Top Three Things We Do That Ruin Our Sleep

Top Three Things We Do That Ruin Our Sleep.

The second most common thing we get asked is “How can I improve my sleep?”.  When we start the conversation with our customers a lot of really common issues come up that most people are not aware of.  There’s a lot of things we do that can ruin a good nights sleep, and in today’s episode, Gretchen and Javier explore three of the most common. 

If you get help from this episode, please hit like and help us grow our following, if you have any comments, please leave them so we can help and grow our mission. 


Gretchen and Javier Casillas started Sleep Well with the idea that sleep is super important, but potential customers were putting off buying a mattress because of the reputation our industry has. Quite frankly, furniture salespeople and mattress salespeople are too pushy and don’t care about knowing sleep but more about understanding the dollar.  The reputation is there, the statement “just like a used car salesman” is used often in this industry.  So, we decided to do something different. 

We created Sleep Well, a sleep store that cares about your sleep, not only cares but, knows sleep and knows how to help you find it.  We research everything about our mattresses, pillows, and bedding.  We know more about the health benefits of an adjustable base than even some manufacturers.  It is because of this knowledge and because of the actual want to help that we have been and continue to be successful.

Since we have this knowledge, we also figured why not share it? That’s why we started Good Mornings with Sleep Well, a weekly video blog to share what we know about all things sleep.  Subscribe and watch us weekly for news and tips.  Thanks for watching!

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Here’s a Transcript of this week’s episode:

00:07                                     Good morning and thank you for joining us for good mornings with Sleep Well, today we’re going to be covering the top three things that affect your sleep. Cheers.

00:26                                     Good morning. Hi, I’m Javier and I’m Gretchen and this is good mornings with Sleep Well and it is a beautiful, what? 74 75 degrees outside. Oh my gosh. It’s nice. I walked to work this morning.

00:40                                     It’s been very weird this year. I would say for everybody in the United States, whether it’d be like continuous snows, like yesterday there were more snows.

00:48                                     Yeah, I know Colorado had snow. What else? Um, oh, there’s flooding somewhere. I was like, wow, that’s, that’s crazy. But anyways, here it’s 74 degrees. It’s beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I like working, walking to work. It’s um, it’s like reflection time. So like when I get out there and it’s all perfect, it’s just nice. And people aren’t throwing beer cans or anything out of the back of their truck at you. Yeah, it’s really nice when I’m not, when I mountain bike. Yeah. When I mountain bike. Do you know when you’re cycling down the road? Um, I had people literally throw cans at me and stuff. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. I don’t know if I told you that before. Yeah, yeah. People they call it, Huh. Anyways. Yeah. So it’d be nice to cyclists. That’s the whole point of the conversation there. So thank you. So, so, um, let’s see. So today our topic is going to be the top three things that you’re doing that mess up your sleep. And it’s a topic that we talked to a lot of our customers about because like people are always saying, I mean on top of, Hey, my back hurts when I wake up in the morning. A lot of people come in here and say, I just cannot sleep. Yes, they do. Yeah.

01:59                                     It’s a common factor. And you know, our job in our store obviously we researched a lot, um, is to know what our bedding offers, to know what our mattress offers, to know what our power bases offer, um, our pillows, everything. But when it comes to health, that’s really where most of our issues stem from. Whether it’s stress amongst the other topics that we’re going to be discussing today. Um, we bring it on. We do, and a lot of it we do to ourselves and we’re not even, we’re not even aware that we’re doing it.

02:32                                     I think that’s the problem is that a lot of people just aren’t aware that, hey, I’m doing something that’s bad for my sleep. And in a recent podcast, it was mark Kinsley and Mark Quinn, the from Sleep Geek, which is well we’re nerds. We listen to this podcast about mattresses and sleep. So anyways, so they, uh, one of them commented, I think it was mark Kinsley, he commented that sleep good sleep is a series of good decisions that you made throughout the day, not just during your sleep time. And I’m major purchase that you made. And I think that’s very true because we make all these decisions that affect our sleep throughout the day from morning until night.

03:15                                     It’s very true. Yeah. When you said major purchase, it’s a woman thing. The first thing I thought was shoes that always makes me sleep so much better.

03:30                                     Okay.

03:30                                     I have a little bit of a shoe rejection at home. So he’s just like, no. But for me, it’s my left. I can’t help it.

