131: What Happens When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep with Jenn Trepeck

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps after Babies radio episode number 131.

Hello and welcome to Biceps after Babies radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is

about so much more than pounds lost or PRs. It's about feeling confident in your skin and

empowered in your life. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife, and mom of four.  Each week, my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take

action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise mindset, personal

development, and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel, and be

strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you, my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in, now let’s jump into today’s episode.

Amber B  0:46  

Hey, hey, hey,  welcome back to another episode of biceps after babies radio. I'm your host Amber Brueseke and today on the podcast we are going to dive deep into the topic of sleep. Now I selfishly invited Jenn Trepeck to the podcast, because I have questions about sleep and sleep trackers and I wanted to ask somebody who thinks and knows more about sleep than I do. As you'll hear in the episode, I've been tracking my sleep for about a year, my brother got me on to an app called auto sleep, which we'll link up in the show notes. And as you'll hear me talk about on the episode, there's so much data that is collected and I don't know how to make sense of it and how to have it inform some of my decisions. And so in this episode, we kind of talk through that. We talked through sleep trackers, and we talked through, first of all why sleep is important, but then how to improve our sleep, how to start to look at sleep holistically. And I got some of the answers about heart rate variability about readiness scores. So if that's something that you've been curious about one how to improve your sleep, two, how to know maybe if you're not getting enough sleep, what are some of the recommendations when it comes to getting better sleep, then this podcast episode is going to be for you.

Amber B  2:10 

Now before we dive into the episode with Jenn, I do want to take a minute just to ask you, if you have not yet rated and reviewed the podcast, will you hit pause, take 20 seconds to do that it really helps out the podcast when you rate and review the podcast on iTunes or whatever platform it is that you're listening on that really helps iTunes to know that people are listening, people are liking the podcast, and it just helps us to be able to reach more people. So thank you ahead of time for taking the time to do that.

Amber B  2:44 

Now without further ado, let's jump into the interview with Jenn.

Amber B  2:47 

I am so excited to welcome Jenn to the podcast. How are you doing?

Jenn  2:52

I'm good. Thanks for having me Amber, I'm so excited.

Amber B  2:55

This is gonna be such a good topic. I get asked questions about a lot of things when it comes to like the health and fitness realm. And I am by no means an expert on very many of them. So I'm excited to be able to bring somebody on today who can speak to this with more of an expert perspective than I have. I'm kind of like sleep is important, sleep is good. So you are here today because you're going to be the expert on this and teach me and my audience a little bit more about sleep, which I'm excited about. So before we dive into those specifics, give us a little bit of background about you and who you are and what you do.

Jenn  3:35

Yeah. So I came to all this wellness stuff through my own saga. I call it a saga. I feel like the word journey doesn't do it justice. You know, and thanks. And mostly, you know, my saga was around managing my weight. I grew up a dancer. And I joke that I was the skinny one and a family of dieters, but really that just meant I was on a diet my whole life and didn't realize it. And then as I grew up and after high school, stopped dancing and went to college, and you know, life changed, and I started to gain weight. And I was like, Okay, I know what to do. Like I watched my family do this my whole life. I got this. And I did every diet under the sun, gained and lost. And it was one of those where I mean, that was in my world, that's just what you did.

Jenn  4:31

And eventually, in that whole process, I learned about the program, the curriculum that I now teach. And it for me changed everything and is the only thing that allowed me to say I've kicked my food issues. And so from there, I set out on a mission to pay it forward and help people help themselves with this information. And then in that process, I became an insatiable student. I read every book, I could get my hands on, every seminar and workshop from a doctor that I had read their book and all, you know, it was like, I learned everything I could. And this all started in 2007. So it's been a minute, and, you know, in that process really digging into, the biggest shifts for me always happened when the choice became intellectual instead of emotional. So whether that was…

Amber B  5:34

Jenn, do you know about the things that I teach? Because I couldn't be more aligned with like, my whole philosophy around life, we could totally jam on this topic. Okay, sorry, I interrupted, you keep going I'm listening.

