Mastering Sleep to Optimize Your Weight And Your Life

Sleep is so important to optimize your energy, your mood and mojo, and for weight loss, weight maintenance, and hormonal balance.

It also helps with performance and to combat depression.

Not to mention it’s one of THE best fat-burners around . . . and it’s free!

Tune in this week to learn how to master sleep.

If you are trying to lose weight, feel like you’re doing all the things, and you’re wondering why it isn’t working, then signup for a Lose The Weight For The Last Time Joy Makeover.  

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• How much sleep we need a night
• How to set yourself up for a successful night’s sleep, even if you have kids
• Nighttime rituals
• Tips and tricks for getting the best sleep of your life
• How to fall asleep
• How to stay asleep
• How to deal with middle of the night catastrophizing or intrusive thoughts

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

• Why We Sleep Book
• Would you do me a favor? Please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform — it helps me reach more and more people. Thank you!
• I’d love to hear from you with any questions or breakthroughs or topics you’d like me to cover. Send me a direct message on Instagram @ajoyfulyou or email me at rachael@ajoyfulyou.com
• Follow me on Instagram for more
• Website

TRANSCRIPT:

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 97, Mastering Sleep to Optimize Your Weight and Your Life.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach, and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Welcome to the podcast.

Today, I want to start off by sharing a review.

I told you all that I have a goal to get 100 reviews by the end of the year.

So many of you helped me out.

Thank you so much for that.

Today’s review is from Lipgloss101.

I love that name.

Can I steal it, please?

Lipgloss says, Rachael does an amazing job talking about the hard things.

It’s not easy to talk about our struggles, but she teaches us that it’s okay to feel vulnerable.

Thank you for your insight and wisdom.

Thank you, Lipgloss.

Sometimes I will be honest with you, and I sometimes I completely feel like a dork or that y’all are going to judge me or think less of me.

But the reason that I show up here and I basically just air my dirty laundry is because I really, truly hope that you will learn from my experiences and that they will feel relatable and helpful for you.

So thank you, Lipgloss, for your review.

If you haven’t left a podcast review yet, would you please go leave one?

Like I said, my goal is 100 reviews by the end of the year.

And if you have already left a review, first of all, thank you.

But you can still help the podcast grow by sharing your favorite episode with a friend, with the family member, on your social media.

Even just resharing a post that I have posted is really helpful.

So thank you again, or thank you in advance.

All right, I have a little story to share with you that got me thinking about this topic.

My family and I just returned from a little vacation, and we went down south, and we stayed in a vacation rental.

And when we got there, we walked into the rental, and the first thing we noticed is this nasty smell.

So we’re walking around, looking at everything.

We notice that there’s still pillows and blankets, kind of all over the couch and on the floor.

Then we walk into the bedrooms, and we notice that none of the beds are made.

We walk into the kitchen.

There’s dirty dishes everywhere, and the place reeks so bad.

So we call up the rental agency, and we’re like, I don’t think this place has been cleaned.

And they say, oh, okay.

Well, we have another rental that’s kind of close by that you guys can stay in.

So we get to this other rental.

It’s not as nice.

It’s not as big.

And it’s fine.

We’re making it work, right?

The other one’s supposed to get cleaned.

We finish the night and we go to hop in bed.

And the first thing that I notice is I’m sniffing because I’m smelling something and it smells like throw up.

And I said to my husband, do you smell throw up?

And he’s like, no.

And then my daughter from the other room facetimes me.

And the first thing that I see is like this throw up stain or baby poop stain that she is showing me that is on her bedspread of the bed that she’s supposed to be sleeping in.

And I was like, oh my grossness.

So needless to say, we took off the bedspread.

We found some sheets that were, I hope, clean.

Got her all situated.

I tried to go back to bed.

I could not sleep.

I was so like getting the heebie-jeebies and disgusted.

So outside, there was having to be a pool and outside, there were these loungers.

And so I’m sitting on the loungers hoping to sleep outside.

It’s nice and cool by this time of the night.

There’s kind of like a covered patio.

And I was like, okay, I’m just maybe gonna sleep here.

Then, guess what happens next?

A bat totally flies by.

Like I could feel it.

I could see it.

So I was like, nope, not gonna do that.

