So welcome to another episode bite size bio hacks. In this episode, I'm going to be taking you through an overview of my SHIFT protocol for health optimization for high performance. And specifically, I'm going to be breaking down the first area, which is sleep. And over the coming episodes, I'm going to be talking to you about each element of shifts so that you can start putting in place these practices to really upgrade every level of your health and performance. So before we get started in relation to sleep, let me first give you an overview of what the shift methodology is. So shift basically stands for sleep, hormones and neurotransmitters, insights, fuel and training. And that training element we did last year is actually training of both the mind and body, I found that both are equally important. And we really need to condition both our mind and body every day, if we really want to be truly healthy and have a high performance lifestyle. The F and fuel is also broken down into four elements that you can remember. And I use the acronym flow because we don't just fuel our bodies with food, but we fuel our bodies with food, or light, oxygen and water. So the multiple areas and also with our thoughts, but I carry it, I go into that section in the to the training. So that's really an overview of what shift is. And it's a framework that you can use to make sure that you really are optimising every facet of your mind, body and spirit for higher performance. So just to run over that, again, it sounds for sleep, hormones and neurotransmitters, insights fuel, which breaks down and flow which is food like oxygen and water. And then T is the training the conditioning of the mind and body. Now over the coming episodes, I'm going to be breaking down each section of the shift model so that you can start using it. But in today's episode, we're going to start with sleep, which I do believe is the foundation of everything indefinitely, where I really missed a step when I was busy working as a corporate lawyer, working all night and weekends and sacrificing my sleep. So I'm not going to go into the science of why sleep is so important here. I think everyone really understands that. What I want to do is give you some actionable steps that you can take to really improve your sleep and move the needle. And if you're tracking tracking it with a device like aura, or a whoop strap or bio strap or something like that, then you can begin to look at the metrics and see when I start putting in place these things. Is my deep sleep improving. Am I seeing improvements in REM sleep? Is my overall length of sleep? Lengthening Is it is it shortening and we've just been getting smarter about my sleep and optimising it because it's not always about sleeping longer. But actually it's about sleeping smarter as well. So the three biggest problems that I see in relation to sleep, why I think people are not getting a good night's sleep barring, you know, things like hormonal issues, particularly around perimenopause, there are three key reasons that I see. And the first one really is that people tend to procrastinate to sleep. And that's often why they're not getting enough. So what do I mean by that, I mean, they put it off. And that's because we have the look of things like Netflix or just, you know, chatting to our partners or family or friends in the evening. And I think we also underestimate how long it takes to get kids into bed to get ready for bed. And often we ended up going to bed later than we really planned to and we don't want to procrastinate sleep. But it is very difficult to use self discipline at this time of day because we know that at the end of the day willpower has really waxed and waned. We don't have much left. And so what I would say to you is to avoid procrastinating sleep and you want to create something exciting or something maybe not exciting because it's a bit too motivational. But something that is appealing should I say that makes you want to go to bed so that could be a snuggle up with your partner could be a great book providing that's not keeping you awake. Or it could be my one of my favourites is to have planned your day the night before such that you're so excited about tomorrow, that you can't wait to wake up with high energy but don't procrastinate sleep, because I'm going to be honest, unless you are a night owl which you may well be nothing great gets done. After about nine or 10pm Nothing great really gets done after about nine or 10pm. That is obviously different for night owls. Some
people are extremely creative at this time. Definitely not for me, you can do questions as online to find this out. Dr. Michael Bruce has a very good set of questionnaires about whether you're an early morning type a lion as he calls them, or a wolf, which is a night owl, or some of the other types. You can also do a DNA test, which is the easiest way that I've done because it also gives you a whole host of information not just on your chronotype on your stress on your power, strength and jurists ratios on your nutrition, how sensitive you are to things like fats and carbs. And that's very easy to do. And if you want to find out more about how you can test your DNA with literally a 62nd saliva test and just head over to Angelafosteracademy.com/DNA and you can find out more about it there. But assuming you know your chronotype you'll know roughly what time you should be going to bed and again, this is something you can test and play with. But the key thing is to not procrastinate sleep and so give yourself something to look forward to. When you start to associate how much better you feel the next day when you have a good night's sleep. You are in turn more likely to go to bed a bit earlier as well. So Set yourself up, bookend your day plan your tomorrow, so you've got something to look forward to the more likely to go to bed earlier. The second thing is anchoring, this can be an issue. So we anchor certain emotions with our behaviours, and they can quickly arise. And sleep unfortunately, is one of those if you've been in bed, where you find it really, really difficult to sleep, it can quickly lead to a neural association with your bed being the place that you can't sleep. I've had this with my children as well, it's something you have to work around to get over. But essentially, what you want to do is develop the right neural association. So if you're someone that goes to bed, and you're not able to fall asleep quickly, or you're waking up during the night, don't stay in bed, the best thing to do is to have some dim lighting for your blue light blockers on, move into another room and do something like some breath work or some reading something relaxing, and go back to bed when you're tired, because that neural Association develops very quickly. If you're getting into bed and you're finding it hard to fall asleep, have a look at how much you're exposing yourself to light in the evening. Because that will disrupt the production of melatonin have a look at how stressed you are. Again, cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship, which means that if cortisol is high, melatonin is going to be low. So we want to be nice and calm and relaxing. Relax, should I say in the evening, but light and the way that you feel in terms of managing your stress is very, very key, those were the two things that I would try and hit first, which brings me on to the third reason why a lot of people don't see well. And that's because they don't have specific rituals, or habits or behaviours around sleep, I would encourage you to develop some really good set of rituals or practices that you do. That sends a message to your mind and body that it's time to start getting ready to sleep so that you start conditioning the mind and body that sleep is going to come over you very shortly.
