Maximize Your Productivity with Optimal Sleep: How to Restore Your Brain
Today’s episode is going to give you better sleep and wake you up. More specifically, wake up your brain! If you find yourself waking up tired all the time, brain fog throughout the day, no energy, and you feel you’re losing sleep, time and productivity, then you’re going to love my guest.
Tanessa Spears is a Kinesiologist (Ka-neice-iologist), a certified sleep science coach and a health consultant. She’s on a mission to help entrepreneurs, like you and I, optimize our health, focus and productivity.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- One of the biggest reasons entrepreneurs are losing time and productivity.
- How sleep affects your ability to show up as an effective entrepreneur.
- How you can get back an extra hour every day with sleep.
- Biohacking and why is it relevant to entrepreneurs and productivity.
- What causes you to wake up with brain fog.
- 3 simple shifts that we can all make to help us enhance our sleep quality.
- Chronotypes – our genetic rhythm that determines when we should sleep and when we are most productive.
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Connect with Tanessa:
tanessashears.com
tanessashears.com/biohacking
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Full transcript:
Allison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show, and today’s episode is going to wake you up. More specifically, wake up your brain. If you find yourself waking up tired all the time, brain fog throughout the day, no energy, and you feel you’re losing time and productivity, then you’re going to love my guest.
Allison: Tanessa Spears is a kinesiologist, a certified sleep science coach and a health consultant. She is on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you, and I optimize our health focus and productivity. I’m really excited for this conversation. Welcome to the show, Tanessa. Hi, Allison.
Tanessa: Thank you for having me. I’m loving this conversation already all about sleep and all the good things that we can do for our brain.
Allison: Love it. Oh, I am very, very excited for this because there has been plenty of times where I’ve woken up and I’ve gone to bed early and I wake up and I feel tired and I have brain fog. So I am excited to get into your brain, understand our brains, understand, you know, better sleep and productivity.
Allison: But my first question out of the gates is, Explain what a kinesiologist is and what drew you to this field.
Tanessa: Yeah, so it was super interesting. I went to university because I was going to be a news anchor. Like that was my jam. I was going to be on the news. Um, but it all started by accident completely.
Tanessa: I was a swimming instructor and if you’ve ever been around a lot of kids for hours on end, freezing cold in the pool. I had about enough of that, and I was looking for a way to like it, I love this job, but how can I mix it up? And the supervisors came in and they were like, Hey, if you want to teach our seniors Aquafit classes, you don’t have to teach so many swimming lessons.
Tanessa: And I was like, sign me up. And through the process of becoming a group fit instructor, this was like back in 2008, I was like, This is cool. The muscles do this. This is how the body works. And I remember as soon as I finished that, I marched into the registrar’s office and I was like, I don’t want to do communications anymore.
Tanessa: Sign me up for kinesiology. And it was literally that pivot point where my whole life began focusing around movement, which is what kinesiology is. It’s applied to human movement, how movement affects our health and our body and everything like that. So that’s where that whole path started. Wellness and health just became the center of my life.
Allison: That is a cool story, especially that you’ve gone from you, you thought you were going to be a TV anchor, which is Yeah, cool and very ambitious and now you’re into the whole health and wellness and understanding the brain and all of that good stuff. So I want to know from you, before we really start tackling sleep in the brain, what is one of the biggest reasons.
Allison: You think entrepreneurs are losing time and productivity?
Tanessa: It’s because they think sleep costs them productivity instead of giving them productivity. They think, I literally just had a client say to me yesterday, she’s like, I feel like I must choose between productivity and sleep. Mm-hmm. And we don’t even question the fact that No, no, no.
Tanessa: A good sleep and a brain that works at a how it’s supposed to work. Makes you super-efficient. And so we go through life feeling foggy and it just feels so normal to us. And everyone else around us is tired. We don’t even question if that is, or we want that to be normal for us. My favorite belief to break is that by sleeping you lose time to work on other things.
Tanessa: It’s the other way around. It gives you so much time back.
Allison: That’s interesting. Cause I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially if they have little ones at home, think they need to stay up late or they must get up super early. To get more done, but as you’re working with clients, I’m sure you’re finding that they’re actually getting less done.
