113: Improve Your Sleep & Increase Productivity

Welcome to season nine of Productivity Paradox with Tanya Dalton, a podcast  focused on using productivity, not just to do more, but to achieve what’s most  important to you. Join Tanya has she kicks off the New Year with a special season  titled, New Year True You. And now here’s your host Tanya Dalton. 

Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome to Productivity Paradox. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton,  and this is episode 113, Improve Your Sleep and Increase Productivity. How does sleep  fit into our season of new year true you? Well, a good night sleep can be the  difference between a highly productive day and a draggy unproductive one, of course. 

But it’s also really the difference between being your very best version of yourself or  well, a grump, otherwise known as not the best version of you. So today, I want to  share with you some of the negative effects of not getting the right amount of sleep.  We’re going to talk about how you can use naps to get you going on those days  where you need a little extra productivity boost, and I’ll be sharing with you some  techniques on how to get to sleep faster and we’ll be sprinkling in some tips on  bedtime routines and setting up your sleep environment to get you in the mood for  sleeping, that is. 

All right, let’s start by having a quick word from today’s sponsor, Gusto. Gusto offers  easy-to-run payroll services and HR support for small businesses around the country. I  personally use Gusto for my company, and we absolutely love working with them. I’ll  be sharing with you a little later on in the episode how you can get three months free  when you run your first payroll later on in this episode. 

But let’s go ahead and talk about sleep because lack of sleep really does affect us.  Listen, the truth of the matter is there is no studies out there that say a lack of sleep is  good for anyone, or working so hard that you’re not sleeping at night is going to be  good for business. In fact, it’s the contrary and I think we know that. 

There are tons and tons of studies out there that show that poor sleep whether it’s  due to the lack of quantity or the quality of your sleep can have really negative  impacts on your productivity and how we function in our days. Now, we all know that  when we don’t get enough sleep, we’re grumpy. We also become poor decision  makers and that’s really new. We know it affects our thinking when we’re overtired,  which of course can lead to more accidents and injuries. 

As a matter of fact, did you know that sleep deprivation was a major factor in some of  the biggest disasters in history like the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, and  also the massive oil spill of the Exxon Valdez? Studies have shown too that there’s a  

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connection between a lack of sleep and symptoms of depression. In fact, depression  and insomnia can actually feed off one another. Depression can make it difficult to fall  asleep and then the lack of sleep contributes to feelings of depression. It’s this vicious  cycle that’s really hard to break. 

But did you also know that the lack of sleep contributes to signs of aging? This was  really surprising to me. We all know the we get dark circles or puffy eyes when you  don’t get enough shut-eye but your body releases more of that stress hormone  cortisol and this breaks down skin collagen causing skin to lose its natural elasticity  and its smoothness. 

Sleep deprivation can also inhibit the body’s release of human growth hormones  which increases muscle mass, thickening skin and strengthening bones as we age. We  really need to get into that deep sleep in order to produce that growth hormone to  repair our normal tissue wear and tear every day. Not getting enough sleep is giving  you wrinkles. That’s all I heard here, I don’t know about you but I heard not enough  sleep, more wrinkles. And I don’t know, that really makes me want to get a little more  sleep at night. 

So instead of splurging on that expensive night cream, maybe we should be splurging  a little more on sleep. But the big question is how much sleep do you really need? And  that’s not really a simple answer. There’s no one-size-fits-all amount of sleep that  everyone needs. It’s actually a range depending on your age and a few other factors.  And you probably remember a hearing about this in health class way back when. 

For adults, the general rule of thumb is between 7 and 9 hours. Some need more,  some need less. Just like in life, we’re all a little bit different and I know you might be  thinking, “Well, I’m the type of person who can get by on a lot less sleep.” But did you  know really it’s only 3% of the population that has this rare gene that allows them to  get less than six hours of sleep and still function normally the next day? 

And that’s the catch here, still function normally the next day, which means they get  less than six hours of sleep and they don’t need to suck down extra caffeine in order  to make it through the day. They can still function. For the other 97% of us, we need to  clock in the right amount of hours in order to be our best selves each and every day. 

So how do you figure out with that amount of time is? What is your optimal amount  of sleep? Well, I recommend approaching this like a scientist. You can try to figure out  the amount of sleep you need by setting an alarm for seven hours, and then wake up,  

see how you feel. Pay attention throughout the day. Are you yawning? Are you  reaching for sodas or coffee all day? That’s probably a sign you didn’t quite get  enough the night before. 