Jenn  5:47  

So like, that really was like the massive shift in food decisions. And I realized in everything, that the gap between what we know we're supposed to do, and actually doing it comes into understanding why and so everything I do now is really about paying it forward and helping people understand and clear up the bad science confusion, misinformation that is running rampant, and wreaking havoc in wellness. So like I said, I've been coaching clients since late 2007. I started my podcast salad with a side of fries in 2019. And, you know, the rest is history, as they say,

Amber B  6:41

That's so good. Yeah. And we were talking before we hit record, and I was just saying, you know, if you went up to anybody on the street, and was like, is sleep important? They would look at you and say, Yes, like, I don't think anybody's gonna be like, right? It's not important at all. And then but then the follow up question is like, do you get enough sleep? Right? And enough, is it relative? And we're going to talk about that, like, do you get enough sleep? And I would say, a lot of people would say no, so it's like this gap between, you know, it's important. And yet you don't feel like you get enough like, what's the disconnect there? And so that's what Jenn is going to talk about. And when you have the power of understanding the why behind it of like, what is it costing you when you don't get sleep? Because I think sometimes there's hidden stuff that but well,

Jenn  7:23

and I think, I feel like we live in a world of sleep when you're dead, do more sleep less. Right? Like, we're all, I hate the word, but we're all super busy. And the element of life that we sacrifice in order to do everything that we want to do in a day, forget what we need to do, but to do everything we want to do in a day. It's sleep that we put second,

Amber B  7:53 

or 4th, 5th or seventh

Jenn  7:56  

or not. Yeah, where's that anywhere? You know?

Amber B  7:59 

Yeah. So we're going to start this conversation with a very broad question. And then based off of how you answer this, we're going to go a couple different ways. But if somebody is wondering, we all know sleep is important. But I think if you ask somebody on the street to articulate why sleep is important, they probably wouldn't be able to come up with a super scientific or really good answer. Like it's just important, right? You as the expert, kind of come at it like answering this very broad question of like, why sleep is so important.

Jenn  8:30

Okay, so there's a handful of reasons that I want to highlight. You know, here because I think it's important for us to realize that the lack of sleep manifests in a whole lot of areas, and a whole lot of symptoms. And if we focus on the sleep, a lot of the other things we're experiencing, will take care of themselves. So sleep, as many of us have heard, it's the repair, the detoxification, our body cleaning, and restoring and preparing to take on the next day. But what does that actually look like? Right, like in what areas does this happen? So primarily or not, but you know, all of these are sort of equal in them, but so memories and learning, so sleep is when something moves from, you know, a moment to something that is ingrained in our brain. Our immune health, so there have been studies that people who had less than seven hours of sleep were three times more likely to be infected with the flu. And there are even studies about people getting more or less sleep and how effective the flu shot was for them. So there's a direct connection between our immune health and our sleep. Like one of my mentors says, you know, sleep really sharpens every tool in our immune arsenal.

Jenn  10:01

Then when we get to like mood and mental health, it is crazy important. So, in the last 20 years of research on psychiatric disorders, there isn't a single one where sleep is, “normal” or not altered. So when we look at how we adapt to stress or don't adapt to stress. You know, like the idea of, you know, like, when somebody says, like sleep on it, like, that's more than just like, take a beat. You know, it's actually science,

Amber B  10:46 

Right. Yeah, interesting.

Jenn  10:48 

Then like metabolism, and weight management, which is the beginning of how I got into all this stuff. So we have hormones that control hunger and satiety. And studies show that sleep, or lack of sleep, lack of adequate sleep, creates an increase in the hormone that tells us when we're hungry, and a decrease in the hormone that tells us when we're satisfied, those are ghrelin and leptin, respectively. So, you know, there's a direct connection between our sleep and our metabolic health. And then really, like those sort of, are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of hormones impacted by sleep. So our entire endocrine system is connected to circadian rhythm. And when we have energy, when we don't, when our body is turning on, when our body is supposed to turn off all of those hormones that control a lot of those things, our ability to sleep and rest and slow down is a function of neurotransmitters and hormones. Human growth hormone is secreted at night. So there's a lot of factors in this where we don't even really think about what controls a lot of our bodily functions, and how intimately connected they are with time of day and having adequate rest. And, you know, then even during the day, giving our body the building blocks that it needs to do, what it needs to do when we sleep.