Tanessa: Yeah, well, just as an example of a client I was talking to last week, she’s like, I feel like, you know, I get the day going and it’s all right and then I get to the afternoon, and I just crash and everything after that is I’m distracted. I, all I can do is light work. Like I must do my emails then. Cause I can’t be creative, I can’t do client calls.
Tanessa: I can’t be engaged in what I’m doing. And I just feel like all I’m doing is waiting for the end of day to come so I can clock out. And I’m like, well, how many. Hours do we per week? Do you think that is? She’s like, it’s at least two hours a day, five days a week. So I say, so 10 hours are just completely like you’re waiting to run the clock out at the end of your workday.
Tanessa: She’s like, yeah. I was like, oh my gosh. What would you do if you were efficient for the entire amount of time you were there? Mm-hmm. And we start to think things like, but sleep is when you know, that’s the amount of time I can do the more work because I was so tired during the day. But what if those extra two hours on your day were useful?
Tanessa: Would you then say sleep might be of value to you? So I just love sleep as the tool to get our brains up to peak capacity because we’re just walking around operating 50 to 60% and not even knowing what’s possible when your brain is super clear. So
Allison: let’s get to sleep. I think a lot of people, entrepreneurs are probably thinking, okay, I need to go to bed an hour earlier, or maybe I can sleep an extra half hour in the morning.
Allison: So how does sleep affect our ability to show up as an effective entrepreneur, like help us understand what we need to be doing when it comes to sleep.
Tanessa: I think it really understands that, uh, to understand that there is a difference between the amount of time you spend in bed and the amount of time you are actually asleep, and then the quality.
Tanessa: So there’s those two parts of the conversation. So to answer the first part, like we think, and I think this is where a lot of the misconception comes in. My lights are out by 11 and I wake up by 6, 6 30. That’s seven. Seven and a half hours. Like check, I’ve got this. Mm-hmm. Yet we go into our day, and it feels like we just can’t get started and we need coffee.
Tanessa: And the morning feels like my brain’s not started up yet. It takes a while to get going. But what I learned, and I thought this was so fascinating, is this concept of sleep opportunity. So let’s say you turn your lights out at 11. So during that night, your brain just doesn’t go off like a light. You take time to fall asleep.
Tanessa: Okay? Now then there’s the time that your brain wakes up between regular sleep cycles. Okay? Let’s add a little more time on there. Even if you don’t know you’re waking up, then there’s the times you do wake up, the kids, the trips to the washroom, the snoring partners, the dogs like the things. And then of course there’s that time when you’re waking up in the morning and I take the data I, I give my clients something called an aura ring, which is basically a ring that tracks all metrics, breathing, sleep stages, sleep timing, body temperature, and all this kind of stuff.
Tanessa: And I analyze that data. And I can tell you when a client starts with me, they are awake between an hour to an hour and a half on average per night. Some more, some a little bit less. Now, I want you to imagine this, those things we just talked about, you add those all up and you think you’re sleeping well at seven hours.
Tanessa: Now let’s take off an hour and a half. If you’re just the average person, you’re getting five and a half, six, maybe hours of solid sleep a night. And we wonder why we feel so tired, and we wonder why we feel so foggy. And we say, but I’m sleeping fine. I’m getting my seven and a half hours a night.
Tanessa: That’s the first part of the conversation. And the second one, which we can go into if you want, is about what happens while you’re sleeping. Because we don’t just lay there. There’s things that happen in our brain that help us show up for our businesses that happen during quality sleep.
Allison: And I want to get into that because I know for myself most evenings, I feel that I can fall asleep quickly.
Allison: I might wake up once during the night to use the restroom, or like you said, the dog interrupts us, or you hear something outside you roll over, takes a few minutes and I feel like I’m back to sleep. And then the next thing I know, my alarm is going off. And I hit that snooze a few times and it is, it’s like most of the time it feels pretty good to get up.
Allison: Sometimes I drag myself out of bed. So let’s talk our brains and quality sleep. Like how do we really get into quality sleep?
