Are you struggling with sleep?

Restlessness, waking up tired, insomnia, and lack of sleep can have a profound impact on your energy levels and overall health. If you aren’t sleeping well, try these.

10 Ways to Improve Your Sleep

1. Get to Bed Earlier

Sounds simple, and it is. Get more sleep by dedicating more of your time toward rest. It can be easy to want to take on a big chunk of time — adding an extra hour or half hour to your sleep — but will you be able to sustain that? Try for 15 extra minutes every night for 7 days. Or 20 extra minutes for 2 weeks. Pick something you will be consistent with.

2. Go to Bed and Wake Up at the Same Time Every Day

This is huge! Get your body in a routine. Go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time every day for a week and see how that feels.

3. Do Cardio

I cannot recommend this enough! Getting your heart rate up and getting a good sweat will help you clear out stuck energy, hit an endorphin high, and calm your mind.

Consider adding an extra PUSH to your workout— 10% longer, 10% more mileage, a sprint at the end, an extra set of pushups. Whatever it takes to hit your failure point where you are feeling really fatigued! Do this three times a week and see how it affects your sleep.

Note: walking and yoga and gentle exercise is great too, but I encourage you to go for a challenging workout where you get your heart rate UP and you feel CHALLENGED. Do what you can!

4. Don’t Eat Anything after 6PM

Give your digestion a break and go to bed without having a lot of food in your stomach. Having sugar, alcohol or hard-to-digest processed foods can make it harder to rest because you’re body is putting energy toward digestion.

5. Turn Your Damn Phone Off & Take a Break from Screens

An hour before bed, turn off your phone and get off the computer and TV. It’s easy to do this one or two nights and then fall back into the pattern of looking at your phone right before you go to bed. Keep in mind, the things you’re reading and watching right before sleep get lodged into your mind and get internalized, even if that’s only on a subconscious level. If you’re engaged in a stressful, disturbing or violent episode of a TV show or movie, that’s leaving an imprint as you lie down for bed. If you’re scrolling through social media right before sleep, your system is elevated and thoughts are moving faster as you process that information. Remove ALL digital stimulation from your environment and see how that impacts your rest.

6. Legs Up the Wall Pose

This is an easy way to slow down, connect to your breath, and calm your nervous system before bed.

7. Yoga Nidra

A progressive relaxation meditation can do WONDERS for sleep. I highly recommend Julie Rader’s Yoga Nidra. It’s a 45-minute audio track said to be equivalent to 4 hours of sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep, this is my go-to.

8. Make Time for Your Emotions

Chances are, if you’re stuffing your emotions away—especially the difficult ones like anger, sadness, resentment, or grief— it’s having an impact on your sleep.

9. Clear Your Energy Field

Are you in tune with your own energy? Are you aware of when your nervous system is in overload? Are you aware of other people’s energy impacting your own, or times when the collective energy field is making your life difficult?

COVID, social unrest, and the huge amount of fear/uncertainty energy that’s out there right now… it’s impacting all of us. It’s a choice whether or not you plug into that and let it affect you to the point of not being able to sleep at night.

There are plenty of simple techniques you can use to clear your energy field on a daily basis. DAILY basis. Not once a week, not once in a while, but every day.

Grounding (walking outside, especially barefoot), or taking a meditative shower at night and picturing any energy you don’t need being washed off— both of these are effective. Stomping your feet to clear the energy in your root chakra. Burning sage or palo santo.

Meditation. Yoga. Breathing techniques.

A lot of these practices may sound woo woo, but the thing is THEY WORK. If you haven’t tried them, how will you know if they are helpful?

And if they aren’t the right fit for you, no worries! Try something else. Google “energy hygiene,” follow and learn from Dr. Joe Dispenza, listen to a chakra clearing audio track, chant OM, learn about Reiki (you can ask me about it, I’ve been practicing it for 8 years), or simply take five minutes and sit quietly. Tune in. Feel YOUR energy. That is step one in the process of understanding and being in control of your own energy field.

10. Be Honest with Yourself

When you look at the bigger picture of what is going on in your life right now, what do you notice? What’s truly drawing your attention mentally and emotionally that is impacting your sleep?
What excuses have you had about your sleep routine?

Often I think we try to hide from what we know intuitively would help us. Sometimes we self sabotage or make ourselves the martyr. Family/kids are more important… I don’t have time… I’m so stressed… I’ve never had good sleep… I’ve tried everything…

Is that really true?

Step back and be brutally honest with yourself.

What can you change or improve? How are your basic needs being met? Nutrition, hydration, exercise? Are you truly showing up for yourself and taking care of yourself on a regular basis? Once the basics are in alignment, sleep becomes easier. If you truly have a sleep disorder or some sort of major health issue that is impacting your sleep, GET HELP. Take the steps you need.

Also: if something’s really bothering you and it’s keeping you up at night… what is that thing? Have you addressed it? If there’s trauma or fear or anxiety, have you looked at that? Have you made time to really sit with it and lean in toward the discomfort?

Is your life in alignment with what you want and truly desire? Do you trust your ability to heal?

You know, deep down, what that is. Whatever that difficult, painful thing is that you haven’t addressed or made peace with because it’s too hard, too dark, too overwhelming.

Healing IS possible. Letting go IS possible. Making a real and lasting change IS possible.

It starts with you.

Sleep is an experience of letting go. Maybe there is something you are ready to let go of.

I’d love to hear how it goes if you try one of the items on this list. Wishing you each the peaceful rest you deserve. Here’s to blissful, rejuvenating sleep!

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