So I go back inside, and there were two beach towels left that we hadn’t used when we were swimming.

And I laid one out on the couch, because no way was I gonna lay on the couch.

So here I am on like this little five foot beach towel on the couch.

Luckily, I brought my own pillow.

And with the second beach towel, I covered up with that, because no way was I using a blanket after all that we had just been through.

Needless to say, I did not sleep very well.

The next day, we washed all of the sheets, but I still didn’t sleep very well.

And then the very last night that we were there, we were supposed to move into the new house, but the rental agency totally failed, didn’t even tell us that it was ready, that it was clean or anything.

So, we ended up having to stay in this crappy, nasty Airbnb.

And the very last night, we all get in bed.

By this time, I am so tired, because it had been two nights of really no sleep, and I was really tired.

And all of a sudden, there’s this loud noise, and it sounded like somebody threw something out the side of the house.

It was like a bang and like a ricochet that we could feel.

And I, me and my husband shot up, and we were like, what the heck was that?

So we come out of our room, all of our kids are coming out of their room, being like, what was that?

And we were like, I have no idea.

Well, come to find out, it was an earthquake.

So we didn’t sleep very well the last night.

And the thing about sleep, and that is why I want to talk about sleep on this episode, is I noticed that it was so much harder to manage my mind, and to have a good time, and to not be a total grump, and to actually enjoy my vacation with my family, when I didn’t get enough sleep.

When I do get enough sleep, it’s so much easier.

So sleep is so important to optimize your energy, your mood, your mojo.

It’s also really important for weight loss, and weight maintenance, and hormonal balance.

It also helps with performance, and it helps to combat depression.

One of my favorite books about sleep is by Matthew Walker, and it’s called Why We Sleep.

And in it, he says, scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer.

It enhances your memory and makes you more creative.

It makes you look more attractive.

It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings.

It protects you from cancer and dementia.

It wards off colds and flu.

It lowers your risk of heart attacks and strokes, not to mention diabetes.

You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious.

Are you interested?

While it may sound hyperbolic, nothing about this fictitious advertisement would be inaccurate.

If this were a drug, many people would be disbelieving.

Those who were convinced would pay large sums of money for even the smallest dose.

Should clinical trials back up the claims?

Share prices of the pharmaceutical company that invented the drug would skyrocket.

Of course, the ad is not describing some miracle, new tincture, or a cure-all wonder drug, but rather the proven benefits of a full night of sleep.

The evidence supporting these claims have been documented in more than 17,000 well-scrutinized and scientific reports to date.

As for the prescription cost, well, there isn’t one.

It’s free.

Yet all too often, we shun the nightly invitations to receive our full dose of this all-natural remedy with terrible consequences.

Failed by the lack of public education, most of us do not realize how remarkable a panacea sleep truly is.

And that’s the end of that quote.

Can you believe all of that stuff that it does?

Holy cow!

Now, sleep is also one of the best fat burners around, and it’s free.

So sleep has a domino effect on all the other parts of our life.

A not-so-great effect if we’re not getting enough, and a great effect if we are.

So studies have shown that we need seven to nine hours of sleep, and moms are usually getting way less than that.

Some of it is because the kids are up at night and we’re woken up, but other times it’s because we’re choosing to.

We are choosing to stay up late.

We are choosing entertainment over energy.

We’re choosing projects over power.

So today I want to talk about how to master sleep so that we can use it to optimize weight loss if that’s what you’re looking for, but optimize your life.

All those things that Matthew Walker said in his book.

Holy cow.

Yes, sign me up, please.

So the first way I want to talk about to master sleep is to simply choose it, choose to sleep.

Which cure-all would you like?

And is having more of that important to you than whatever you are getting out of staying up late?

That’s the first thing you need to decide.

The next thing that’s helpful is to set a sleep curfew.

As a mom, you know when an average night of sleep looks like for you.

You know approximately when your kids are waking up or you are waking up, right?

We know what that kind of looks like, especially if we have babies or young kids.

Sometimes we don’t always know and we can’t always plan for it, but sometimes we do know, right?

So we can plan for it.

You also know about what time you’d like to get up in the morning or what time your kids will get you up in the morning.

So just do the math.