Jenn  12:24

And even our physical health. So there are studies about, you know, risk of injury and balance issues with people who don't get adequate sleep. So it's funny, like I said this before, I think a lot of times, and with a lot of the doctors I work with people present with a whole bunch of symptoms, and we start to treat all those symptoms. But if we took it back to sleep, a lot of things would really sort of start to take care of themselves.

Amber B  12:55  

That's so good. Yeah, and, you know in medicine, we always want to get to the root cause, right, we can slap band aids on symptoms, we can, you know, give ibuprofen if someone says they have a headache, but if we don't figure out that, like they have brain cancer, or that like their blood pressure is too high, right? Giving them an ibuprofen isn't gonna actually solve anything. And so when we can get root causes something, then we can actually solve a whole host of problems without having to solve them individually. I mean, I think the first question for me would be, what are some of those symptoms? What are some of those manifestations where we may be experiencing these things in our life and being like, Oh, I don't like that, or I'm not happy with that, or this is happening in my life and we maybe even haven't connected that yet back to sleep?

Jenn  13:37

Yeah, so I mean, any challenges like, these six areas tend to be like the big ones, right? So are you lately like randomly walking into walls? Like are you always like, I have moments where I feel like, Oh, my God today, everything like I'm dropping everything. I walked into the corner, that table, like the table hasn't moved. Yet. so like, for noticing some of these things. Maybe we aren't sleeping enough. Um, if you're feeling like you're, you know, no matter what you do, you're gaining weight. We want to start to, you know, take it back and look at some of what's happening with sleep. Are we giving our body what it needs to repair or re-helping and supporting our body to detoxify? Do you feel like you're relying on melatonin or CBD or some of these other things to help you sleep at night? Is stress really taking over life? And it's like, I don't even know which way is up. You know, do you feel like, you know, you're always looking for your sunglasses and they're on your head. You know, is it which could also be the B vitamins but still, you know, it's like we lose our train of thought, or we can't remember what happened. What was going on? What we're supposed to be doing right now, we walked into a room and we can't remember why we walked in there. You know, a lot of these things in the moment, they seem small, it's not that big of a deal but when we start to add them all up, we're like, oh, wait a minute. There's sort of a lot of these elements showing up.

Amber B  15:20  

Sure. Yeah. So I mean, that I think that bears the question of, are we should be looking for the symptoms and saying, hey, the symptoms are there, then we can trace back to the sleep? Or should we say there is just a general amount of sleep that we should be aiming for? And if we aim for that, then the other stuffs going to take care of itself? Like, I guess, I'm just trying to touch like,

Jenn  15:41  

how do you approach it from…

Amber B  15:43

How do you approach it? Like if someone's listening to you? And they're like, well, I don't necessarily have any of those things that she just said. Does that mean they're getting enough sleep? Or is there still like, you should be like, this is the amount that like everybody, absolutely, for sure needs and then some people need more, and some people who I don't know,

Jenn  16:04 

Yeah, so some people do need more and some people are okay with less. But we also want to sort of draw the distinction because for years and years, I was one of those people who felt like I was fine when I slept, sometimes five to six, maybe six and a half hours a night. Because life was forcing me to function that way. And I thought I was fine.

Amber B  16:28

Yeah, I would not be fine.

Jenn  16:30 

So right now, my energy, how I feel when the alarm goes off is very different when I'm getting seven, seven and a half hours. So sometimes we don't even notice the difference to we,

Amber B  16:44

you try to experience it,

Jenn  16:46  

right? Yeah,

Amber B  16:47 

So you're telling yourself, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine and then you experience the other side of it, you're like, Oh, I wasn't really fine.

Jenn  16:54  

Exactly.

Amber B  16:55

I'm not fine until I experience this new reality that I could have.

Jenn  17:01  

Exactly. So I would say, a good place to start is to shoot for seven to seven and a half hours. Right, there is a point where sometimes then some of us have probably experienced this where you'd like to sleep so much. And then you feel like you can't wake up,

Amber B  17:17

you know, foggy and like you got hit by a truck and

Jenn  17:19  

right. So that's not ideal, either, like there is sort of this middle, ideal spot. But what that spot is, is different for everyone. And so there is a little bit of an experimentation process.

Amber B  17:35

Sure, yeah. But like starting with, hey, am I getting seven hours of sleep is a good place to at least start and then kind of adjust, try out experiment around that to figure out like your optimization.

