Are you looking for ways to fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and finally wake up rested? I bet you are. And today we are talking about creating a wellness based bedtime routine that will help you achieve that quickly.
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Are you looking for ways to fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and finally wake up rested? I bet you are. And today we are talking about creating a wellness based bedtime routine that will help you achieve that quickly.
I’m Dr. Alison DiBarto Goggin With Little Black Bag Medicine. I am a functional medicine doctor and today I’m so excited to talk to you about creating routines that will calm your nervous system, train your body and mind to go to sleep and really focus in on what you can do every single day that’s going to guarantee you that you’re going to sleep all night.
Now when you start these programs, of course always remember it takes consistency, it takes time, it takes a lot of nutrition and good health. So this is just one aspect of things that are going to help you. So the number one thing that I always like to focus on with my patients is calming the nervous system and the adrenals.
And I know you already know these things because you are smart, but the problem is sometimes we need accountability. Sometimes we need those reminders or just a gentle push to say, turn off the TV before you go to sleep. Turn off your phones, put them on airplane mode, or just put them down, put them in a different room, maybe put your phone charger in the bathroom and that way it’s off of your bed. You don’t have to worry about it. You’re not tempted to continue to look at it. One, because we know that those blue lights from the screens affect our melatonin and our sleep. But the other thing about things like social media or even television is that it affects our dopamine. And when we get those likes, we become addicted to it and then we can’t stop looking. We can’t stop thinking about it.
So we want to break ourselves from addictive patterns. Ideally, I would like to see you put your phone down, turn the TV off about 30 minutes before bed at the smallest and then an hour before bed at the most. So find different ways that you can incorporate moving her phone around. Maybe having sleep timers on your TV. So you know, you just have a little bit of time to watch and then you are done. The other thing that I like to recommend at night for calming the nervous system is that if you’re not a morning person and you’re sick of people telling you to wake up and exercise and journal and meditate, that’s not you. Maybe this is your time to create this new pattern in your life where you can turn your TV off, put your phone down, do some gentle stretching, do some yoga journal, deep breathing, gratitude, journaling, all these things that you want to do during the day.
Make it now your nighttime routine. And when you start to slow down, you start to do some deep belly breathing. You’re going to be able to calm your nervous system, which is going to help you sleep so much better is going to calm your adrenals. And the other thing that I like to focus on is in my life is prepping for the next day. So that way you’re not in bed overthinking, worrying. So sometimes that means laying out your clothes. That used to mean laying out backpacks, purses, everything that was ready to go for the next day so we didn’t have to rush and run around. It might mean right now laying out homework packets and making sure that pens and pencils are out or computers are charged, whatever you can do to prep for the next day. Maybe that also means automating things like turning on your coffee pot and setting it for the morning or your teapot, running your dishes at night so in the morning you can empty it or starting laundry and just keep that cycle going or washing it again at night so that way in the morning you could put it in the dryer.
Little things that will keep your life moving forward so you’re not backed up the next day or not starting what making you feel like you’re behind. The next thing that we like to do is also focus on supplements at night. Now it’s easy to forget about your supplements during the day. You don’t want to save all your supplements for rate at dinnertime necessarily, but before bed. I really like to have my clients take probiotics because it’s going to get into the system typically a little bit faster. There’s not food to interrupt the digestion. Most things like doTERRA’s, PB assist that I have back here are enteric coated so that way it’s going to skip the acidity of your stomach and your small intestines and make sure that it gets into your large intestines and plus your system isn’t moving as much. So it’s going to allow that time for those probiotics to seed and help you.
I also like to recommend doTERRA’s serenity copaiba or adaptiv capsules at night because they give you the precursors for your neurotransmitters. I don’t just like to give neuro-transmitters. We want to be able to help the body make their own, so things like L-theanine or zinc sometimes even iron can help make new neurotransmitters in the brain so you feel better faster. So some people start with just one, like I like to do just the, serenity at night.
Some people who have a lot of trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. We do the serenity copaiba and adaptiv. Just do one of each. Take it with some water, maybe a little bit of a protein snack like half of a protein shake is a great thing to do if you’re having trouble staying asleep all night because it’s going to feed your brain and it’s going to keep your blood sugar a little bit stable throughout the night.