So bump it up a little bit. Maybe try setting the alarm for seven and a half hours and  then again, pay attention to how you feel and keep bumping it up until you find the  right amount. And I know what you’re thinking. Well, obviously, the more sleep you  get, the better off you are? But that’s not necessarily true either. 

Funny enough, the effects of sleeping too much are just about the same as not  getting enough. We want to find our sweet spot of sleep. The amount that’s just right  

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for you kind of like Goldilocks, not too little not too much, just right. But what if you  don’t get it just right? What if you don’t get enough sleep? I want to share more about  what we should do when we don’t get enough sleep in just a minute. 

But first, let’s have a quick word for my podcast sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is a great  payroll benefits and HR tool for any small-business owner and I’m telling you this  because Gusto is what we use ourselves at inkWELL Press. You can sign, store and  organize employee documents all online. It makes it seamless. Gusto also  automatically files and pays all the state, local and federal payroll taxes, one less thing  to worry about. 

Expert HR support is also just a phone call away to help you answer any of your  questions. And my podcast listeners get three months free once you’ve set up and run  your first payroll. Simply go to Gusto.com/paradox and take advantage of this great  small business tool. 

Let’s get back into talking about what do we do if we don’t get enough sleep. Even on  these times where have the best laid plans, we might have nights where we don’t get  our optimal amount of sleep. When your kid knocks on the bedroom door at 2 a.m.  with a fever, you’re up half the night. Maybe you have a big presentation or an event  coming up. You’re staying up way too late all week working on it, or maybe a late  night out at a party. It happens, right? We don’t get enough sleep. 

I think we can all agree most of us don’t get the sleep we need. So I want to tell you  about a little trick that you can use to give you that extra boost you need on those  days that you find yourself yawning every other minute. Are you ready for this? It’s  

called a nap. Yeah, I know, not a new thing, right? But in fact, your grandma is actually  probably a very big fan of the nap. And you know what? She’s right on track. 

Now, even if you haven’t been using the nap, it’s one of the best things you can do on  those days when you didn’t get enough sleep that your body needed or even if you  did, to give you that extra boost of productivity. You might be surprised to find that a  good nap doesn’t take much time at all. And that’s the thing that holds a lot of people  back. They think, “I don’t have time for a nap.” As a matter of fact, you do. 

There is an ideal length of time for a nap. It’s 26 minutes. I call them 26ers. And I take  one about every other day or so. Honestly, I take a 26er probably at least four days  out of the week. Now, your first reaction might be this sounds so unproductive, but  taking a nap actually makes you super productive. 

I’m telling you, this is one of the things that I do all the time because it truly makes a  difference but maybe you don’t believe me. Let me give you some science to back this  up. Back in the mid-1990s, NASA actually did a study that found that 26-minute naps  improve performance 34% and alertness 54%. 

If you do find yourself really dragging throughout the day, it might be the boost you  need to make the rest of your day productive. I know for me, it gives me just the right  amount of productivity boost that I need in the second half of my day. So why is it 26  minutes? Well, the key is you don’t want to nap for too long we’re going to zonk out  

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for several hours, then you wake up all groggy and feeling worse than before when  you took your nap. 

We all know that we have different phases of sleep. Well, 26 minutes is the ideal length  of time to refresh and reenergize before you hit that deep sleep mode. As a matter of  fact, have you ever woken up from a nap and felt kind of a little bit loopy? It’s because  you woke up in the middle of that deep sleep cycle, and that’s what we want to avoid.  We want to close our eyes and set the alarm on your phone for 26 minutes. 

Now, I’m not suggesting you get caught sleeping on the job by any means. But if you  schedule it into your day, maybe during your lunch break, then it’s on your own time  and you won’t affect anything that you’re supposed to do. Head out to your car, find a  quiet spot in the office, put on a sleep mask and set the timer. Get a little bit of shut eye. 

I take a nap some afternoons after I get home. I tell my kids … Literally, I say, “Ah, it’s  time for a 26er,” and I head to my room. Now, my kids are old enough that I can do  that. Yours might not be, but even closing your eyes and not fully sleeping while they  watch a quick episode on Nick Junior is just the right amount of time. 

Now here’s the thing I want you to keep in mind. This does not make you a bad mom.  In fact, the rest will make you a better mom, a productive mom that’s much happier  and more patient for the rest of the day. So you might be thinking, “Nap in 26  minutes? Impossible. I can’t even fall asleep for half an hour most times.” 

