3 Ways to Get Your Best Sleep Ever

Dr. Lipman is a leader in Functional Medicine, specializing in what he calls Good Medicine: a combination of modern medical treatments and age-old Eastern healing techniques. For almost 40 years, he has helped thousands of patients improve their physical health, emotional wellbeing, and get the best sleep ever. Something Dr. Lipman is extremely passionate about is the power of sleep (he even wrote a whole book about it called “Better Sleep Better You”). As Dr. Lipman says, "sleep is not a pass of time." In fact, your body is repairing itself during the night, ridding itself of toxins and chemicals. If you don’t get enough sleep, those harmful substances will continue to build up, leading to detrimental effects on your body. It has been found that routinely sleeping less than 7 hours per night can lead to a number of chronic illnesses like diabetes, depression, anxiety, obesity, Alzheimer’s and even cancer. Luckily, Dr. Lipman taught us some easy ways to get a better night’s rest. Let’s dive into it.

Change your environment 

There are different environmental factors that can improve your sleep - one of them is darkness. It is vital to darken your room as much as possible because darkness makes it easier for your body to produce melatonin (a sleep-inducing chemical). Additionally, sleeping in a cold room has also been found to help. So dark and cold…check.

Try Fasting

Secondly, Dr. Lipman suggests another, more surprising, tip: fasting. Ideally, you should eat dinner at 6pm and not eat again until 10 or 11 am the next morning. This is more commonly known as “intermittent fasting.” If you eat too close to bedtime, your body will have to allocate energy towards digesting that food when instead, it should really be focusing on cleaning the body of the toxins we talked about earlier. Not only will making this minor adjustment improve your sleep, but also has aging benefits as well. If 6pm is too early, at least try and give yourself 3 hours between dinner and bedtime. 

Establish a healthy nighttime routine 

Lastly, we cannot expect our bodies to go from 100 to 0 right away. We must implement a “power-down process,” as Dr. Lipman calls it. This can be listening to calm music, taking a bath, or meditating. However, one practice that we all must include in our nighttime ritual is an “electronic shutdown” - the powering down of all electronics, ideally an hour or two before bedtime. We know, it’s a hard thing to do, but it will be worth it, your brain and body will thank you later. 

For more from Dr. Lipman, listen to his full episode HERE--> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/better-together-with-maria-menounos/id1320060107?i=1000516762198.

You can also head to Heal Squad X Maria Menounos for more episodes.