As a manager or people leader, it's essential to stay healthy to achieve optimal performance. In this video, learn more about the importance of sleep health and get helpful tips on how to improve your sleep. Discover how getting enough sleep can help prevent obesity, dementia, heart disease, and more. Plus, learn how to adjust your evening routine to ensure you get the sleep you need. Get the tools to stay healthy and perform your best with this video.
Transcript from video
Hello, connections. It's Mike here, and we're on our seventh, I believe. I'll probably get all these numbers wrong. Video in the happy Manager video series. We say it's for managers and people leaders, but it's for anybody.
If you want tips to be healthier and happier, this is the place to be. So about three or four videos ago, we started diving more into the health component and we talked about four different pillars that contribute to good health. We've got body health, fitness, nutritional health, sleep health, and mental health. And today, we're gonna go a little bit deeper into sleep health and look at some tactics for improving our sleep. First of all, though, how important is good sleep? Well, when I served in the military, we learn about different methods that are used to make people speak. a.k.a torture. And of all of these things that you see in the movies, the most effective one to break somebody down is sleep deprivation.
There's nothing more effective than that. So that shows you just how much can affect you physically and mentally. There's some research from Hopkins Medical Center in the US that
suggests that if you are chronically sleep deprived, getting less than five hours a night, you're fifty percent more likely to suffer from obesity. You're thirty-three percent more likely to suffer from dementia. You're forty-eight percent more likely to suffer from heart disease, which is the number one killer in the west, and perhaps most importantly, your three times more likely to catch a cold. So not getting enough sleep has some serious impacts on our long-term health.
It also really drops our present cognitive function. We know there's a massive increase in car crashes for people that are sleep deprived. So in your health in the long term, it affects your performance in the short term at work, and it generally makes you feel either really good or really crap if you're not getting enough. So we've gotta make sure that we're and enough sleep. Why don't we get enough sleep? I don't really need to go into all the details,
but I think we know historically we didn't have sleep was largely dictated by some rise and some fall. Since today is that some rise and set really doesn't do anything. We've got bright lights in our houses. We've got mobile phones, sharing bright lights in our eyes. We've got social lives that go on into late hours of the night.
So it's become very easy for us to neglect our sleep. It's a new thing. So how can we improve it? How can we go about making our sleep better? Well, the best thing we can do is get into a routine where we wake up before our alarm clock goes off because that tells us that we're getting the amount of sleep that we need to function. How many hours of sleep do we need? The average for an adult is about seven and a half. So obviously, it might be more or less for you, but that's the average. So that's a good number to start with. And the way to do this is to play around with your evening routine working backward from the time you need to wake up.
So if I need to wake up at eight in the morning, I'm gonna work backward by seven and a half hours. I'm gonna say, I need to be asleep by midnight. Then I'm gonna work back from there and be like, when do I need to be in bed, to be falling asleep at midnight, perhaps it takes me an hour, so I need to be in bed by eleven, and I need to work my routine from there. Try and play around and find out what the amount of sleep you need is and what your evening routine needs to be to enable that. There are some other tips and tricks and hacks that we can go into, but really that's where the hard work is. Some tip to support you in getting to sleep is to change the bulbs in your house to low-lumen light bulbs. You can get them in most of the now. That's the bulbs you'll see in pubs and cafes. We've got them throughout our house because they don't stimulate the brain to believe that it's opposed to natural daylight, which makes you come back to life.
So get yourself low-lumen light bulbs and put them around most of the rooms in your house,
especially the rooms that people go through and the ones that you are the rooms that you're gonna sleep in. Another tip is to put your phone put sleep mode on your phone so that it knows not to notify you within an hour of when you're going to sleep. And you can also put a light change on your phone It's easy on an iPhone. You can do it on Android as well, where it turns off the bright lights at nighttime and puts them down into warm lights to your phone doesn't wake you up. Finally, I don't wanna overwhelm you with tips because really it all comes from working back to find being able to wake up before your alarm goes off, and be better in the evening.
But another final tip as well is that you can figure out your chronotype, which is your unique sleep in genetics. And if you just google power of when quiz, you can go in there and find out for free what your sleep genetics might be. which then might give you some advice. Actually, for you, you're gonna find it easier to go to sleep earlier if you're reliant or you're gonna find it easier to go to sleep later if you're a wolf or if you like most of us are there probably around eleven o'clock. So there are a few tips there. Quite a lot of information,
but I would say the key thing is trying and find that routine while you're waking up before your alarm, then you're in a good place.
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Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike founded Better Happy in 2018.
He now works with a variety of businesses ranging from small accountancies up to large organisations such as Travelodge on improving employee happiness. Mike's vision and the vision of Better Happy is 'Every employee happy, every business thriving'
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