We're super good at doing this with our children. You know, once we have that baby, we basically create a lovely beautiful relaxing evening routine because we as parents want to get them into bed and get some sleep so we give them a warm bath. We snuggle up with them and give them Cuddles, as they get bigger, we read them a story. And very quickly what happens is the moment they go into that bath, they become conditioned that bedtime is coming and what you'll notice is your baby or your toddler, it goes down a lot easier, really to do the same things for ourselves as adults, whatever that evening routine is, it could be that you do have a warm bath. Many people enjoy a cold shower. Lots of people prefer a bath and you know add some Epsom salts and so on magnesium salts, and some essential oils, like lavender can be very calming, lighting a candle, maybe doing a bit of yoga, something relaxing, agreeably. This is very difficult if you're a parent like me, who has children who are sporty, and you're going round to swim clubs and different things in the evening. So it may be that not every night, you can do this, but you create something shorter some form of routine. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see my red light behind me. Something that I love to do earlier in the evening is actually to do a red light therapy session, and then put my blue light blocking glasses on. This really helps tell my body particularly in the height of summer when it isn't getting light early or getting dark early here in the UK, that I'm kind of creating that sunset experience. So I will sit in front of my red light, maybe do some breath work or book in my day, I'll write in my journal, I record my daily wins the things that I'm looking forward to the next day how I can make tomorrow even better. Now I don't face the light, if I'm doing this, if I'm writing in the journal, I actually have my back to the light because it's too stimulating on the eye. LED light in the evening is going to be too stimulating on the eyes. So if you want to sit in front of it, and I would do some meditation or breath work or just sit there calmly listen to music or even just be quiet for a few minutes, which we don't do enough. But put a sleep mask across the eyes and then remove that after the session and then put on your blue light blocking glasses. Otherwise, you can do it with your back turn to it, which is better as well. So that will be my evening routine when I'm at home and I have time. And then I put on my blue light blocking glasses. I religiously do this because that helps me to produce more melatonin. I love the lights and the block of blue light blocking glasses by red light rising. You can see the links to those in the show notes. But that's part of my routine. But a big thing is I will always put it back in my day and journal. Sometimes I mean, I do take supplement wise, I'm not big on supplements at bedtime. I do religiously take magnesium every night again, you've probably heard me talk multiple times about by optimizers. Why? Because it's got seven different forms of magnesium and you don't know which ones you're deficient. And I've had clients who take this they love it so much they can't stand it when it goes out of stock. I think it's an incredible product. And as you know, I take it sometimes during the day particularly from having a particularly stressful day as well. But I take that every night. I also like to take some Reishi reishi mushroom, very relaxing and calming at night as well. And that really helps to uplevel my sleep if you haven't listened already, go back and listen to Tuesday's episode is number Episode Episode number 163 that I did with Simon Salter, the co founder of Dietea wild Dirtea mushrooms are a great mushroom band ones that I love and he goes into all the different types of mushrooms there and when to take them. So have a listen to that if you haven't already. The other key thing to mention in relation to sleep without going into too much detail because this is a bite sized episode is just make sure you get access to sunlight early in the day. The earlier you go out the more you'll In a brain, that circadian rhythm a little bit further forward to enable you to go to bed earlier. So and one thing we do know is that if you can go to bed by about 10:30 that really seems to support adrenal function. And that's important. So if you want to really, really perform at your best if you want to detoxify effectively if you want your organs to be working properly, if you want to have great energy the next day great skin because human growth hormone is produced at night and helps support healthy looking skin and give you that glow. If you want to really look after your smarts and make sure that any buildup of things like tau protein and beta amyloid plaque that's been associated with dementia is cleared overnight, then nailing your sleep is key. I personally track mine with my aura ring. But I would suggest that you really, really focus on it, you can't really change what you don't measure. So measure it in some way. Even if it's with a free app like sleep cycle. I use that too. I think it's a fantastic app for waking you up if you use an alarm in the morning, because it will actually wake you up in your lightest phases of sleep. So it makes it much easier to get up and much nicer. But what I would say to you is make sure that you don't procrastinate on sleep, put in place some form of evening routine or ritual that anchors you really well to associate sleep with a positive thing and your bed positively as a nice place to relax. Work out what works for you. I've shared shared my evening routines and different tips and things that you can try. Whether that is a warm bath, a cool shower, whatever it is snuggling up with your partner in bed, but make sure that the bedroom is only used for sleep and sex and if it doesn't keep you awake reading, but I wouldn't use it for anything else. never never never put a TV in the room. Anyway, those
are my top tips. Let me know how you get on and I will connect with you again next Friday for another bite sized BioHacks episode.
