The Winning Edge Coach Podcast

Unlocking Your Full Potential Through Consistent Sleep

• Kevin Oakley • Season 1 • Episode 81

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Unlock the secrets to a restful night's sleep with the innovative 16-10-3-2-1-0 framework! Ever wondered how the strategies of a pilot preparing for a smooth landing could transform your sleep routine? 

Join me, Kevin Oakley, on this special Wednesday edition of the Winning Edge Coach Podcast as I guide you through an approach that synchronises your daily habits with your body's natural rhythms. We'll explore why getting exposure to bright natural light shortly after waking is key to regulating your circadian rhythm, and I’ll share practical solutions for those who rarely see the morning sun. 

From managing light exposure to creating the perfect sleeping environment, learn step-by-step how to cultivate high-quality, uninterrupted rest. We'll discuss the vital role of dimming lights two hours before bedtime and unplugging from screens one hour before sleep, along with the benefits of engaging in relaxing pre-sleep activities like reading or stretching. Discover how maintaining a consistent sleep schedule can radically enhance your well-being and performance. As we wrap up, I’ll give you a sneak peek into our upcoming episode featuring a supplement stack designed to elevate your sleep quality even further. Tune in and take the first steps toward unlocking your fullest potential every single day!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Wednesday short episode of the Winning Edge Coach Podcast, where I aim to give you the tools, tactics and techniques to help you to achieve your true potential. I'm your host, kevin Oakley, and over the next three Wednesdays we will discuss something a little bit different. I want to go back to one of the topics I'm passionate about, which is sleep. In this episode, I'm going to share with you the framework to radically improve the quality of your sleep. That is simple to follow and remember. Then, in the up and coming Wednesday episodes, I will tell you about a supplement stack for better sleep. And then, in the ultimate Sleep Wednesday short episode, a simple trick to help you fall asleep when you wake up in the middle of the night with ideas or worries running around your head. Welcome to the Winning Edge Coach Podcast. I am Kevin Oakley. As always, being your host, I'm also a peak performance mindset and life coach. In each episode, I want to share with you the tools, tactics and techniques to create a winning edge mindset to help you to live the life you were meant to live. In today's episode, we'll discuss a framework to help you establish an effective sleep hygiene regime. Basically, sleep hygiene refers to the habits and practices that help to support consistent, uninterrupted, high quality sleep.

Speaker 1:

One of my favourite quotes is from Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist, who likens going to sleep very similar to landing a plane. Now, if you've ever been on a flight, you'll know that the approach to landing takes place a long way back from the runway. It's something a pilot starts preparing for probably 30, 40 miles out from the actual runway before he starts his approach. It's not get close to the runway nosedive in, and sleep shouldn't be the same. Sleep isn't a case of just head hitting the pillow and falling asleep. Your preparations for sleep should take place going back quite a significant part of the day into creating the right sleep hygiene to get effective sleep. Now.

Speaker 1:

One of the reasons on the podcast I like to talk effective sleep Now. One of the reasons on the podcast I like to talk about sleep is sleep must have a significant biological reason, or evolution would have found ways for us not to go to sleep. Sleep is widespread through the animal kingdom, which says that sleep started somewhere way back in the early evolution of any kind of animal life on this planet, so it's got to be significant. I believe there are even animals who've evolved to have a sleep pattern where half the brain is awake, half is asleep. Because, again, that's why sleep doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary or point of view is we are vulnerable when we're asleep. So why would we sleep unless it serves a crucial or significant purpose to our well-being?

Speaker 1:

So if you want to be on your a game, high class, high quality sleep is imperative to make sure the next day you're functioning at your best, performing at your best, you're cognitively at your best. Now you may have heard of the 10-3-2-1 sleep technique. If not, don't worry, as I'm going to introduce you to the enhanced version of the 10-3-2-1, which I've called the 16-10-3-2-1-0. Now, don't worry, I'm going to break this concept down to you and share it in actionable tips to help you sleep better and feel your best. So let's get started.

Speaker 1:

So the first step one is 16. 16 hours before sleep, which is roughly about the time within 30 minutes of going out of bed. On immediately waking up, expose yourself to bright natural light to 10 to 30 minutes. This is a little tip I got from Andrew Uberman on the Uberman Labs podcast. Basically, this helps to regulate your circadian rhythm and increase your alertness, and this practice can be simply achieved. It's just a case of, first thing in the morning, 30 minutes within waking up, of getting outside in bright natural light. It doesn't have to be sunny, even on a cloudy morning, there's sufficient light there to actually reset your body clock and start that countdown to sleep. So it could be just as simple as taking your cup of coffee outside and spending 20-30 minutes out in the bright natural light, just resetting that clock. On a bright morning you might only need 10. Now, if you're like me, I'm recording this episode in December in the UK and literally from waking up this morning, it's two hours now before we've got sufficient light to actually possibly get outside and get natural light in my eyes.

