Over the weekend, I posted on Instagram about exercise during the quarantine. While I avowed being streaky, with my workouts, the majority of commenters were regularly exercising. If you are exercising and eating well, let’s be sure you’re sleeping. Sleep is important for your immune system and insufficient sleep weakens the immune response.

Here are 5 tips for morning, noon, and night to improve your sleep, health, and weight:

Early bird gets the sleep

Rise and Supplement

We will get to bedtime supplements in a bit. But as we said, in our Vitamin D newsletter, take your D in the morning. If you take vitamin D too close to bedtime, it can interfere with sleep. And since a lot of our sleep, particularly COVID sleep, issues are intertwined with stress we love an adaptogen called Rhodiola. Adaptogens are herbs that help your body respond to stress. Because Rhodiola helps normalize cortisol levels, it has been shown to produce a fat-burning response. Take stress-busting, fat-burning Rhodiola in the AM.

If you’re looking for supplement recommendations while we’ve placed our shipping on hold, email us which supplements you’re curious about and we’ll send you a link with recommendations.

Coffee cutoff

Don’t worry, we are decidedly pro coffee at Foodtrainers. But we’re also pro sleep. Caffeine has a half-life of 6 hours and a quarter-life of 12 hours. Translation, if you have a cup of coffee at 8am, half the caffeine is in your system at 2pm and one quarter at 8pm.

Keep coffee to AM only. And if you’re saying, “I sleep fine, despite coffee.” Your REM sleep would beg to differ.

Close the kitchen

Just as your brain tires, at the end of the day, so does your gut. For your sleep to be restorative you don’t want your body busy digesting. Try to close the kitchen at least 2 hours before bed.

Set an alarm

It’s important to go to bed at a consistent time each night. Try setting an alarm one hour before you’d like to go to bed. Adopt some evening rituals. I take my sleep trifecta of magnesium, CBD and valerian. Sometimes I take a warm bath with this in it. I’ve also found lavender oil (this is my current love) and using a face roller are super relaxing.

And we found this tweet a little too relatable,

“Goodnight moon. Goodnight Zoom. Goodnight unshakable sense of impending doom.”