126: A Year of Optimizing Sleep
See the show notes for this Episode here.
This transcript has been automatically generated.
Bonnie Christine [00:00:00]:
The people in my life know that I love sleep. I have always loved sleep. And when someone asks me if I am a night owl or a morning person, I say neither. And so I have been a big believer in getting enough sleep for a really long time. About a year ago, I transitioned my goal from getting enough sleep to getting quality sleep. And I've learned so much. And so I wanted to do a little episode with you where I shared with you some of the things that I've learned around sleep quality and what I've done to completely transform my sleep quality over the last year. But I do also want to say that I have tested some things, but I'm not a doctor.
Bonnie Christine [00:00:55]:
You know this, and so please do your own research. I'm going to share with you what has worked for me, but do please do your own research and talk to your doctor if you're thinking about trying some of this as well. I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains running a multi 7 figure business doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable.
Bonnie Christine [00:02:08]:
Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. Stu many, many years, I have always felt like I needed at least 9 hours of sleep. And if I could get 10, I would get 10. So I love a good 10 hours of sleep. I just love sleep. I love everything about it. But about a year ago, I was getting still enough sleep. So at minimum, 9 hours a night.
Bonnie Christine [00:02:37]:
And I would still be tired in the late afternoon or I would feel like a heavy lack of focus. And so this prompted me to just kind of dig in and see what I could figure out. So the first thing that I did was I got an Oura ring. So an Oura ring is a ring that you wear and it tracks all of this data for you, tracks your activity and your readiness score, and your menstrual cycle, and your sleep. And so I started to wear the Oura ring to track my sleep. Now, just a side note here is that I wanted to wear it around the clock. But as I began to wear it kind of around the clock, what I realized was that I actually couldn't work out with the ring on. And I think that's because I do a CrossFit style workout, so I'm having to grip a bar, like a barbell, or a rig, or a dumbbell, or a kettlebell all the time.
Bonnie Christine [00:03:39]:
And the ring was just thick enough to where it really bothered me to have to grasp, a bar with the ring Bonnie, and it would also get scratched. So I was finding that I was taking it off to work out, and then I wasn't meeting any of my, like, activity, metrics for the day, which I just found really upsetting. So I don't actually wear it during the day. I'm a big fan of the Oura ring, but I don't wear it to track my activity. I do wear it, however, to track my sleep. And sure enough, what I discovered was that I was getting minimal deep sleep. So I'm looking at some of my scores from about a year ago, and they were always in the red zone. So less than an hour of deep sleep, and most of the time, it was like 25 to 27 minutes of deep sleep.
Bonnie Christine [00:04:33]:
Now, deep sleep is when you do the deepest restoration, when your mind and your body gets the deepest rejuvenation. And so, this is how you can sleep for a long time and still wake up tired it's when you didn't get enough deep sleep. So that kind of spun me into this world of trying to learn how to better get deep sleep and how to better also optimize my REM sleep, REM sleep. So I tried doing all of these things. And I'll share with you that for a long time, I would take a little bit of melatonin right before I would go to sleep. And I loved this because it really helped, just kind of helped me fall asleep. I don't know if you're like me, but oftentimes, I get to thinking when I lay down. And it's about nothing bad.
Bonnie Christine [00:05:27]:
It's about exciting things though. I would have business ideas, and think about team stuff, and just think about things that would actually almost wake me up. I would get so revved up about them. And so I found that melatonin would just help me kind of fall asleep more quickly. But what I learned is that the melatonin will actually kind of keep me out of that deep sleep. Now, this is just for Amy, and it may not be for you. So again, just sharing my own experience. But one thing that I did was actually stop taking melatonin.
Bonnie Christine [00:06:00]:
And I started taking a couple of other things. So I started taking magnesium, and I also started taking this supplement at night called Sleep Breakthrough by Bio Optimizers. Now, I'm not associated with Bio Optimizers at all. I had someone else share something similar with me, how this, like, transformed their sleep. And so I dove into it from a recommendation. And so we'll link all of this up in the replay if you're interested, but I started taking their magnesium breakthrough as well as their sleep breakthrough, which is vitamin B6, zinc, potassium, taurine, L theanine, a bunch of natural things. And what it is supposed to help you do is increase your deep, your high quality sleep and also wake up refreshed. So I've been taking these Stu things for about a year now.