Tanessa: I think the first part of it is understanding that that quality of sleep is directly tied to your business. So if we’re going to look at what quality of sleep means when you sleep, your brain goes through different depths of sleep and each one of them do different things for us.
Tanessa: So in the early part of the night, you know, 10, 11, 12, 1, we’d get a lot of deep sleep. Deep sleep is for physically restoring your body. So thank you. Just had the workout. Physically restoring your body happens during deep sleep. Your brain also gets physically restored, and that is key time for preventing long-term ailments like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Tanessa: Super important there. But my favorite part of sleep happens in the early morning hours, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6:00 AM and that is where we start to dream. Mm-hmm. And it’s called rapid eye movement sleep. Now here’s, I call this sleep entrepreneurial gold, because there are main things that happen. So number one, that is where your creativity is fostered.
Tanessa: So, as in business, being creative really helps with connecting, creating different ideas. It helps you solve bigger problems. How well your business does is often correlated to the size and the quality of the problem we can solve, and how good we are at coming up with unique solutions for either each client or each customer or whoever we’re working with.
Tanessa: So if I’m getting enough REM sleep, my problem solving skills are on point and my creativity is on point. So that’s part one. Part two, REM sleep is like therapy for your brain. It allows you to reduce the amount of adrenaline in your system. And what this does is it helps foster emotional stability the next day.
Tanessa: So think about this. We’ve all woken up feeling irritable, grumpy, a little feisty. Maybe we’re not as, uh, patient as we might be. So suddenly you get an email in your inbox and it’s got some criticism or something that’s not so nice, or you get a troll on Instagram. I want to show up with integrity even on my birthday.
Tanessa: So when you get that REM sleep, it enhances your ability to be emotionally stable and not swing into overwhelm or into like that short term thinking of like, Ugh, to heck with it. I’m just going to quit today. I’ll come back again tomorrow. And then I think the third and most important part that happens during REM sleep is your ability to read facial expressions and body gestures increases.
Tanessa: Now, why is this important? If you’re working with a team, with clients, you’re pitching or doing presentations, or you’re doing interviews like this, my ability to subconsciously be watching for your body gestures and your facial expressions is going to tell me that what I say hit. Did it make sense? Am I going in the right direction?
Tanessa: Do I need to elaborate on this? So I watch my clients because when they’re leaning in, My body’s going, my brain is going, okay, they got this, I’ve got them engaged. But when they’re leaning back and there, yeah, I’m picking that up and I’m like, okay. I’m able to say what’s not connecting here and it makes me a much better coach.
Tanessa: So quality of sleep is not just only about how refreshed you feel in the morning, but it’s how do you want to show up in your business now during that time when we’re dreaming?
Allison: I thought I read a quick article and correct me if I’m wrong. That on average, we will dream at least two hours a night.
Tanessa: So the minimum you want to see is 90 minutes.
Tanessa: I mean, there’s a lot of things that can affect how much we dream. So for example, two big things off the bat are if you’ve ever had a concussion or traumatic brain injury. That’ll affect our ability to dream. The other one is alcohol. It wipes out REM sleep, which is our dreaming time, right? So we look at, um, as a standard, what I like to set as a good goal is a minimum of 90 minutes per night, but two hours is like, Beautiful.
Tanessa: We can get that much time in dream sleep. You’re going to feel fiery and feisty in the good way in your business.
Allison: So does that explain why if someone like me chooses to have a cocktail or two on a Friday night, still go to bed at a decent time, sleep in, but you can still have that brain fog in the morning?
Allison: That’s because the alcohol did not allow me to have that dream sleep. Yes.
Tanessa: So REM sleep is one of them. It’s so interesting, right? Well, the interesting thing about alcohol is, and I’ve had a lot of clients have this discussion with me is like, no, my day. It was over. I got the kids, I got the dog, I got the business.
Tanessa: This client was complaining about this. All of this is going on. I need to unwind. What do we do? Mm-hmm. We have a glass of wine. Now in itself, there’s no problem with wine except when it’s affecting your next day, because what it does is it sedates your brain, which means you don’t fall asleep. You pass out.
