Sleep is a hugely overlooked aspect of leading a healthy, stress free life.

Lack of sleep and poor sleeping patterns have a huge knock-on effect to both managing your weight, training to your full potential and general cognitive performance.

Looking at it from a weight management point of view, if you are only getting 4-5 hours sleep every night, this means you are awake more hours in the day to possibly take in calories and not stick to any target you have been given. You can see where people who do not know about calories in versus out may go massively wrong here as well, they have no real reference point for managing the energy they take in, and the potential is there to put on weight without really knowing why.

Nobody who gets 4-5 sleep makes good decisions when it comes to food choices, especially if they are unprepared. The tired client is generally then a stressed client, and stressed/tired client will very rarely stick to what they are meant to.

Sleep has a huge part to play in recovering properly from your training as well. Instead of looking for some supplement or small detail, always evaluate your sleep if you feel you aren’t recovering properly.

Ideally, you will aim for 7-8 hours. I can sense the collective ‘eyes rolled to heaven’ from all the parents out there, but they are the guidelines regardless.

People are too quick to write off trying to get more sleep, but it doesn’t have to be hours at a time. Do your best, if you only get 5 hours a night just try and add 15 minutes extra for a couple of weeks…then another 15.

Here’s a excerpt from an amazing piece on sleep from James Clear, who happens to be one of my favourite writers.

‘How much sleep do you really need? To answer that question, let’s consider an experiment University of Pennsylvania and Washington State University researchers conducted.

The researchers began the experiment by gathering 48 healthy men and women who averaged seven to eight hours of sleep per night. Then, they split these subjects into four groups.

The first group drew the short straw. They had to stay up for three days straight without sleeping. The second group slept for four hours per night, the third group slept for six hours per night and the fourth group slept for eight hours per night.

In these final three groups — four, six and eight hours of sleep — the subjects were held to these sleep patterns for two weeks straight. Throughout the experiment, the subjects underwent physical and mental performance tests’.

The subjects who were allowed a full eight hours of sleep displayed no cognitive decreases, attention lapses or motor skill declines during the 14-day study.

Meanwhile, the groups who received four hours and six hours of sleep steadily declined with each passing day. The four-hour group performed worst, but the six-hour group didn’t fare much better. In particular, there were two notable findings.

First, sleep debt is a cumulative issue.

In the words of the researchers, sleep debt “has a neurobiological cost which accumulates over time.” After one week, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at random times throughout the day.

After two weeks, the six-hour group had performance deficits that were the same as if they had stayed up for two days straight. Let me repeat that: If you get six hours of sleep per night for two weeks straight, your mental and physical performance declines to the same level as if you had stayed awake for 48 hours straight.

Second, participants didn’t notice their own performance declines.

When participants graded themselves, they believed that their performance declined for a few days and then tapered off. In reality, they were continuing to get worse with each day.

In other words, we are poor judges of our own performance decreases even as we go through them. In the real world, well-lit office spaces, social conversations, caffeine and a variety of other factors can make you feel fully awake even though your actual performance is sub-optimal.

You might think your performance is staying the same even on low amounts of sleep, but it’s not. And even if you are happy with your sleep-deprived performance levels, you’re not performing optimally’.

So you can see that you may not think lack of sleep is costing you anything, but it is – you’re just not aware of it.

Anecdotally, I am very aware of a change in mood and performance when I don’t get enough sleep. Like everything, things will differ from person to person, some may function well on 7 and others may need 8. Then there are always outliers in every situation, so perhaps there are individuals who manage quite well on 6.

Getting to sleep at an appropriate time can be a problem for many people due to many factors – stress with work/life in general, handheld devices/social media and not properly winding down before going to bed amongst other things.

I would recommend the following;

  • Make your bed every morning! It’s always a productive start to the day and you’re setting yourself up to get a good night’s sleep.
  • At least 30 minutes before you intend to sleep make sure you are off all social media/laptops/phones.
  • Have a notepad on your bedside locker and write anything down that may stop you from relaxing. This has been huge for me, it may not even be something bad, it could be a great idea…but leave it until tomorrow.
  • The room where you sleep should be a relaxing area, if possible keep any office/working area separate.
  • Make sure your bed is comfortable! If it’s not you will struggle getting asleep, make sure your setup is comfortable and regularly change your bed linen. I rarely have a problem getting asleep after a shower and with a fresh bed.
  • Be organised for the following morning, if you’re trying to sleep but know you are already disorganised for the next day it’s not conducive to sleeping well.
  • Don’t drink coffee or take on anything with caffeine late in the evening. This can vary person to person, if I’m tired enough I will fall asleep regardless, but there have been many times I know I could not get asleep due to the effect of caffeine.
  • Routine, routine, routine – it’s the same with nutrition. A chaotic style of living is much, much harder to find any kind of consistency with food, training and sleep than it is with regular patterns.

I hope this helps in some way, remember – sleep feeds in to everything else in the healthy lifestyle habit cluster – food, stress, training, relationships. Get your sleeping patterns right and you will feel big changes in day to day life.