So I’m going to share with you a method on falling asleep that the army uses, and it  takes less than two minutes. It actually comes from a book from the 1980s called Relax  & Win. It’s not a new technique obviously. It’s been around since the 80s but I know  many people who’ve tried this and found it to be really successful. I know for me on  the times that I’m having a hard time relaxing, this is what I do. 

So here’s what you do. Before you get started, you make sure your phone is turned off or in silent mode and your alarm is set for whatever time you’re wanting to get up.  Only have your bedside lamp on. When you’re ready to fall asleep, sit on the edge of  your bed. And then you’re going to work on relaxing your body starting from the top,  working your way to the bottom while breathing in and out and listening to the sound  of your breath. 

With each breath, I want you to move down your body one zone at a time. So, start  with relaxing your face. Tighten up your facial muscles by making a wincing motion  and slowly and naturally, let those muscles relax. Then let your tongue fall in whichever  way it wants to in your mouth. And then after you’ve relaxed your face, look over your  shoulders and let gravity pull them naturally downward. 

Allow your arms to dangle and then let your chest relax further, then relax your thighs  and your lower legs all the way down to your feet and toes. And then once you moved  down to your toes, I want you to clear your mind for 10 seconds. Keep your body  relaxed and loose. And then I want you to picture one of the following scenarios in  your mind either lying in a canoe on a calm lake with clear blue skies above you or  

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lying in a pitch-black room in a hammock, gently swaying in the darkness. I want you  to do this sitting on the edge of your bed and then I want you to lay down. 

Now I don’t know if you could hear that in my voice but I felt like I was so relaxed in  sharing this technique with you because this is something I find incredibly helpful on  those nights where I just need to turn my brain off. Just taking a little bit of time to  practice this technique can make a huge difference. And I think you’ll notice you fall  asleep much faster. Really, it’s as simple as doing a couple of really small tweaks in  order to really get that better sleep we’re all craving. We all want to sleep better and it  really doesn’t take that much work. 

I have seven tips to share with you on how to get a better night sleep. Now I’m going  to go through these one by one but I also have a download to make it easier. You can  grab that at inkWELLpress.com/podcast and go to episode 113. What I would really  encourage you to do is print out this download. Put it next to your bed because I want  to encourage you to incorporate at least one or two of these techniques, if not, the  whole seven of them because I really think they can make a huge difference. 

Let’s start with tip #1, create an evening routine. Listen, adults, we need a bedtime too.  The best thing you can do for yourself to set yourself up for a good night sleep is  establish a routine. A lot of us put our kids to bed at night at a regular time and we  have a whole routine we go through. We forget that that would really help us as well.  Instead, we tend to get sucked into a TV show or we browse social media and then all  of a sudden we look up and it’s past midnight, and we’ve got to get up for work and  then we stress ourselves out. 

Really establishing a nighttime routine will really make a big difference in triggering  your brain to know it’s ready to go to bed. You can include some really great soothing  and calming activities to help you relax. So, this could include taking a bath, lighting a  

candle, listening to relaxing music, doing some stretches or meditation, doing that  exercise we just talked about a few minutes ago with relaxing your body. But creating  an evening routine really can make a huge difference. 

The second tip is to implement a caffeine curfew. We all enjoy a little caffeine kick now  and then, me included. But caffeine stays in your body for six hours and that can really  disrupt your sleep cycle. So, what I would encourage you to do is have a cut-off time  for consuming caffeine. Pick a designated time and then no more caffeine, so maybe  that’s four o’clock if you want to go to bed around 10:00. 

And then in the evening after your designated time, maybe try drinking things that are  calming like a decaf tea. I have a sleepy time tea. It’s a part of my evening routine that  I really enjoy because it’s very calming and warm and it’s just something that I really  enjoy. So, think about what you could do to cut out that caffeine. 

The third tip is to change your lighting. We’ve all heard about blue light and how it can  have a really negative impact on our sleep and really even on our eyes. Try using an  app like Night Shift or f.lux on your desktop to try to turn those blue lights into a warm  or orange light. A lot of the tech that we have nowadays really will adjust itself  depending on the time of day, so check to see if you have those settings in your  

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phone and on your computer, but really making sure that you’re not having a lot of  that harsh lighting in the evening. 