Tanessa: So your brain does not actually get the quality of sleep. And then what happens is when that sedation wears off in the morning, it makes it very hard to stay asleep. And that is when you get that light sleep that’s not giving you the quality. Now here’s the thing, you don’t get enough REM sleep. Your emotional capacity is compromised the next day.
Tanessa: So you are less, you are more likely to be overwhelmed, frustrated, stressed out. So what is your day? Overwhelmed, stressed out, frustrated. And then what happens? You come home and how do you unwind? And the cycle continues. It’s a fascinating thing, and when I look at my client’s data, it’s so obvious in your data.
Tanessa: And what I say by that is like I can tell by looking at the quality of sleep, I can tell by looking at their resting heart rate at night. And I can tell by monitoring a certain variable called your heart rate variability, which tells me if your body is under fight or flight stress or not. It reads from the ring, and I can go through my client’s data and be like, you had drinks on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and I can show it to them.
Tanessa: And it’s fascinating when you see what that does to your body’s ability to recover. It’s cool because then you just start to make the choices of like, Hey, I’ve got an interview. I need my brain on point tomorrow. I’m not going to drink the night before. And you get to start making those choices for how you want to show up the next day.
Allison: That is so fascinating. See, I told you listeners that today was going to be like, A rock solid interview like this is so cool. I, I’m just, I have so many questions just popping in my head. So my next weird question, I guess, and I’m sure the audience is probably thinking this, how do you explain those nights where you wake up and you had the craziest, weirdest dream that you probably would never want to dream again?
Tanessa: I often think that a lot of those dreams are just manifestations from a lot of the things that aren’t closed, decisions that are left open, and I sometimes find that. What you do in that time before bed either sets you up for sleep or it hurts your sleep. So I have a client, for example, if she does anything in her business, checks her ads, touches her email pokes into Slack after 7:00 PM mm-hmm.
Tanessa: I can see it in her sleep, and she will often be in and out of sleep all the time. Or I’ve got other clients, it’s like nine o’clock and they’re fine. But when we’re looking at things like if our brain is having to process open decisions, Like, are we going to move? Should I launch? Like, you know what I mean?
Tanessa: All those big decisions that don’t get closed, I feel often our brain goes to work on those. Mm-hmm. And so we get those kind of recurring intense dreams. And the crazy thing is, mine is always a plane taking off, but then it must land, usually an emergency landing. Again, it’s always like, I’m never scared, but that’s always comes up when I have an open decision.
Tanessa: Where is the direction I’m taking my business right now? Do I want to go into a launch? Do I want to do a soft open to my email list? And I’m often. Finding that is when I’ve gone to bed with an open decision that my brain just goes to work on it overnight, and those are when I’m up, up at three in the morning trying to review my to-do list to no benefit of my next day.
Allison: Now, how do we get more REM sleep? What do we do as entrepreneurs?
Tanessa: Yeah, great question. So the first one we identified is alcohol. As something that affects your REM sleep, you’re wanting to look at what my next day look like? Another good one is the temperature. So we have something called a circadian rhythm, which basically fancy word for body clock, and there are a bunch of different things that affect how this body clock runs.
Tanessa: When we operate with our body clock, then we tend to have better sleep and better energy. So something that affects that body clock is temperature. Now, to have solid quality sleep, our body temperature needs to drop before sleep. And now a lot of the clients that I work with love a heated blanket. In the winter, we like some heating pads curled up by the fire, right?
Tanessa: That will increase your core temperature. And it’s the same thing that happens in the week before our period, or if we go into menopause, it’s our inability to keep our temperature down and that’s why we get disrupted sleep. So one of the things that I love to do is it’s a two part. Have a warm shower because by heating the body, the core temperature tries to cool it with water, right?
Tanessa: Cooling your body before bed, and then letting yourself air dry and dress a little lighter than you would expect, right? So you want to just not cozy up. You want to just let yourself cool a little bit. And this can honestly even mean turning the thermostat down to like 68. I find a lot of people sleep with it in the seventies, but that 68, 65 is a sweet spot.