Speaker 1:

So how would you deal with that? If you're in a country like the UK in the winter months, how could you get that 30 minutes of light exposure, 20 to 30 minutes of light exposure, within 30 minutes of waking, when it isn't going to be light for two hours? Well, there's a few solutions. Bright lights is one way. Another way is the seasonal effective disorder lamps that you can go out and buy that emit quite a bright light. You could go out and get one of those. The light therapy lamps are also good and basically positioning as the manufacturer's instructions, so that while you're having your coffee in the morning or you're pottering around in the kitchen, you've got that light in the background and you're doing the same as you would if you went outside and had that coffee in the summer months, exposing yourself to that natural light and resetting your body clock. So you're effectively saying to your body right now is the time to start that countdown, to sleep at whatever time I'm going to bed, and you might even want to time it backwards. My bedtime, for example, is 10 o'clock, so 16 hours back from that would be about 6 am in the morning roughly. So you could even do a quick calculation to time what time you need to get that light in your eyes More naturally. It would be just a case of getting that light within 30 minutes of waking up, getting outside, getting natural light in your eyes. So that's the 16 part of the 16, 10, 3, 2, 1 of the enhanced framework. Now we move on to the 10, which is 10 hours before bed, which is very simple Stop consuming caffeine.

Speaker 1:

Why? Why stop caffeine 10 hours before you're due to go to bed? Well, caffeine has a four to six hour half-life in most people. In your average person it has a four to six hour half-life. What that means is that it takes up to six hours for half the amount of coffee you've drunk, or the caffeine in the coffee you've drank, to reduce by half. So when you're getting into bed, if you've had an espresso quite early on in the evening, you've still got a high proportion of that caffeine in your system.

Speaker 1:

Let me illustrate that point to you a little bit further with the practical effects of caffeine's half-life in relation to an actual cup of coffee consumed at 2 pm. So let's consider the following scenario Assuming the average cup of coffee contains about 95 milligrams of caffeine and let's say the half-life for you or for me was five hours, we can track that caffeine levels in the body over time. So at 2 pm you're going to have 95 milligrams. At 7 pm you're going to have 47.5 milligrams about half of what it was by midnight. You've still got 23.75 milligrams two half-lives of caffeine in your system.

Speaker 1:

Well, why the big deal? Well, basically, caffeine interrupts sleep and it also interrupts the quality of sleep. So if you want high quality sleep, you need to push back that last cup of coffee and give it a chance for your body to process it. If you're sensitive to caffeine, if you're somebody who finds you're particularly sensitive and has a big impact, you might even want to push that window back to 12 hours. Not a fan of and this is just my personal opinion of stopping caffeine altogether. Well, stopping coffee altogether. I think coffee brings with it certain benefits that ride on the back of the caffeine. So you could go decaf, because some of those bioflavonoids, et cetera you know riding with the bean, et cetera. So it's worth sticking with the caffeine.

Speaker 1:

Now the next stage is three. So we've done 10 hours out, we're now three hours out, so we are bringing yourself in If this is a guided runway to sleep. So at three hours, three hours before bed, it's basically stop eating food and stop eating alcohol. So avoid large meals because there's a number of reasons and a lot of research has been done on the impact of food on sleep. One of the reasons for avoiding a large meal within three hours is one it's been research has shown that it can increase by about 61 percent the likelihood that you're going to wake up in the middle of night, in other words, having waking episodes where your sleep is disturbed. The other one is a large meal can probably, or probably does, impact on the depth of your sleep. So you need that quality, deep sleep. A large meal will impact on that and will give you poor sleep efficiency. So at the three hour mark this is the point to stop drinking alcohol.

Speaker 1:

The reasons for that is that basically, alcohol interrupts this sleep architecture or the sleep hygiene. It reduces REM sleep. Alcohol actually reduces the amount of rapid eye movement sleep which is key, or even crucial for memory consolidation and cognitive dysfunction. So if you want to be at your best the next morning, you don't want to be drinking alcohol within three hours of going to sleep. It also increases slow wave sleep.

Speaker 1:

Initially alcohol increases deep, slow wave sleep. Initially alcohol increases deep, slow wave sleep, which we know. We know that one of the common associations with alcohol is it aids sleep. But this effect diminishes as the night progresses. So as the alcohol leaves your system, it impacts on or diminishes the amount of slow wave sleep you're getting. Alcohol also causes sleep fragmentation. In other words, as that alcohol I can't even say today alcohol metabolizes, it leads to more frequent awakenings and lighter sleep in the second half of the night. So that glass of wine or couple of glasses of wine is actually going to impact. Although it might help you to go to sleep, it's going to reduce your sleep quality as the night goes on.

