Yesterday I wrote about the importance of sleep and how it impacts almost every aspect in our life: our mood, our health, our stress levels, … the list goes on and on. I shared some of the tools that helped me the most in prioritizing my sleep: Being consistent with your bedtime, getting enough sleep and avoid food, bright light, work and alcohol.

Today I want to expand on that list and hope that some of those tools might be helpful for you:

• Avoid caffeine within 8-10 hours before you go to sleep: The average half-life of coffee is between 4 to 6 hours. That means that when you drink a coffee at 12pm, you'll still have about a quarter of the caffeine in your body at 10pm. For me it works well to usually drink my last coffee until noon.

• Track your sleep: A very impactful decision on my journey of prioritizing my sleep was to get a sleep tracking device. Some friends and coaches recommended me the oura ring and to see my sleeping times and sleep quality along some helpful tips on how to improve my exercise levels and sleep times makes a big difference.

• NSDR & Yoga Nidra: If you have problems with falling asleep (in the middle of the night or when you need a nap) try this! Non-Sleep-Deep-Rest protocols such as Yoga Nidra guide you through a meditation that will bring you into a deep-resting state like when you sleep. I've used Yoga Nidra for the last months for my naps. Usually I fall asleep during the meditations, but that's also no problem - I feel much more refreshed afterwards. Just search for "Yoga Nidra" or "NSDR" on youtube for plenty of free videos.