03:40                                     Hmm.

03:41                                     Okay. Sorry. We’ll get back to the topic I was talking about. Okay. Okay. Yes. Let’s go back to the mattresses.

03:48                                     Yes. Yeah. So anyways, go from it. No. Okay. So, so, uh, the top three things back to the topic, top three things that we’re, but you’re doing that mess up your sleep. So the number one, and this is the most common one and a lot of people just don’t understand this and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, let me tell you something. These top three that were telling you are in no particular order because they all affect you pretty much equally so, but the first topic that we want to cover today is blue light and blue light. We don’t even, a lot of people don’t even realize what that is and how it affects them.

04:29                                     Yeah. Blue Light and everything. When you started thinking about something as simple as your phone, how many of us live with our face down in our phones, whether it for work, social media, reading, we all have our faces in our phones or tablets or computers, our laptops, um, and the blue light that it projects actually activates your brain. So even if you feel like you’re exhausted and you’re at your desk and you just need that little nap or you’re at home and right before you go to bed, you just want to take one more look at Facebook or Instagram or you want to check your emails really quick. Um, your phone light actually emits the blue light and it activates your brain even though you’re trying to go to sleep. So you might feel rested but you don’t realize what you’re doing.

05:17                                     Right, right. There was an article that I read when I was doing the research on, on the blogging. It was, uh, our, our screens are killing us and although that’s a little overdue, overly dramatic, um, it’s killing our sleep. It’s killing our sleep. And a lot of people don’t know that it is. I mean, what it does is it blocks your Melatonin. Like what you were talking about. It doesn’t let you wind down, doesn’t let you do this. Um, the social media has taken is, is being taken into the bedroom and it’s, people are looking at the last minute of what’s on Facebook right before bed and it’s killing your sleep. Um, so a solution to that, and both apple and android have done this. They’ve installed a blue light filter APP on your phone. And I know we, we put it on our Samsung just because we don’t do apps. So we put it on our Samsungs and uh, it, it basically at nine o’clock it turns to the Blue Light, which now I’m looking and I, um, I’ve been doing another little bit of research on it now. It’s what, two hours before bed or something like that.

06:23                                     Yeah. They recommend that you do it so that your brain fully shuts down prior to you. And having that blue light activation turned off, you know, is really important. You know what, if you get that alert, go off in the middle of the night and you have to look at your phone or somebody calls in the middle of night, whatever, and you have to look at your phone. That one brief second that you look at your phone just ruins it.

06:46                                     It just makes your body think that, hey, it’s morning so it wakes you up. Exactly. And honestly, Mel Robbins and a lot of a lot of the speakers and, and life advisors, they talked about keeping the cell phone off at night or at least putting it into a different room. I’m very anti cell phone before bed. Um, I actually stopped looking at it at seven and I don’t look at it in the morning until seven 30. So that’s, that’s me. I know she likes playing games at night, so that’s why we put the blue screen filter on there. Um, and it’s, it’s very, very helpful. It helps you fall asleep so faster. Um, so the second thing, and this one, this one I think a lot of us are guilty of and this one is actually, it’s a topic that I think would be fun to do, another experiment on and that is drinking caffeine within six hours of sleep time. It affects you and blocks you from actually falling asleep.

07:43                                     You know? And that’s a hard number to really grasp it because six hours. Yeah, yeah. That can be tea. It can be soda, it can be coffee, it can be in your food, it can be an medicines, it can be in so many items and they say six hours prior to your bedtime, you know? So if you’re going to be going to bed nine o’clock, that means 3:00 PM that’s your cutoff time. And if you’re extra sensitive to caffeine, they say don’t, don’t take any caffeine after noon or just cut it out completely. They just don’t want it to be a disturbance for you. When you actually tried to go to sleep. And again, people get confused or like, oh I can drink and I can go right to sleep. And whether or not contemplating is your body’s asleep, but your brain is what it’s affecting and it’s not allowing you to get into the deep sleep that you require in order to clean your brain.

