Wellness Tip of the Week: Ways to get better sleep

This week, Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, healthspan coach and host of the Healthspan Digest podcast is sharing 3 tips for better sleep. As Shaw explains, sleep is important not only for physical recovery, but for emotional stability, as feeling stressed can be linked to not getting enough sleep.

Below is the transcript, lightly edited for clarity:

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Hey, this is Aaron Shaw with a Wellness Tip of the Week. I want to talk about something that most people on the vet health team are not getting enough of—that is sleep. Sleep is where the magic happens. Sleep is where our body recovers from the wear and tear of day-to-day life. So, if you find yourself a little crabby, maybe a little foggy headed, maybe not making the sharpest decisions and even feeling stressed, oftentimes it's not actually the stress that's the problem, it’s that you're under slept.

Sleep is where our nervous system can recover from the wear and tear of day-to-day life. When you don't get REM sleep, when you don't get enough REM sleep, what suffers is part of our brain called the amygdala, and this is the part of the brain that really processes the emotional stress, emotional demands of day-to-day life and prep us for tomorrow's demanding life that we have.

So, it's not a personality flaw if you're feeling on edge and not sleeping well, it's just neurobiology. It's something that we all have to deal with. So, I want to give you 3 tips that you can do that will help maybe just get you a little bit better sleep.

Tip one, at least 30 minutes, maybe even 60 minutes before you go to bed at night, have a technology cut-off time. Set that timer where after a certain point—an hour before you go to bed—you have no screen time. No phones, no computers, and even no TV, no Netflix. Resist, you can do it. And what that will help you do is get some of that light shining in your eyes out of your face and help you be prepared for sleep quicker.