The fourth tip is to darken your bedroom. Kind of piggybacking a little bit off that idea  from tip #3, but we often don’t realize how much extra outside light sources are  affecting our sleep. They’re creeping in through the windows in different areas from  street lamps and outside house lights, a bright full moon. Even in the summer when it  stays light outside longer, it’s really hard for your body to trigger that melatonin that it  has inside of itself to want to fall asleep. 

A couple of tricks, you could get blackout shades which are relatively inexpensive  especially if you get them from the hardware store, or even cheaper get a sleep mask.  Put that on, black out the room and really enjoy a little bit of extra sleep by having a  darker bedroom. 

The fifth tip is to create a sleep sanctuary. Listen, beds are not meant to be desks. So,  try not to work from your bed. Make your bed a place for sleeping, so that when you  get in the bed, your body knows it’s ready in that right frame of mind to go to sleep.  And don’t forget when we’re talking about a sanctuary, get rid of some of that extra  clutter that’s around especially on your nightstand or next to your TV. 

Wherever you look first thing in the morning and last thing at night, we want to have  that sanctuary feel. That will help us relax. We touched on this a couple of weeks ago  when we talked about how to organize anything, about that feeling we get when life  feels a little less cluttered and a little more organized. Take advantage of that in your  bedroom so you can feel like you’re going to sleep in a sanctuary. 

The sixth tip is to lower the temperature in your room. The optimal temperature for  sleeping is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so it ranges from 60 to 72 degrees. So, think  about lowering your AC. You could use a fan or even open the window if the weather  

is nice or you could consider using a cooling mattress or lighter weight sheets. But  really lowering your body temperature can help you get into that deeper sleep. 

And then the seventh tip is to stick to a regular sleep schedule. This helps more than  anything. We want to regulate your body’s internal clock, so it knows when it’s time to  go to sleep and it knows what time to wake up each day. This helps your body get  into a rhythm that will help you fall asleep more regularly. 

Also, if you know you have to get up early to catch a train or maybe you have a big  presentation, work backwards and figure out what time you need to go to bed in  order to get that ideal amount of sleep that’s right for you. The key here though is to  keep some sort of regular schedule going, if you can. That repetition really works well  for your body. Your body craves that rhythm and that cycle. 

I want to encourage you to download all seven of these tips and print them out and  start implementing them. Just go to inkWELLpress.com/podcast and look under  episode 113. I want you to get started setting yourself up with some really good sleep  habits and routines. I really think you’ll begin to see how much of a difference this  makes in your day. 

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And if you’re one of those people who thinks that surviving on a little amount of sleep  each night and burning the candle at both ends is a badge of honor, I really want you  to think again. The long-term effects of sleep deprivation far outweigh the benefits of  

those bragging rights. We want to make sure we’re taking care of our bodies. And if  you want to function better, you want to be happier, you want to be more productive,  schedule the right amount of sleep each and every night. It really can make a huge  difference for you. 

And speaking of making a big difference, I want to share with you the review of the  week because this one really made me so happy to read. For those of you who don’t  remember, every episode, I am sharing an iTunes review, an email, an Instagram  comment, something that somebody has said about the podcast that has helped  brighten their day, because truly it brightens mine. 

And when we share the word, when we spread the word about the podcast, it helps  us share the messages. It helps us spread the word about intentionality and living a  productive life and that we’re not doing more of focusing on what’s most important.  And that is why these reviews mean so much to me. 

Let me share you this one from Lyla Gray who says, “In the minutes I have to focus on  myself, I often find myself listening to Tanya Dalton. I love that the focus is finding true  happiness instead of getting the most things done. Feeds the soul.” I can’t tell you  how much that means to me that last sentence, feeds the soul. That makes me  incredibly happy. So, Lyla Gray, please send my team an email and I will handwrite you  a thank-you note this week. Thank you so much for leaving a review. 

And next week on the show, I have an amazing guest in store for you. We are going to  be talking about knowing your enneagram and how it can change your life. Jenn Jett  is coming on the show. I cannot wait for you to hear what she shared with me during  our interview. It is so incredibly good you will definitely want to tune in. 

And in the meantime, I would love to see you in my Facebook group. It’s an amazing  place on the internet, full of support and encouragement as we work towards  becoming the very best version of ourselves. So, until next time, have a beautiful and  productive week. 

Thanks for listening to Productivity Paradox. To get free access to Tanya’s valuable  checklist, five minutes to peak productivity, simply go to inkWELLpress.com/podcast. 

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