Tanessa: So that’s part one of like what I would look at for temperature. And then the last thing I would say, if we’re really looking at protecting that REM sleep is the light we expose our eyes to. So there was a cool study. There was two groups and group one read a paperback book before bed group two, read the book on an iPad.
Tanessa: Now crazy thing. There was up to like a 90 minute delay in a hormone called melatonin to rise when you’re reading on an iPad. And what that does is it basically prevents you from being able to have quality sleep and stay asleep. Melatonin’s one of those sleep hormones. Now, the fascinating thing was that this didn’t just affect.
Tanessa: REM sleep specifically that night, but it had a two to three day digital hangover. Mm-hmm. So when we’re on screens before bed, it can affect our sleep for up to two to three nights after, and our ability to get rem sleep. So to keep it super simple, alcohol will affect it negatively. Being warm before bed will affect it negatively, and staring into our screens in the hour before bed will affect it negatively.
Allison: Well, I do read from a paper book. Mm-hmm. As you can tell. If you’re watching on YouTube behind me, I mean, there’s book I could never do the whole iPad Kindle. I didn’t like it. So I’m all about paper. But going back to the heat thing, because I find this interesting. I am the type of person, if I am slightly chilled or if I feel a little cool or cold, it is impossible for me to fall asleep.
Allison: So I must have knee, you know, socks, up to my knees, long pants, long shirt, and I have a fleece blanket on, and I wrap myself in there and I fall asleep, and I feel like I stay asleep all night. I can’t. I can’t do it.
Tanessa: Yeah. Well, and so that ties beautifully to the point that there’s also individuality and everything because there is science, but then there’s also, I try to, and here’s my sweet spot, right?
Tanessa: Because the interesting thing about temperature is if you get too cold, like if your body drops too cold, it might disrupt sleep as well. But this is the interesting thing that I found about the socks with bed thing. Now, think about this. Have you ever gotten too hot? What’s the first thing you do in the middle of the night?
Tanessa: You throw your leg out, right? Uh, yes. The reason for that is there is a special skin on the palms of your hands. At the bottom of your feet and the top of your forehead, it’s called glamorous skin. And what this does is it temperature regulates you better than any other skin on the body. So when you are feeling warm and you throw a foot out, it cools you down faster.
Tanessa: Now the interesting thing about socks is it keeps that from happening. So if you ever overheat it makes it hard to cool back down. So I think it’s finding that sweet spot and testing it out. Maybe it’s not like literally, you know, short sleeve shirt sheet and no socks. Maybe it’s just a slight layer lower, you know, maybe it’s, instead of fleece, it’s just a regular cotton blanket, but everything else.
Tanessa: And you start experimenting with like one week at a time and just waking up and be like, how do I feel today? If you feel better, you keep it, and if you don’t, you go back or you try something else. That’s so interesting.
Allison: I’ll have to try that. I’ll have to maybe switch out a blanket and see if I’m comfortable enough to fall asleep and stay asleep and not wake up shivering.
Allison: Yeah. Well
Tanessa: part of it all is also our body’s ability to adapt to cold. Like me, my kind of field of interest is very much in biohacking, which is self-experimentation for longevity and it’s sometimes using neuroscience, but there is a lot of research to show that by. And I feel you on this because I am one of those people that I hate being cold.
Tanessa: However, for the last year I’ve been consistently, um, adding a cold shower for the last 30 seconds, and my tolerance for cold has gone up so much. Like I find I’m in half the layers that I used to be in, and my body is adapting to being cold because what happens is when you’re cold, Your body builds up something called brown fat.
Tanessa: Now this is not the fat that we all think about, like around our, you know, our hips or our stomach or our arms. This is around our sternum and it’s responsible for producing body heat. Hmm. So by exposing yourself to cold, it builds up that brown fat, which keeps you warmer in future cold situations.
Tanessa: Neat.
Allison: That is neat. And I’ve heard about like the last 30 seconds to a minute try to tolerate. Cold water. And I have tried that when I remember, or I’ll even try in the morning to, um, splash my face with cold water. Or I even have, um, an ice roller in the freezer. So if you wake up and you’re feeling like a little puffy or feel like you can’t wake up, I’ll roll it on my face.