Speaker 1:

Before we leave alcohol, let's look at an example. So if we take moderate alcohol intake close to bedtime one to two hours, so low alcohol, we'll say, is one to two drinks within that three hours of going to sleep it actually reduces your sleep quality by about just short of 10%. That's a 10% reduction in your sleep quality just by having a drink within that three hour window of going to sleep. So that's an important one to remember. So three hours no food and or no big meals, and definitely no alcohol.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so now we're at the two parts of the enhanced framework. Two is two hours from bedtime. Now is the time to start winding down. It's the time to stop thinking about work, stop doing any kind of mentally stimulating activities. It's also time to beginning to start dimming the lights. It's the opposite of the process you went through first thing in the morning, where you got bright light into your eyes Two hours out. Now is the time to turn down the actual brightness of the lights in your home and start to reduce the intensity and basically use warm, low intensity lighting to signal to your brain that it's time to start to get ready to sleep. It gets your body clock on the wind down. It starts to tell your body right, night is approaching, it's time to sleep Now. That can be done in a number of ways. In the winter months, just reduce the light levels. In the summer months, that could be drawing curtains etc. And start to reduce the amount of light coming into the room. Okay, so that's two hours out, one hour to go.

Speaker 1:

Now we're on the final approach to sleep. This is the key bit. One is turn off all screens, that's TVs, phones, tablets, within that last hour, pieces of technology that's similar to actually that bright light first thing in the morning, sorry, first thing in the morning. So it's like signaling to your brain that it's time to wake up. So by sitting on your phone just before you're going to go to sleep, watching the TV just before you go to sleep, it's like telling your brain I'm out in the sun, it's time to be awake. It's disrupting that sleep hygiene. So, one hour out, phone away, tv off any kind of tablet. Now's the time to stop.

Speaker 1:

One of my tips here is a good old fashioned paperback with a bit of dim light to read by and also switch from something that's going to be mentally engaging, such as the nonfiction type paperbacks, to fiction, something that you know doesn't get your brain thinking too much. It's a good way to like wind down. So dim the lights at two hours, one hour to go tablets, phones away, and then non-stimulating activities which actually start to gently relax. So you need to engage at this stage, at the one hour point, there's something relaxing that isn't stimulating the brain. So you want to grab the paperback and do a bit of stretching. Maybe this is the time to get into that meditation habit. And then, of course, zero. This is touchdown in terms of sleep. This is actually go to sleep.

Speaker 1:

Ensure that your bedroom is cool, it's dark and it's quiet. Some research that says not too dark, pitch blackness can actually be anxiety inducing. I'm not too sure about that. But the darker the better. If you think evolutionary-wise, we were probably exposed to moonlight, so that's probably the maximum amount of light you want into a room at any given time during the night. But the darker, the cooler, the quieter the better.

Speaker 1:

And there's one other stage of this 16, 10, 3, 2, 1, 0 routine that you might want to consider Again. That's when you wake up in the morning, first thing is to get straight out of bed, donate the snooze. Consistent wake times day in, day out, actually regulate your circadian rhythm and help to promote good sleep hygiene. So don't snooze as soon as the alarm goes off. Get up out and on your way and be consistent the same time, seven days a week and again at bedtime, same time seven days a week. So that was the 16-10-3-2-1-0 sleep hygiene framework which, if you follow that, you're going to significantly improve your sleep quality and overall wellbeing and cognitive function. You're going to hit the day at your best. Remember here consistency is key when you're establishing a new sleep routine. That's why I like the framework. It gives a track for you to run on any stage in the day you know what you need to be doing. So that was the 16, 10, 3, 2, 1, 0 framework. What I'm going to do in the next episode I'm going to introduce you to introduce you even to a supplement stack you can use and about the one hour to go mark. That again will drastically improve your sleep quality and the ability to fall into a deep sleep.

Speaker 1:

Next Wednesday's short episode of the podcast, so tune in for that. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. If you have, please hit the subscribe or follow button, because that basically gets us seen by more people and more people get to benefit from the information we're sharing. Thank you for today. Until next time, see you again. That was the Winning Edge Coach podcast. Thanks for listening, if you enjoyed this episode of the Winning Edge Coach podcast. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of the Winning Edge Coach podcast and you'd like to help support the podcast, please hit the subscribe button and, if possible, leave a rating or a review. Also, please feel free to share the podcast with others and post about it on your favourite social media platform. It on your favourite social media platform. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on Twitter at winningedgepod. Thanks again, I'll see you next time.