Tagged: Your Guide to Better Sleep

This week I want to touch on something we can be a bit hesitant to talk about: sex. 

It’s one of life’s great joys, and you don’t need to be a relationship counselor to know how important sex is to a healthy relationship. 

Its importance is why there’s a booming business centered around maintaining and improving sexual health. Men have likely noticed an uptick in companies offering erectile dysfunction supplements in recent years. That trend is showing no signs of slowing down, either. The ED market is already a billion-dollar industry, and it’s expected to rise to $2.63 billion by 2023. 

At the same time, advertisers and major drug companies are increasingly targeting women and their sexual health. Most notably, “female Viagra” was approved by the F.D.A. last year, with the manufacturer looking to assist the one in 10 women who have a low sex drive. 

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with sleep. It turns out, a lot. A growing amount of research is highlighting the strong link between a good night’s sleep and a healthy …

Bad sleep hurts work performance. You need a good night’s sleep to be at your best. 

This, in a nutshell, is the underlying reason I stress the importance of quality sleep each week: You’re not you when you’re running on less than 7 hours of sleep each night. 

You’re not in this alone. 

Poor sleep impacts millions of Americans — and research suggests the issue is getting worse, not better. 

A recent study found 35.6% of people get less than 7 hours of sleep each night, or the baseline amount for a good night’s sleep. That’s up from 30.9% of people who got inadequate sleep each night in 2010. 

I bring this up because I know, with 2020 just getting started, that many of you have set career goals for the new year. Maybe you’re making a push for a promotion, looking to make more sales than you ever have before, or aiming to land your dream job. I think that’s great, and I fully support setting ambitious professional goals. 

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed many people sacrifice sleep in order …

Happy New Year, I hope you’ll make all your 2020 resolutions, RestOLutions. If you haven’t seen my Restlolutions series on Instagram, be sure to check them out.

I’m beginning the year after having just returned from Asia. 

This trip was a twist on how my family and I normally spend the holidays, but it was certainly worthwhile and made for a trip we’ll never forget. Getting to spend one on one time with my daughter who is in China as an exchange student and see how she’s grown and can speak the language so fluently was so great to see. 

There were a number of highlights I could spend the day telling you about. There were two in particular I want to mention, before sharing a few tips to help you sleep better this year. 

The first, and perhaps most incredible part of our trip, was seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors.  We saw them early on in a town in southeast China. These are remarkable clay sculptures that are more than 2,000 years old, yet were only discovered in …

How to get a good night’s sleep is the question I probably hear more than any other, even SNL characters bemoan the lack of sleep.

Did you happen to catch Eddie Murphy on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend?

I, like everyone else I talked to this week, thought he was hilarious. It was great to see him bring back classic characters like Mister Robinson and Gumby, decades after he last performed on “SNL.” 

But there was another sketch that caught my eye. Maybe you saw it, where his future son-in-law is laying on a cheap blow-up-mattress while visiting for Christmas. Inevitably, the air mattress pops with the young man laying on it, and he ends up yelling out in anger in the middle of the night.

It stood out, of course, because it was funny. But it also because of how relatable that frustration is. Bad sleep can derail your day — especially during the holidays. 

We already know how important a good night’s sleep is. Without it, we’re typically tired, irritable and unable to make our best judgments. 

A …

I’d like to discuss 11 reasons you can’t sleep and are struggling to stay asleep but first, let me take a moment and wish you a happy holiday no matter which one you celebrate this time of year. I’m grateful that you spend your time with me each week and to have this opportunity to share my work and experience with you.

This holiday, my daughter is in China on a student exchange program so we are spending the holidays in Bejing and touring around China. It will be an interesting experience but I’m really excited to see my daughter, it’s been a while!

While I used TimeShifter and everything I know to minimize my challenges with the multiple timezone difference, holiday travel always makes sleeping more difficult. 

And, with all of the travel and extra people in our houses, this is the time of year when a good night’s sleep can be even harder to come by.

With the holidays here and a new decade right around the corner, I know many of my patients are fighting to carve …

Back pain is the worst and low back pain and sleep loss often go hand in hand. Anyone that’s experienced it, knows it.

I know it first-hand, too, since I’ve been suffering with pain on the lower right side of my back on a daily basis.

Your back is tied to every other part of your body, so when you’re dealing with a lingering back injury, it tends to impact everything you do. Just getting out of bed can feel like a major accomplishment when your back is acting up. 

That’s why I wasn’t shocked when I came across a new study looking at the connection between a bad night’s sleep and back pain. 

The study, done by a group of Norwegian professors, looked at more than 6,000 men and women across a 10-year period. 

I won’t get into every detail, but the key takeaway is this: Insomnia and general sleep problems both make it tougher to recover from chronic lower back pain (LBP). 

It turns out, a lack of quality sleep doesn’t just make it harder for you …