08:31                                     Right? So, um, personal experience is I took, I wrote the blog and this is why I told you that it’s something I want to experiment with. I wrote the blog this past week and um, then I was like, okay, I’m going to try this out because that’s who I am. So I, I purposely drank coffee at four o’clock. Okay. And I was thinking, okay, six hours my will flush it out. And I know, and I know better because I actually read in the research setting, but hey, if you’re extra sensitive to caffeine, it’ll keep you up later. Do you know? And those are the nights that I told you I slept like crap. I literally was up til midnight laying there going like, should I get up? Just what should I do? Cause that it really does affect you. It, it Wa I wasn’t at that point excitable, but at that point I was, I was able to lay down in bed, but I just could not fall asleep. I was there and I’m just there and I’m just there and I knew it was the caffeine that I drink. So yeah. Yeah. A caffeine can keep you from falling asleep faster. So and, and to address, cause I know Travis, her son Travis says, oh caffeine, I can drink an energy drink right before bed and it won’t affect me. It won’t affect me. I it has, he not told us this.

09:50                                     Yeah. He likes to drink monster and he’s in the military. So for him he has to utilize different things because his shifts are so weird. Um, they can go straight 12 hours of street, 24 they can be in combat training, whatever their situation is. They just have to be able to operate so for his body and then adding monster drinks to it, he’s really doing his body for a loop because it comes to a point when they say you’ve got 30 minutes to sleep. You have to be able to just shut your eyes and sleep. I mean it’s, it’s chaotic and if you have that stuff in your body, you can’t,

10:25                                     right. So yeah, and he tells us all the time, oh wait, it doesn’t affect me. I can fall asleep. I can fall asleep. No you can’t. So like she said, what happens is you, you may think you are down but you are not getting the rinsing sleep. And I call it rinsing sleep because that’s what’s going on as it is your, your brain is actually rinsing out. They liken it to a dishwasher where it’s washing all the proteins out from, from, from your brain that they’re eliminating plaque that can lead to memory loss and all kinds of things later in life. It actually will not allow that to happen. So you never hit deep sleep or REM  sleep. So please watch your caffeine intake.

11:06                                     Just so you know, the actual chemical process that takes place. When you have caffeine in your body, it actually stops your brain from producing the Melatonin that’s required. And instead you have adrenaline. So that’s what keeps you alert and keeps you going throughout the day, even when you’re exhausted. But the smartest way, the most efficient way to get through those moments is to actually have an app because it takes away that exhaustion and it recharges you. So you’re able to continue functioning. No chemical induction of any kind. It’s just a natural process.

11:39                                     Yup. She had to bring it now she loves naps. Okay. So the other, the, the last topic that we’ll be covering today is exercising within three hours of sleep. And I know this one kind of took you by surprise. That would be one of the top three

11:55                                     in a way it does because I mean exercise obviously is super important for everybody and in our busy lives and our work schedules and staff, you have people that prefer mornings and people who prefer evenings. And again, that can go back to are you a morning person or a night time person? Um, and some people think, well, if I exercise before bed, it wears me out so I can go to sleep. When actually what it’s doing is it’s charging everything. When you start moving around and activating that brain and making your body happy and getting that blood flowing, your brain starts producing everything all over again. So you don’t want it to be a situation in which you can’t fall asleep because you exercised. Even when you feel tired. Again, it’s your brain,

12:36                                     right? So what it does is activate your brain like what you’re talking about, but it also raises your body temperature. And so your body temperature actually during unwinding time should be lowering like by two degrees. Yeah. Yeah. Right before, right before bedtime, your body temperature has gone down two degrees. So by exciting your body, by doing exercise within three hours of sleep time, you actually aren’t allowing that process to happen and you will have some slight trouble falling asleep. Um, it’s recommended to exercise. Everyone should exercise. But uh, within three hours of bedtime is not such a good idea. Yeah.

13:14                                     It also elevates your heart rate. I mean, which anybody who exercises can tell you, especially if they’re doing a lot of cardio and okay, brief kicks in. So your situation has to be regulated. You have to find something that works for your body as well as your time.

13:30                                     Right? Right. So, uh, I guess the antidote to this one is make sure that you’re allowing enough space between your exercise time and your sleep time. So that way you have a lot of unwinding time in between there. So that way you get the full night’s sleep that you, that you need. Right? Right. So that is the top three things that we do that jeopardize our sleep. So I hope you found it helpful. And if you did find it helpful, please join us for more episodes of good mornings with sleepwalk. Cause I know before this we had an e meeting on topics that we want to cover and we came up with some really good things. Absolutely. Yep. And remember when you sleep well, you live well. Have a wonderful day. Bye Bye.