What What I want to talk to you about today is ways to improve your sleep and give you three real tangible ways to improve it. There's one real sciencey word in there and I know if you're anything like me, if you hear a word that you don't understand, everything after that word your brain just shuts off and you stop listening. It's like when you're talking to a car salesman or something, they start with this techno-bub of VA, so it's like, it's gone. I know what you're talking about. You've lost me because you've started using techno-bubble. So I want to head this one off at the door because it's the only sort of ward that will put you off in this. It's melatonin. I mean, you hear the word melatonin, it's a hormone that enhances your sleep. So without melatonin, we have very poor or broken sleep. In the presence of melatonin, we have very good and peaceful sleep. That's the prerequisite to understand the morning I'm going to talk about here. So eating going to bed is kind of, it's nearly covering, I want to give you a tree tips And both tip number one and tip number two are boat relating to eating around bed because if you have something like, you know I know it's common for a lot of people have like a bowl of cereal gone to bed Or you know a sandwich something like that because they think they'll be hungry during the noise But in fact the exact opposite is true if you eat going to bed what happens is your blood sugars are raised So obviously you're in bed sleeping for two three hours, and you're not eating while you're in bed, so you enter into a hypoglycemic state. That's just a state of low blood sugar. What typically happens during the day, if we have a state of low blood sugar, everyone calls this the 11 a.m. dip, you wanna go and reach for that sugary snack, you wanna go and reach for a carb as a bit of a pick me up, but you're in bed, you obviously can't do that. So a couple of things will happen. One, you might wake up hungry the next morning, absolutely starving, you have those mornings when you just get up and you can't get that a breakfast counter fast enough. Or secondly, actually my wake up with hunger pangs in the night. And both those are related to that hypoglycemic state. So it's really important that we don't put ourselves into that hypoglycemic state because apart from making us hungry, what it does is it affects the quality of our sleep. So when we talk about sleep, there's obviously two variables, there's quality and there's quantity. The Matt Walker book is brilliant on the importance of quantity, eight hours is the quantity we need. and he explains brilliantly why we need that. I'm talking about things that affect the quality of the sleep. So eating sugar, eating the bowl of cereal before bed, it's gonna put us into that hypoglycemic, low blood sugar state, a couple of errors after we fall asleep. And that really affects the quality of our sleep. So that's a no-go, no-go. The second reason we shouldn't eat on the way into bed. So, you know, we're in, I'm talking 60 minutes, 60, 70 minutes before bed, is blood sugar inhibits the production. So blood sugar turns off the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. We need melatonin to get quality sleep without melatonin. Yeah, we can get a sleep, but the sleep is broken. It's the store, but if you have any of these sleep trackers on, we don't get the same regenerative quality. So if we think back to something that I'm always harping on about in this podcast, training gives us the possibility to get faster, or if we smash ourselves in a VO2 max session. That doesn't make us faster. that makes us weaker. It gives the possibility to get faster when we couple that with recovery and sleep is the absolute, it's the cornerstone of our recovery. It's the most important thing by a mile.