Tanessa: And you know why that works? That’s that g glamorous skin. Okay. Right with the roller and washing your cold water. So you’re getting cold here. On your face, which is telling your core it’s cold, we should heat the temperature up and that rise in temperature, increases alertness, focus, and energy.
Allison: Oh, so interesting.
Allison: Mm-hmm. Now I want to shift gears to brain fog. I bet we have a lot of listeners that think they’re getting their REM sleep may, you know, they don’t have the, the screen time at night. What causes me to wake up with brain fog?
Tanessa: Brain fog is usually the presence of inflammation. Like we know what inflammation is when we think of like a sprained ankle, right?
Tanessa: Mm-hmm. It goes red. Mm-hmm. It’s, you know, fluid to the area, maybe a little hot. That can happen not only in our digestive tract, but it can also happen in our brain, and that inflammation is what happens when we get brain fog. And the weird thing about brain fog is you’re not going to be able to like walk into the doctors and be like, Help me.
Tanessa: I have brain fog! Diagnose me because it’s a collection of symptoms, right? Yes. It’s, it’s, I’m forgetting little things. I’m distracted super easily. I feel tired, but I can’t figure out why. And it’s like you go to do something and there’s just that lack of creativity and focus. And I almost think of it as if you picture running on the beach, you know how it’s like you can do it, but it feels slower and harder.
Tanessa: Yes. That’s what brain fog is for your brain to think it’s like thinking in sand, but almost it’s just. It takes effort. It’s not as fluid as you would like. So when it comes to brain fog, we’ll wind back. If it’s inflammation, well, where’s this inflammation coming from? And most of the time I can pinpoint it to one of three areas, and this is usually where I like to work.
Tanessa: It’s either our sleep is either not a proper duration or quality. Our food, meaning it’s getting in through the processed foods we’re eating, we’re seeing blood sugar that’s all over the place and we’re getting a lot of inflammation through our diet. Or stress that goes unchecked. I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just this season.
Tanessa: Just till then, just till I hit this goal and I’m fine. I’m fine. And it never goes checked. And we get brain fog and inflammation.
Allison: And I want to go back to the second piece because I think typically people do not really understand this. And this can almost be an entire episode on its own. I would almost like to do it.
Allison: Your gut, which is really your microbiome, is directly tied to your brain. So what you’re feeding your gut is going to affect your brain, which is also going to affect your productivity and your energy and your sleep. And I have noticed that. I know now I try to stay away from gluten, and I cut down on dairy.
Allison: I will know if I wake up with brain fog and I will look at the past few days and I’ll go, I consumed more gluten than I’m used to, and gluten is inflammatory to the gut, to the microbiome, which is directly tied to my brain, which is now causing my brain fog, brain fog, and it’s going to affect my energy and my productivity.
Allison: Yeah, and I think people just don’t get that.
Tanessa: Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, and, and here’s the thing is like, Gluten is, everyone has different sensitivity levels. Some people can get away with a little bit more than others, but there are other things, like I had a client, and it was nightshade vegetables, so it was like tomatoes, eggplant, uh, peppers and potatoes.
Tanessa: Those set him off. But when you have something that comes, you eat a food that is, well, I think of as like an assault. On your digestive system, and I think it’s part is figuring out what it is for each of us. Mm-hmm. I always like to think of the gut lining as like a nice fine pair of panty hose, meaning it should filter the things out.
Tanessa: But when we’re eating things that don’t work with our body, think of it turning into like fishnets stockings. And what ends up happening is bacteria and undigested food particles and all that get through into the bloodstream and your body’s like, I don’t know what that is. We should probably get the immune system on that right now.
Tanessa: Send off an inflammatory response. So in addition to what you said with the gut being directly connected by a nerve even to the brain, it’s just this entire systemic response that happens and it can take up to two weeks to heal from one assault. So we think. It’s only weekends and you’re right, it’s, but if it takes you two weeks, you’re only ever partially recovered.