What time do you need to be in bed in order to get seven to nine hours of sleep?

Do the math.

Then set yourself up for a successful sleep.

I’m going to share with you a bunch of ideas of what this could look like, but you need to experiment and find what is right and what is going to work for you.

Being aware of what’s getting in your way of going to bed on time and what’s getting in your way of a good night’s sleep is the first step.

Like I always teach, awareness is the first step, always and forever.

So simply just start paying attention and then start doing what you can to make things go smoother, to make your sleep work better for you.

Also, another idea is that you can create an environment for sleep and do it intentionally.

So making your room cool, making your bedroom dark, and making your bedroom boring, so you’re not super stimulated.

This could look like keeping your electronics and your TV out of your bedroom.

I’ve heard that this is also helpful because of the EMF, the electromagnetic field.

It has been shown to interfere with sleep.

I’ve also heard that you can put Tesla rocks under your bed, and that is shown to help people sleep better.

You can also have a nighttime ritual.

So, just like we have rituals or routines for our kids, having a routine for ourself is going to help our brain and our body know, okay, it’s time to stop go, go, go, go, going, and it’s time to slow down, start shutting things down, and start getting sleepy.

And there are lots of things that you can do.

Some moms find it helpful to take a shower at night.

Some moms love diffusing essential oils.

Some moms find it helpful to get off of their phone an hour or two before bed.

I’ve also personally had a lot of luck with watching the sunset.

There’s just something about that red light and watching the sunset that signals the brain and the body that it’s time for sleep.

I love taking a sunset walk at night.

It has made me one, shut everything down.

I’m off of my phone.

I’m also getting that red light, but I’m also able to just kind of relax and have just a little bit of time for me.

So that works for me.

You’ve got to find what works for you.

Other things that might be helpful is limit your electronics.

This is television, iPads, laptops, computers, phones, Kindles, anything that emits blue light, or you can find a really good pair of blue light blocking glasses.

And wear those.

I haven’t really researched and dove into it, if they block everything, or if you’re still getting some.

But it’s just an experiment.

So experiment and see if it helps you.

If you’re wondering what blue light is, blue light is essentially daylight to our body.

So when our body sees it, when our body takes it in, this also goes for the lights in our house.

That’s why at night, sometimes you’ll turn the lights down lower, because that also signals your body that it’s no longer daytime, it’s nighttime, because if the body thinks that it’s daytime, it’s going to want to be up.

It’s going to be pumping you full of hormones to keep you awake.

And then we’re going to struggle to fall asleep or to stay asleep because of it.

Another thing that you might find helpful is to limit your caffeine in the late afternoon.

So don’t have it past a certain time in the afternoon, because many moms find that it affects their sleep and it keeps them awake and keeps them from getting tired.

Also, exercising too late in the day can also affect sleep.

So if you go to the gym at night or if you run or lift or do cardio or kickboxing classes or whatever you like to do at night and you find that you’re not sleeping as well, that might be something that you want to look into.

And then another thing and maybe the last thing that I want to say is just to have a consistent bedtime and awake time.

So in other words, go to bed and get up at the same time each day and be consistent.

If you know that you need to go to bed earlier, let’s say you would normally go to bed at 11.30, and you want to be in bed by 9 o’clock, you are probably going to need to sleep train yourself.

You will go to lay down at 9 o’clock, and your body will be like, excuse me, sister, what are we doing?

And you won’t get sleepy.

But if you sleep train yourself by going to bed 15 minutes earlier each week, until you finally get down to 9 o’clock, it’s going to not be as frustrating for you.

Just like we sleep train babies, sometimes we have to sleep train ourselves, and that’s totally okay.

So did any of these ideas stand out to you?

This week, I’m going to challenge you to just pick one to work on and experiment with.

And then once you’ve got that one down, or once you’ve fully experimented with that one, then pick another one, and experiment and work on that.

Remember, don’t try to do it all at once.

Small and simple, slow and steady wins every time.

Okay, the last thing that I want to talk about on this topic is a couple of things that get in the way of us staying asleep or falling back to sleep if we’ve been woken up in the middle of the night.

The first thing is worrying about being tired in the morning.

I hear this from so many moms that I coach, and I personally used to do this all the time as well.