Bonnie Christine [00:06:56]:
And then I've also just started to pay attention to many other things as well. I use a sleep mask if it is if there's any light noise at all. If there's a light on, or if the Moon is fully bright, or if the sun is coming up and I'm not done sleeping, I will just slip on a sleep mask. Now, I have a favorite sleep mask. It's by Lunya or Lunya, not sure how you say it, but we'll link that as well. It's a washable silk, super nice on your eyes. And so I love that. We also make sure to keep it pretty cold.
Bonnie Christine [00:07:33]:
So this optimal kind of sleep temperature is somewhere between 6068 degrees for you to be able to get into your deepest sleep. So we typically keep ours at around Stu, 65 with, like, a heavy blanket. Feels so good. Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers' spam folders. I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit, you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your look and feel professional without any coding. Plus, their powerful automation tools make it easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Bonnie Christine [00:08:43]:
But that's really not all. ConvertKit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send targeted messages Stu your interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric. And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those 2 different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within a day of focused effort. It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in in, and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head on over to Bonnie comforward/resources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today. You can go ahead and dive in and get familiar with the program.
Bonnie Christine [00:10:13]:
Their support is amazing and see what you think. This is truly an email service provider who can grow with you from 1 I've also been really careful about what I consume before sleep as well. So I don't consume any social media, anything that could get my eyes, you know, really wide eyed or awake. It has to be something calm, like reading or something like that, for at least an hour before bed. And so by doing all of this, let me tell you how everything has changed. So my deep sleep has gone up to, oftentimes, nearly Stu hours. Now you're aiming for between, let's say, 15 25% of your total sleep time to be deep sleep. So if you get 8 hours of sleep, 25% of that would be 2 hours.
Bonnie Christine [00:11:17]:
And so 2 hours of deep sleep is generally considered really, really good. And I'm getting close to 2 hours, somewhere between an hour and a half and Stu hours every night, since I've just started to really pay attention to what helps me get into that, that high quality sleep. And so, what I found is that I don't need as much sleep. And so now, I'm naturally waking up after 7 and a half or 8 hours, waking up before my alarm and feeling completely refreshed and rejuvenated and ready to hit the floor. Like my feet are ready to hit the floor, I'm ready to hit the ground running. That is new for me. Within the last year, that is a new feeling for me. It wasn't so much that I needed as much sleep or more sleep.
Bonnie Christine [00:12:09]:
It was that I needed higher quality sleep. And so I've mentioned a couple of supplements here today, but that's not really what this is about. What I what I really want your takeaway to be is to dive into the quality of your sleep and start doing some research on how can you improve the quality of your sleep. And maybe do something to start tracking your sleep sleep so that you can see how many REM cycles you're having and how different things affect it. So if you eat right before bed, how does that affect your deep sleep or your REM cycles? And if you have a drink, let's say you have one drink that has alcohol in it, How does that affect your REM cycles, the number of them, the quality of them, or the percentage of your deep sleep? Just start paying attention to this and see if you can tweak things and play with them, and come out the other side with higher quality sleep and see how it changes how you feel. We know that there are so many benefits to high quality sleep. First of all, physical recovery, cardiovascular health improvement. So if you are exercising and working out, your muscles do its deepest recovery and deep sleep.
Bonnie Christine [00:13:26]:
This also enhances your immune system, and so you are likely to stay healthier. It improves your mood, your mental health, your brain function, it helps prevent burnout, it helps memory formation, and actually increases your cognitive ability to take on more. So it actually improves your memory, it improves your creativity, it is associated with reducing inflammation, helps you have better stamina, helps you have better weight management. And so, my focus is to always be the best version of myself. And so, how can I make sure that I'm setting myself up for success with my health, my mind, my Bonnie, to be more creative and productive and present in my day? So productivity and literal cognitive function such a big part of our life as a creative entrepreneur that I think it deserves every ounce of energy that we can give it to make sure that we're optimizing optimizing our sleep, optimizing our nutrition, optimizing our mind, optimizing our body, so that we can show up and do the best that we possibly can with our life. And the impact that we want to have as a leader and an entrepreneur. So if you have any tips, if you have been studying your own sleep, if you figured out a way to increase your deep sleep, your rest, fall asleep easier, quiet your mind, I would love to hear about it. So we're planning to post on social media over Bonnie Instagram how you're optimizing your sleep and how you're feeling as well.
Bonnie Christine [00:15:23]:
This has been just one of the Stu, things that I've done over the past year to optimize. That's what I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, we'll link up all these resources and things that I mentioned over on the show notes for today's episode. You can find that at professionalcreative.com. My friends, create the beauty and the sleep that you want to see come alive in the world, and remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.