And of course we want you to have water or tea at night. We want to minimize alcohol as much as possible. If you are drinking and you know you need to cut down, you don’t necessarily have to go cold Turkey right away. Cut down to one. Another trick that I have is if you have a bottle of wine, how long can you make it last? Give yourself like a little challenge to really spread what you’re doing. Find different ways of coping without alcohol or your phone or whatever else that you’re doing to self soothe because we really want to make sure that your brain is getting trained to fall asleep on its own and your body is learning to relax on its own. Another thing that we need to do as well in creating a routine is setting up specific times because the body and the brain, like a circadian rhythm, they like to do the same thing every single day.
So that might mean at 10 o’clock that you turn everything off. You take a shower or a bath, you read your book. So really focus on what is the routine that will work for you and it will take some time. So don’t rush, just enjoy the process of figuring it out. And while we’re talking about showering and taking bass is really important that you wash your face because we really want to get off makeup, we want to get off chemicals, we want to get off deodorant, whatever you’ve been wearing that it’s not seeping into the skin all day long, right? That’s number one. So we’re already have chemicals, but we also want to make sure that while we’re sleeping, we’re not continuing to add chemicals into our bloodstream. Overwhelming the liver. So the more that you can cleanse, not only the, the internal part of your body of water and supplements, but we want to cleanse the outside of your body with so, right, that seems really obvious, but so many people don’t take off their makeup or wash the day off.
So make it a part of your routine that you are taking care of yourself. You’re taking care of your skin, you’re taking care of your liver and your blood and your lymph by cleansing the skin, getting rid of makeup and all of the toxins. Of course, use toxin-free cleaners as much as possible. Things that are quote unquote clean. You can always look up the products that you’re using on the environmental working group. And of course, I love doTERRA’s products. They have a number of different skin lines as well, but their oils after you’re washing your skin to protect it, the yarrow pom serum on the face, amazing. I’ve had amazing changes with fine lines bags under my eyes. So when you wake up in the morning, your skin is fresh, you feel good and feel good about yourself, right? So we’re curating these longterm things that are going to help support your body, your skin, and your confidence as well, and bring your skin protection and support.
And of course the last thing I always want to talk about is oils because they are so, so effective and the supporting the brain, supporting the nervous system, calming the Vagus nerve to support the parasympathetics, which is going to support digestion. All of these good things. So I like to set my diffusers around the house. I don’t know about 30 minutes before bed. What I actually do is I save all my empty bottles from my oils and then I just reuse them. So we label them, I’ll make my own sleep blend like balance vetiver and frankincense and they’ll just put 10 to 20 or 30 drops in it, make my own blend and that way I can go around the house with a jug of water, fill up everybody’s in their room and then we don’t have to worry about it. Plus no one wants to carry like 15 bottles around us.
A pain, make your own blends, pick your favorite oils. My favorite story now to tell is my daughter was having trouble sleeping and she came down and she’s like, mom, I really just can’t sleep. I can’t focus. And I said, are you using your oils? She said, of course I’ve been putting oils in my diffuser every night for the past week. I said, well, what have you been using? And she said, peppermint, wild orange and lemon. And I said, Ava, those are awakening, energizing, motivating oils. So we really want to make sure that you’re using oils that promote sleep like that ever. Frankincense, lavender, find something that works for you or you can put the feet, the feet, the oils on your feet, the back of your neck. And if you touch oils, make sure that you wash your hands really, really good before you go to touch your eyes or take out contacts or anything like that.
Just fair warning there. So go back and my podcast or my YouTube videos, I have a number of podcasts about sleep sleeping through the night because those ones are focused on eating and maintaining a healthy blood sugar throughout the day because that is actually what affects our sleep. So you can do all of these things, but if you’re not eating throughout the day, I want you to go back and listen to those, check out the physiology and understand why you need to be doing that. So if you have any questions, if you need support with sleep, your kids sleep. If you’re tossing and turning, nothing seems to be working for you. Give me a call. We always do a free 30 minute session to brainstorm, to get to know each other and figure out what steps you need to take, because maybe we need to do some testing to get to some root causes instead of covering them up with oils or food or nutritional supplements, we want to make sure that your body is functioning and that you’re not spinning your wheels or taking too much time to figure out what’s going on. Let’s get to the root of this quickly. So thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.