Do you ever wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, go to pee,
go back to bed, and then you just can't fall
asleep even though you don’t want to be up for another
several hours? Well then this video
is for you. Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn
of ChrisMasterjohnPhD.com and
you're watching Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name
of the game is “Details? Shmetails. Just tell
me what works!” I think there’s a few things
going on here. Number one. You may not be eating enough
carbohydrate. Your body has the
task of maintaining your blood sugar high enough through the
night when you're sleeping and that's the hardest time to
maintain your blood sugar up because
that's the longest you ever go
between meals.
So sometimes you haven’t eaten enough carbohydrate
and your body just doesn't have it stored up
and when that happens your body kicks into a
stress response that allows you to turn other
things that aren't carbohydrate like protein
into carbohydrate so that you
can keep your blood sugar balanced.
Now when that happens that stress response
can make it hard to stay asleep,
or fall back to sleep, and can also make
make you have to pee.
So if you're not eating enough carbohydrate
if you don’t know whether you’re eating enough carbohydrate,
I would say if you're a sedentary person,
start with a hundred grams. If you’re already eating that,
start increasing it. You can go in small
increments but if you're highly active you might need several
hundred more grams per day than that. Now I'm not
saying that everyone has to eat that much. I’m just saying that if
you have this problem, try increasing carbohydrate
in increments and see if it helps.
Now, the next thing to consider is
say you woke up for whatever reason whether it was carbohydrate,
or you drank too much alcohol or too much water
or you didn’t eat enough food, whatever the case may be, say you've
woken up. How do you get back to sleep?
What I think one of the problems may be that you
wake up and you use a flashlight to get to the bathroom
or you turn on the light and you turn on the bathroom light
and, boom! Blue light’s going into your
eyes and telling your brain it's time to wake up.
Well, how do you
get around that? It's the same principle
that I’ve talked about in previous videos that allows you to fall
asleep in the first place and that's blocking the blue light.
So number one, I have
this nightlight in my bathroom that I got
from lowbluelights.com and this is the primary
light that I use in the bathroom during the night or in the early morning.
Number two, lowbluelights.com also has
this special flashlight that you could use to get to the bathroom
or you could just put on your
blue-blocking glasses in the bathroom. So for example
you got your Swannies on and then
you can use your phone's flashlight or whatever you prefer
to get to the bathroom, and just make sure that you continue blocking the
blue light until you get back to sleep
Now say you did all that and you still can't sleep?
Well, I think there’s a third thing that often comes into play and that's
you’re thinking about what you gotta
do for the next day. Now I'm sure this varies
from person to person, but if
I’m up at 4 o'clock in the morning,
within seconds of waking up I'm probably
thinking about what I need to do for the whole rest of the day.
I need to stop thinking about that to get back to sleep
and you can find whatever works for
you in order to find the right distraction
but personally I feel that a video
game is highly effective. Keep in mind that
if you’re going to play a video game, that's blue light.
So you got to keep the blue-blocking glasses on.
Now. Mike Hawk had commented on my YouTube channel
last time I talked about video games and sleep and said
“dont play battlefield that
game can make u rage so hard.﻿”
So whatever game it is, it shouldn’t be something
that stimulates your emotions. Personally I find
Tetris to be perfect for this because it's
kind of meditative and all you ever
do is just increase your numbers of lines
so there's nothing super curious or fascinating
that you might run into that’ll surprise you
or make you interested or something like that.
All right I hope this was helpful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of ChrisMasterjohnPhD.com.
You’ve been watching Chris Masterjohn Lite,
and I’ll see you in the next video.