The Problem
I'm not sure about you but I hate not getting the hours of sleep required for cognitive function the next day, (pretty sure my other half would attune to that). From not getting to bed early enough, to setting my alarm for an early morning 6am client (coach issues), or waking through the night with an overactive mind.
I'm pretty sure you'll all agree not getting adequate sleep destroys your happiness.
The Cause
Issues the majority of us face over our hours of sleep; your kids waking early on weekends, or prep before you leave the house for work, and the worst when you just can't get it all done before bedtime either.
All of those reasons are why I want the quality sleep, (actual sleep) to be epic.
Why you need to sleep and the benefits.
Why is sleep so important? Click the link for the deep dive into negative effects of insufficient sleep, but here's some basics to understand the role of sleep and its beneficial effects. You feel much happier when you wake (best feeling), improved physical performance and improved cognitive performance due to increased rapid eye movement (REM sleep) and deep sleep phases and the big plus, you've reduced all the health risks the BBC tell you about each day, that are important (ps, these are the big 1s but usually the parts we don't think about) inflammation, metabolic disease, cancers, heart disease. Yip poor sleep leads to an increased risk of dying, damn kids and now I understand why mum said I'll be the death of her.
Some Basics of good sleep hygiene
Now some basics to create an optimal environment for your sleep to increase your quality of sleep. Have a cool room 18-20°c, have a dark room (as much as possible), have no electronics in your room (because you'll play with them, especially if you can't sleep), and aim to set your bedtime at the same time daily for best circadian effects, but is there anything else we can do to improve sleep quality and of course there is, it's the reason i'm writing this article.
The Plan
I'm lucky enough to follow Motion Nutrition and also lucky enough to have went to Uni with Joe the founder, and if you follow him, you'll notice he chats loads about benefits of all the stages of sleep and their product Unplug. As we're online personal training company at Resilient Human it's useful for us to source solutions you can use to achieve higher performance daily. So we thought, I should have a go and see what improvements it could give me and hopefully you. (Friend bonus: Joe has given me my first month for free to trial, but I will be paying thereafter, read on to know why).
Our Methods
Here's our very basic method of the trial, so it can make sense. 30days consistently taking Unplug roughly 60-90mins before bed. During this time we've had some ups and downs, chickenpox, Easter trip to Scotland, 1 night out to Urban Golf (fair few beers), but otherwise pretty regular sleep per night.
We're all the same
Lifestyle admission for future reference: Personal trainers, coaches and physios aren't all living a perfect lifestyle all of the time, but some of us are trying to figure out as many solutions as we can to create the best healthy lives for ourselves and our clients.
My Issues
As I don't know you, but I do know me. I can show you, why I don't get the hours I need, because like the majority of us I have a lot of commitments. Here's my wee list of them: partner, daughter (3yr old tornado), online coaching, clients every AM and of course, I love my physical training, it's what I do. So enough of me chatting to prove my fatigue (as I know you have yours too).
Sleep Feedback via app
As you can see I get around 7.5hrs in bed (not enough), but only manage to sleep 6hrs (not enough). That's a regular evening for me over the last 30days as you can see from my 66% sleep performance. This means over a long time I'll get negative effects of sleep loss by not listening to my body clock and start accumulating sleep debt.
Incase you don't know the app i'm using it's Whoop it gives me data that I can use and understand, which can then be related to clients to show benefits of solutions we can build for them. (it's of course better if clients also use this product and we can track them individually).
Little Whoop lesson:
HRV (Heart Rate Variability), RHR (Resting Heart Rate) and the Sleep you get all add together to create your recovery from the day you've just completed. As you can see, it's a green recovery (which means i'm ready to perform high volume), even though the sleep was much less than it should be to achieve this.
Now we're at the good part.
It worked!!
Unplug, is aiding in my sleep recovery without having to do anything different, even though my sleep is still reduced from what I need, the sleep I'm having is much better, it improved REM sleep and deep sleep for me, and allowed me consistently better recovery days.
Over the course of 30day trial (including easter where I had some drinks and did see not as great recoveries), I've had 15 green recovery days, 14 yellow days and 1 red day (alcohol induced), with a sleep percentage of around 66% of as seen above, so as you can see from this something is making me have quality sleep and the only difference is Unplug.
Unless you like data, you don't care about the numbers, you care about the real life difference.
- 90% plus days I want to wake up and start the day (early)
- every training session I've felt good to go
- no daytime sleepiness
- actual sleep time has improved, specifically deep sleep and REM sleep
- having dreams again (maybe 5 years without)
- improved happiness in my day (I think but I'm feeling happy)
The guys at Motion will give you bigger insight to other improvements you may feel, but our aim here at Resilient Human is to give you the insight from our results of a product, and then allow you tryout for yourself.
If you like the idea of better sleep, better recovery and better performance, check out discount code resilienthuman and receive 20% off. (ps. we take no kickbacks for what you buy, so we will only back products we use personally).
If you want to achieve more solutions towards optimised performance then follow us
IG: @resilient.human
Linkedin: Resilient Human
website: www.resilienthuman.co.uk