Sydney Ross Singer – Fascinating Tips For Dramatically Improving Your Sleep Part 2

[include file=get-in-itunes.html] Today we had Sydney Ross Singer on the show to talk about how to improve your sleep based on his book called, Get It Up! (pictured below).This was the 2nd installment of our 2 part series with Sydney Ross Singer about how to improve your sleep. If you want to listen to part 1 of our series with Syd Singer about sleep you can click here. We had an amazingly fun conversation with Syd Singer about an experiement Kate and I are doing with our bed. Syd recommends elevating the head of your bed 6 inches or so, in order to decrease blood pressure in your head. It also affects your thyroid gland (which plays a huge role in our hormone levels) and carotid arteries and brain function. Interestingly enough it also affects you eye health in relation to glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration and more. So raising the foot of your bed is important according to Syd to dramatically improve your health. It's simple enough and takes no extra effort (my kind of thing!) once you spend 10 minutes elevating your bed. I haven't looked at the science myself or any studies I'm just going on intuition and trust here because I think Syd is onto something with this one. Aside from the mechanical and positioning of how we sleep which we covered more in part 1, we also discussed commonly covered topics like how much sleep should you get (his answer might surprise you), and how important it is to get to sleep before midnight. Now that's an interesting subject because I tend to stay up late. I do combat staying up late though by turning off all lights and using candles along with dramatically reducing my exposure to blue light using a computer program called Flux and some blue light sunglasses. This has helped my sleep a lot. If you're interested in the sociological impacts of how blue light is affecting us, listen to the show we did with neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse and you can even look at some webinars Dr. Kruse has put together by clicking here. We also covered topics like Polyphasic Sleep and if that's something viable to look into. A lot of "Bio-Hackers" are doing that these days but I don't think it's sustainable (or healthy for that matter) long term. Although the idea that we could (and/or should) take smaller cat naps throughout the day is very interesting to me and I'm sure is very natural. I just don't think cat naps should take the place of a deep restful REM induced sleep where maximum healing and recovery takes place. We also discussed if it's normal to wake up in the middle of the night and how long it should actually take us to fall asleep. Over 40% of the population these days are having trouble sleeping. I think not sleeping sound enough and deep enough contributes to our stress levels, lowers hormones,