My baby or my toddler or even my teenager would wake me up, and once I would go to lay back down, my mind would just ruminate with thoughts of how tired I was going to be in the morning.

I would literally lay there for hours worrying about this, which just kept me awake longer than I needed to actually be awake, right?

Here I am just thinking, oh my gosh, we’ve just got to go to sleep.

We’ve just got to go to sleep.

When I literally could just have been asleep.

So what worked for me was when my brain started offering me the thought that we’re just going to be so tired in the morning.

We better go to sleep.

We’ve got to go to sleep.

Then I would just answer back, maybe, but you know what, brain?

We can do tired, and it’s not a big deal.

We’ll just do the day tired.

And when I answered the brain back with it’s not a big deal, it’s okay.

We can do tired.

We’ve done it before.

We’ll just do it tired.

That always seems to nip the ruminating thoughts in the butt, and I will usually fall quickly back to sleep.

The second thing is catastrophizing or intrusive thoughts.

I don’t know what it is about the middle of the night.

Maybe it’s because we’re undistracted and it’s quiet, but our brain thinks it is the perfect time to think about and imagine the worst case scenarios, right?

We can worry and worry and time travel better than Marty McFly.

We like to go to the past and worry about past regrets that we have and things that we wished we had done and things we wish we hadn’t have done and how awful we were and how awful we are.

And then we go to the future and we worry about the future and we worry about what’s going to happen and we worry about our kids.

And I don’t know about you, but I will lay there for hours imagining the worst, mostly making up problems that aren’t even problems, but for some reason in the middle of the night, they are a crisis.

And if I don’t solve them right there in the middle of the night, then all of my kids are going to end up homeless and dead.

That is literally where my mind goes.

And this is really where being the boss of your brain comes in handy.

Sometimes we let this turn into fighting with our brain in the middle of the night.

And when we’re fighting with our brain, we’re like, that’s not really going to happen.

And our brain’s like, yes, it’s really going to happen.

We should really be so concerned about this.

We need to do something about this.

We’ve got to solve this right now.

We’re fighting back and forth with our brain in the middle of the night.

And that is just riling you up more.

And so what I like to do is I like to just get out of my brain.

I like to get out of my head and I like to drop into my body instead.

And I will start paying attention to and thinking about my breathing.

So I will breathe in and count for two, then I will breathe out and count for two.

Sometimes I find that helpful.

I also find a body scan to be super helpful.

So what I do is I start down at my toes and I try to fill my toes just by thinking about it.

Okay, so you’re trying to fill your toes essentially with your mind.

Then once I can really fill my toes, I’m like, can I fill my toenails?

Can I fill the tops of my feet?

Can I fill my ankles?

Can I fill my calves?

Can I fill my shins?

Can I fill my knees?

Can I fill the back of my knees?

And I just work all the way up through all the parts of my body, all the way up to the top of my head.

And what this does is it puts attention on your body and not on your worst-case scenario.

It’s also very calming and a bit boring.

So usually I am asleep before I even reach my belly button.

Now, if you find that none of this is working for you, my suggestion is to get up, try not to turn on any lights, because again, blue light, your body will think, oh, it’s morning, let’s get up, and you’ll have an even harder time to fall asleep.

So get up, try not to turn on any lights.

If you can, and just walk around for a minute.

Sometimes what happens is our nervous system got triggered so much that it literally thinks that there’s like an attacker in the house or something we need to do.

And so if we just get up and we let our brain see, hey, we’re safe, everyone’s OK, it will help to calm you down and you can climb back in bed and you’ll fall back asleep.

All right, the thing that I want to leave you with is just do your best.

This isn’t a perfect, it’s a practice.

So give yourself grace when you try and celebrate yourself when you have successes.

Every little bit counts.

Just control what you can and do the best with what you can’t.

I know not everyone, especially us moms, we’re not going to just lay down on the pillow and just sleep for nine hours.

That rarely happens.

I get that.

So just do the best that you can.

And as always, I am cheering you on and I’ll see you next time.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

If this episode was helpful to you, make sure to subscribe and please share it.

The most helpful thing you can do in return is to go leave a review.

If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram at A Joyful You or on my website A Joyful you.com.

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