Click above to watch my VLOG – Sleep Better Tonight. Or, feel free to read the transcript below instead!
Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Hi Beauties,
Today, our topic is the one powerful thing that you can do to Sleep Better Tonight. We’re going to get to that in just a moment, the research surrounding this one thing that you can start to really focus on to sleep better.
Sleep and The Four Cornerstones
Before we dive in, I just want to give a little bit of background about sleep. We know sleep is really important for us to feel in our fullest energy, our fullest vitality.
Body is our second Solluna Cornerstone. Number one is food, second is body, third is emotional wellbeing, fourth the spiritual growth. Sleep fits into our body care. We all know if we don’t sleep well, we actually don’t function as well.
We need more caffeine. We’re stumbling through the day. But did you know that on a deep cellular level, sleep is very important for autophagy. I just did a whole solocast on autophagy. You can check that out if you’re interested.
Sleep and Autophagy
Autophagy’s basically our body’s recycling mechanism. It’s our internal way to clean up damaged cells. It’s very important for our health and our beauty. The amount of sleep that we have and the quality of our sleep impacts its vital process.
Down, just beyond just feeling good in the world is key. When we sleep well, our detoxification pathways are able to function more effectively.
Sleep Benefits
Sleep helps lower anxiety and stress levels
This is important to our long term health and wellbeing. According to Harvard Medical School, a good night’s sleep really helps to decrease anxiety and lower stress. A Stanford University study found that athletes that slept more had more stamina, less fatigue. We know that you’re less likely to get into accidents.
Sleep helps with weight balance
It really helps with your weight balance. This is because when we don’t sleep as well, ghrelin and leptin and other hormones can get very imbalanced. It makes it much harder to lose weight and to keep it off. There’s a billion, million research studies about sleep. We’ve done a podcast about this. You can check it out. We’ve had sleep experts on.
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?
You might be wondering how much sleep do we actually need? This is something that ranges, I think, a little bit for each person, your body type. Ayurvedic medicine would say it depends if you’re a Vata or Kapha or Pitta person. Generally it’s what we’ve always heard, seven hours.
I personally like to get eight hours every night. This may not always happen, but when I do get eight hours, I really do feel amazing and great. It’s really important to notice for your body, how much sleep do you need and where can you carve out and really honor that. Maybe that’s saying no to some night events or moving up your evening routine, whatever it is.
Other Factors that Affect Your Sleep
There’s other factors that affect how much we need to sleep. Teenagers need 8-10 hours of sleep per night, so that’s 13 to 18. When you’re pregnant, you probably need more sleep as us mamas know. It’s the quality of your sleep, which is not just the hours you’re sleeping.
This would include making sure you’re in a space of darkness, a cooler space, the temperature is lower. There’s a lot of factors around that. This is in Radical Beauty, my book with Deepak. If you’re interested, we talk a lot about quality of sleep.
Tips To Sleep Better Tonight
One powerful tool that you can do tonight to sleep better tonight is, meditation. We talked a lot about meditation here, especially since it’s our fourth Solluna Cornerstone. There’s amazing research now emerging to support this.
For instance, a study published in JAMA said that 49 adults were split into two groups. One was given a meditation program, the other was not. Those that were in the meditation program experienced less insomnia, fatigue, and depression. This is published research.
Another study from The National Institutes of Health found that in their insomnia program, there was great improvement in those that meditated both in total sleep time and sleep quality. To me, meditation is the time that is the break between our work day, family time, craziness, chaos, and going into slumber.
Tuning in for Better Sleep
It’s a time where we tune in. We take all the senses, which are going out all the time outward, and we pull it in. We start to pull into ourselves and can start to go into the lunar time of Solluna, the darkness, the rest, the rejuvenation.
If we don’t have that break, if we’re trying to go from TV and stimulation right into sleep, they may not be that deeper quality of sleep.
Try Solluna’s Free Meditations
Remember, we have free meditations here for you at Solluna. You can download them or check out all the other forms, the apps out there, but get into your practice. Whether it’s one minute a night or five minutes or you can start to build up to 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever, but get into that rhythm of meditating.
Again, if you are someone that really likes to have the backing of science and research, the research is there. Meditation is going to help with your sleep. It is going to help still the monkey mind, the anxiety, the thoughts going through. Do that favor for yourself, do it for your vitality, do it for your health.
In Closing
We have all the support for you as well. Sending you lots and lots of love, Beauty. Thank you so much for tuning in. Love you, love you. Grateful for you. Let us know how else we could support you.
We also have the Solluna Circle where we do, we have themes, and we have different meditations that we practice together every month as well. I hope that you enjoyed this and will see you back here soon. Lots of love!
Hi Kimberly, I think you should formulate a sleeping supplement for us. I know it would be successful & something all of us could trust! Thank you!!!