You know that you need to sleep well in order to optimize your life performance but night after night you find yourself tossing and turning.

Here are a few ways to accelerate your sleep quality.

1. Get sunlight exposure every day. Even if it is cloudy, get out there and expose your body and eyes to that wide spectrum light.  Just don’t look directly into the sun, that would be a bad idea.
2. Eliminate added sugars from your lifestyle. The ups and downs of blood sugar and insulin will wreak havoc on hormones and neurotransmitters responsible for maintaining circadian rhythm.
3. Make sure you are nasal breathing at night and strongly consider practicing nasal breathing during the day.  Nasal breathing promotes deeper sleep and a general sense of calm.
4. Start dimming your indoor lights in accordance with outdoor light. And make sure your bedroom is as dark as possible. Check for all those little blue, red and green lights and cover them up or remove them from your room.
5. Eliminate blue light from screens 2 hours before bed time.
6. Write down what you’re worried about. If you find your mind racing at night get a journal out and dump all those ideas and worries on paper so that your brain doesn’t think it needs to hold on to them all night.
7. Turn your bedroom thermostat down. I would aim for a cool 68 degrees F. 
8. Avoid any stimulants including chocolate after 2pm. Some people need to eliminate them completely for optimal sleep.
9. Aim to get your exercise in before 4pm. Most people will have some level of sleep disturbance if they exercise at high intensity within 3 hours of sleep. I find that for chronic insomnia, exercise before noon is most helpful.
10. Don’t guzzle water in the evening. Aim to hydrate first thing in the morning and then keep water after 6pm to just a few ounces.  The same goes for large meals in the late evening.  The digestive and urinary tract working at full capacity make it challenging for their to be enough resources to repair and regenerate the rest of your being while you slumber.

I hope this helps take your sleep to the next level.  Before you grab sleeping pills and give yourself the façade of a good night’s sleep, go all-in on these lifestyle action steps.

By optimizing your sleep, studies show that you could be unlocking performance gains, unrealized cognitive capacity, and promoting optimal immune function.  Sleep really is a great anti-aging medicine.

For more tips on how to have a good night of sleep, check out this post. Want extra sleep support? Check out Cortisol Metab, it helps with optimal cortisol rhythm so you can get a good night of deep, restorative sleep.

What has helped you sleep better? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.