain and blood-brain barrier can start to accumulate at an increased pace. This deterioration is thought to play a significant role in the development of Alzheimer's.

Better Brain Tip

·        Prepare your brain for better sleep with the Walk-Breath-Twist (WBT)        routine at the end of your workday

·        See video for the 3 simple steps to WBT routine  

The Five Signs that Show Your Brain Needs More Sleep?

Poor sleep habits can lead to serious health conditions .This is becoming a growing problem in our country with nearly 40 percent of adults reporting that they fall asleep unintentionally during the day ,and five percent report nodding off while driving. Forty-five percent of teens also don't get enough sleep on school nights and 25 percent report falling asleep in class at least once a week.

Lack of sleep has serious health consequences that go far beyond not feeling fully awake and refreshed during the day. There's a price to pay both in the short term and long term as now a number of studies have linked poor sleep or lack of sleep to an increased risk of Alzheimer's. One of the reasons for this challenge has to do with the fact that your brain's waste removal system only operates during deep sleep.

So how can you be sure you're getting the right amount of sleep for you? The following Five signs indicate you probably need to address your sleep habits because you're not getting enough time for the brain to recharge.

1.    You're moody- Chronic insomnia is associated with a greater risk for irritability, depression and anxiety. The problem is even one night of insufficient sleep can have a dramatic impact on your mood. According to Lauren Hale,17 editor-in-chief of the journal Sleep Health:"If you're sleep deprived, you're more vulnerable to crankiness, irritability, and challenges coping with stress."

2.    Your work performance and productivity is inadequate - Basic brain functions such as focus, logical reasoning, and even memory can suffer when you're tired. Sleep has also been shown to boost creative functioning and promote problem solving, both of which are valuable needs in just about any profession.

3.    You're gaining weight -  The risk of developing insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes increases due to poor sleep habits or lack of sleep . Sleep exerts a specific effect on glucose metabolism, and lack of sleep also decreases levels of the fat regulating hormone leptin while increasing the hunger hormone ghrelin. The resulting increase in hunger and appetite can easily lead to overeating and weight gain.

4.    Signs of sleep deprivation are showing on your face- You can usually tell when someone hasn't slept well by how they look. A recent Swedish study looked at facial cues showing sleep deprivation, finding that people readily identified as having hanging eyelids, red swollen eyes, dark under-eye circles, pale skin, more wrinkles, and more droopy corners of the mouth as tell-tale signs of a poor night's sleep.

5.    You're drowsy during the day and catch yourself nodding off- Daytime sleepiness is a clear sign that you didn't get enough sleep the night before. So, if you're constantly yawning, and consuming excess coffee to keep yourself going, you need to get to bed earlier.

Sleep Is NOT a Luxury, It's an Essential for Good Health

**As noted in a recent issue of Time Magazine

"Sleep, the experts are recognizing, is the only time the brain has to catch its breath. If it doesn't, it may drown in its own biological debris... [Sleep researcher Dr. Sigrid] Veasey is learning that brain cells that don't get their needed break every night are like overworked employees on consecutive double shifts–eventually, they collapse.

Better Brain Tip

1)    Get your body in a natural rhythm by going to sleep and waking up at the same time for one week. See how you feel and adjust the time appropriately for better sleep patterns.

2)    Make sure you have a good mattress and pillow while avoiding sleeping on your stomach.  

How to increase your learning curve?

Our brain is a memory organ and understanding "how it remembers" can increase your overall health. There are key insights according to the latest brain research that are extremely valuable to understand. The most significant findings contributing to memory loss is the lack of daily health rituals and not making learning new things a priority.

Here are two key research findings to keep in mind next time you learn something new.

1. The process of learning creates new connections in the brain

Your brain works like an electrical circuit and when you learn something new, stronger connections form between neurons in your brain. Just as when electrical current travels through a circuit in your home, the same thing happens from one group of nerve cells to another. The stronger the electrical signal is initially the stronger the connection is between the neurons.

If you have a daily habit patterns you’ve felt the effects of a strong memory connections. Getting in your car, turning the key in the ignition, backing out of your driveway and driving to work can all happen without you even thinking about it. This unconscious behavior happens automatically as a result of brain circuitry that’s been strengthened through daily repetition. Studies show that the best way to create a healthier brain is to learn something new daily. Remember that habit patterns and daily rituals are only good if they support your overall health and vitality.

2. Overlapping connections are the best way for effective long term learning.

Just as awareness and conscious attention plays a role in learning, so does the quantity of the connections made between neurons. A single isolated fact may be very be tough to remember, but you can increase your memory by linking it to familiar information in your brain.

When I teach memory technique classes it is often astounding to the group how learning a simple strategy can magnify their learning curve. Whether it be remembering names ,lists, numbers etc,it is always better to link new knowledge to a previous memory. A sequencing of thoughts is similar to overlapping shingles on a roof which creates better recall.

For example: If you want to remember a grocery list ,predetermine specific places in different rooms of your home and then visualize items on your list.

Pick 5 places in each room starting on the left and move from place to place clockwise:

Room 1 could be your kitchen and item # 1 visualize eggs cooking on the stove

#2 you smell bread baking in the oven

#3 milk in the refrigerator

 #4 cleaning apples in the sink

#5 dishwashing soap in dishwasher.

Having five specific places that are predetermined makes it easier to visualize your items at each designated spot. You will be more likely to remember new information when you’ve formed connections across multiple neural systems. You’ll also have a much stronger network of connections for recalling this information later.

Understanding how brain research proves that learning creates new connections and these connections are stronger if you link it to previous memories gives a clearer strategy to create a Better Brain. Try applying this awareness the next time you want to learn a new fact, remember a list or even someone's name.

Better Brain Tip

1)    Use as many senses as possible to create new memory patterns.(seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and feeling)

2)    Instead of making a grocery list use this technique to strengthen your brain. For more memory techniques go to previous Better Brain Blueprint memory video blog click here