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Get Better Sleep: Beyond "Sleep Hygiene"
Plus: touch your toes, the easy way (yes, really!)
The 10almonds Team
July 04, 2023
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
❝If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more❞
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
Touching your toes is not just a thing to show off—it’s an important part of our mobility, especially as we get older
See today’s video for a “one quick trick” to be able to do it, even if you thought you couldn’t
Sleep is super important for our physical health, mental health, and longevity—but it’s often quite neglected
Ways to improve on this include:
Don’t fight nature—go with your circadian rhythm
Take naps (but take them well)
Have enough space in bed
From dream journaling to sleep-tracking apps, what gets measured, gets done
Ongoing learning is one of the most important things we can do for our long-term cognitive health.
Today’s sponsor, Skillshare, are offering 10almonds readers a free month (no commitment!) of all their highest quality courses.
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
Why it’s so hard to touch your toes—and how to do it (at any age)!
Can you touch your toes? If not, don’t worry. Most people can’t. Here’s a “one quick trick” to be able to do it comfortably, at any age:
💤 MAIN FEATURE
Better Sleep, Better Life!
This is Arianna Huffington. Yes, that Huffington, of the Huffington Post. But! She’s also the CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live—in particular, by challenging the idea that burnout is the required price of success.
The power of better sleep
Sleep is a very important, but most often neglected, part of good health. Here are some of Huffington’s top insights from her tech company Thrive, and as per her “Sleep Revolution” initiative.
Follow your circadian rhythm
Are you a night owl or a morning lark? Whichever it is, roll with it, and plan around that if your lifestyle allows for such. While it is possible to change from one to the other, we do have a predisposition towards one or the other, and will generally function best when not fighting it.
This came about, by the way, because we evolved to have half of us awake in the mornings and half in the evenings, to keep us all safe. Socially we’ve marched onwards from that point in evolutionary history, but our bodies are about a hundred generations behind the times, and that’s just what we have to work with!
Don’t be afraid (or ashamed!) to take naps
Naps, done right, can be very good for the health—especially if we had a bad night’s sleep the previous night.
Thrive found that workers are more productive when they have nap rooms, and (following on a little from the previous point) are allowed to sleep in or work from home.
Make sure you have personal space available in bed
The correlation between relationship satisfaction and sleeping close to one’s partner has been found to be so high that it’s even proportional: the further away a couple sleeps from each other, the less happy they are. But…
Partners who got good sleep the previous night, will be more likely to want intimacy on any given night—at a rate of an extra 14% per extra hour of sleep the previous night. So, there’s a trade-off, as having more room in bed tends to result in better sleep. Time to get a bigger bed?
What gets measured, gets done
This goes for sleep, too! Not only does dream-journaling in the morning cue your subconscious to prepare to dream well the following night, but also, sleep trackers and sleep monitoring apps go a very long way to improving sleep quality, even if no extra steps are consciously taken to “score better”.
We’ve previously reviewed some of the most popular sleep apps; you can check out for yourself how they measured up:
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
Skillshare | Enjoy a free month of high-quality classes of your choice!
Ongoing learning is one of the most important things we can do for our long-term cognitive health.
Skillshare is a platform that offers thousands of classes in many subject areas—from creative arts to business and technology. And yes, health and life sciences too!
You may be wondering how well-vetted the course instructors are; can anyone teach? Well, anyone can apply to teach, but there's a vetting process that takes prospective new teachers a couple of weeks to get through (if they get through it), so this isn't a free-for-all, and a high quality of teaching is assured.
Normally, Skillshare offer a 7-day free trial, but for 10almonds subscribers, they're upping that to a whole month for free (no commitments).
You won't need a discount code for this, but you do need to use our link (otherwise you'll only get the 7-day trial that everyone else gets).
Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free
🌍 AROUND THE WEB
What’s happening in the health world…
More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Feel Great, Lose Weight: Simple Habits for Lasting and Sustainable Weight Loss - by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
We all know that losing weight sustainably tends to be harder than simply losing weight. We know that weight loss needs to come with lifestyle change. But how to get there?
One of the biggest problems that we might face while trying to lose weight is that our "metabolic thermostat" has got stuck at the wrong place. Trying to move it just makes our bodies think we are starving, and everything gets even worse. We can't even "mind over matter" our way through it with willpower, because our bodies will do impressive things on a cellular level in an attempt to save us... Things that are as extraordinary as they are extraordinarily unhelpful.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is here to help us cut through that.
In this book, he covers how our metabolic thermostat got stuck in the wrong place, and how to gently tease it back into a better position.
Some advices won't be big surprises—go for a whole foods diet, avoiding processed food, for example. Probably not a shocker.
Others are counterintuitive, but he explains how they work—exercising less while moving more, for instance. Sounds crazy, but we assure you there's a metabolic explanation for it that's beyond the scope of this review. And there’s plenty more where that came from, too.
Bottom line: if your weight has been either slowly rising, or else very stable but at a higher point than you'd like, Dr. Chatterjee can help you move the bar back to where you want it—and keep it there.
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Wishing you a restfully restorative day and night,
The 10almonds Team