Tanessa: And I always love like, Once you set the foundations for like getting healthy food in your fridge, making healthy food, having it regularly, I always love to explore this idea of a 30 day no sugar, no flour, not because we, you know, restrictive or whatever is the way to go, but like, how would you like to f like experience your body when it feels the way it’s supposed to feel.
Tanessa: And having had that experience, you can now make a decision what you want to add back in, because I don’t think we can fairly make the assessment of what we should be eating. When we haven’t had the experience of what it feels like to be fully clear. Like it’s not a fair, it’s not a fair decision.
Allison: Yeah, exactly.
Allison: Oh it, it’s so incredible how the gut and the brain are tied together. And like I said, that can be a completely different episode for sure. Going into that and your gut lining and oh my goodness. Well, before we wrap up this conversation, do you have any last minute tips or strategies for our listeners so they can add more quality sleep and get back the energy and productivity in their business?
Tanessa: Okay. Well, I’m going to give you a boring one and then a fun one. How about that? Perfect. So the boring one is the one that is going to be the most effective and it’s. Stick to a bedtime six nights a week within, you know, an hour window that is going to give you the most bang for your buck because it will help balance out your circadian rhythm, which means you’re waking up more consistently with energy.
Tanessa: That’s number one. Number two is something that’s kind of cool. It’s something called your chronotype. So your chronotype specifically is how your body genetically prefers to be a morning or an evening person. Interesting. And so one of my favorite things to do is when I find I have a client come in and they’ll be telling me like, this just happened last week.
Tanessa: I sleep from 10 30 to six 30. And I will send her, there is a, a free quiz that your listeners can go do. It’s um, it’s from a book called The Power of When and the, you just Google the power of when Quiz, you take it. And what it’ll do is it’ll ask you a series of questions and then spit out what is called your chronotype and a suggested sleep schedule that it predicts to be based on what would be a lot of your personality traits, which coordinate with your chronotype.
Tanessa: And so what had happened to her, just as an example, is it’s like you are a lion. And she will be optimized best sleeping nine 30 to five 30 instead. And so this was a switch I even made myself about three years ago. I tried to do the 11 to seven. I am an, I am an early lion. I’m an eight 30 to five, and I have never felt better and I’m getting the same amount of sleep, but it’s at a time that is biologically wired to me.
Tanessa: My temperature is at the right time at the right point. My hormones are at the right point while I’m sleeping. It really sets me up. So if you’re wanting to kind of do something fun, go take that quiz, see what your chronotype is, and it’ll tell you what your ideal sleep time is, and then see what yours is and if it’s doable because we’re entrepreneurs.
Tanessa: So there’s some flexibility there. Can you shift your schedule for two weeks to kind of align with that and see if you feel any different?
Allison: That is so cool. So interesting. I know. I’m going to take that quiz for sure. So what do we Google again?
Tanessa: The power of when quiz. So the book is called, um, the Power of When.
Tanessa: Love It. And it’s a book all about how our whole life, if we could function according to this clock, here’s how it would look depending on your prototype.
Allison: Super cool book. That is cool. Oh, I’m going to check that out. I’m sure the listeners will check that out. So, cool. Tanessa, where can the listeners connect with you so they can find your work?
Tanessa: So if you’re a podcast person, which if you’re listening probably are, I have a podcast called Becoming Limitless. Every episode is a deep dive into one specific help optimization hack, how to apply it and how it will affect your business. So tons on there. Um, but beyond that, I’m on Instagram @tanessashears, or there is if you’re like, this sleep stuff was cool, but I don’t know how to put it into action.
Tanessa: Um, I have a free three part mini course called, uh, three Biohacking Secrets to Optimize Your Energy. Or optimize your sleep and boost your energy, and it’s going to give you simple 10 minute videos to help with your sleep. And it’s at tanessashears.com/biohacking.
Allison: That’s awesome. I will make sure all these links are in the show notes.
Allison: And thank you so much for being here today. I hope our listeners will do their best to go to bed at a certain time according to their chronotype. And thanks again for being here.
Tanessa: Oh, thank you for having me.