Jenn  17:49 

Exactly. And, and a piece of that experimentation is also saying, a) committing to it, and b) that experiment needs to be longer than one night. Right. Like we need to, if we're going to say, Okay, I'm going to see how I feel on six hours of sleep. Doing that consistently, I'm going to see how I feel with seven hours of sleep doing that consistently. I'm going to see how I feel with eight hours of sleep doing that consistently allows us to actually experience it. You know, we can't sleep six hours one night, seven hours tomorrow, eight the next and be like, well, I didn't notice the difference between?

Amber B  18:32  

Sure. Gotta give it some time to like actually make something change. Right? Oh, what is your opinion on sleep trackers? I feel like we're getting into this age where we can like track so many things, right? It's like, we track our calories, we track our workouts and we track our sleep and like there's all the tracking thing. And I know, especially in a fitness world, fitness trackers are very inaccurate in terms of like, how many calories you're actually expending. And so

Jenn  19:03  

thank you, agreed.

Amber B  19:06

I'm so you know, I take that like piece that I understand from my realm. And then I start to wonder, are sleep trackers kind of the same way? I don't know.

Jenn  19:14  

Yeah. So I think on some level, they're a little bit more accurate in some ways than the fitness tracker, because I mean, this is a whole other conversation, right? But like with the fitness component, it doesn't actually have enough information about you to know some of those things. With the sleep stuff, it can sense your body temperature, it can sense your heart rate. And so in that respect, there is some piece of it that makes it a little more accurate, but I still don't. I still have a love hate with sleep trackers. And admittedly, I've been using one and you know, I think we can use them as a tool to understand patterns, right? Like I say, people with fitness trackers use it as a relative day to day rather than an absolute barometer. And I say the same thing with the sleep. Right? We can use it relative day to day, but to count it as an absolute and as fact, is, I think, like, missing the forest through the trees, or whatever the phrase is, you know, that, like, one of my big pet peeves, at least the sleep tracker that I've been using, it gives you like a cumulative like sleep debt, or surplus. And that's not how sleep works.

Amber B  20:48 

Yeah. It's not cumulative.

Jenn  20:51

Right? So it's not like, Oh, I slept five hours last night. I'm going to sleep an extra three hours the next couple nights, and then I'm averaging seven and a half, like the body doesn't do extra repair, and make up for the repair that didn't happen on Tuesday. Like, it doesn't work that way. So whatever doesn't happen at night, isn't happening. Right? It puts us on a different baseline for the next day in terms of what's happening, you know, chemically in the body. So that's one of my pet peeves around sleep trackers. But I do think it can be helpful to use them to look at your patterns. And to say, okay, generally, do I have more energy when I'm sleeping seven hours? Do I have more energy when those seven hours are you know, midnight to 7am versus 10pm to 5am? or whatever? Seven hours is, I can't even do math at this moment. You know, but like thinking about what those times are? When do I feel better? When do I notice? Like, if your alarm goes off, and your eyes feel heavy, and you feel like you've been hit by a bus? Not great. I don't want to wake up that way.

Amber B  22:26

Same, right.

Jenn  22:29 

Like, I also notice, when I don't get enough sleep, I feel hungover. Even if I've had zero alcohol like that feeling. I don't know how else to describe it like that feeling is the feeling of being hung over.

Amber B  22:41

I have a question. So if you're, if you are waking up before your alarm, is that an indication that you are, you know, getting enough sleep? Or is that an indication just that your body has adapted to that time to wake up?

Jenn  22:57  

So good question. Yeah, I think it's both. And I think it depends on you know, the situation that does happen a lot where our body gets used to waking up at a certain time. Sometimes we also wake up, like, sleep cycles tend to happen and sort of like 90 to 110 minutes -ish. So sometimes we also wake up in between those cycles. And so it also could be that there's this moment where that's why you woke up like, we don't tard to know. And it's one of those like, unless you're going to do a sleep study and really get to the bottom of it. It's a giant experimentation process.

Amber B  22:59

Yeah, totally. One of the things that because I've been tracking my sleep for about a year, my brother got me onto an app, and he's like, this is really cool you should do it. So I've been doing it for about a year and it has been interesting to like, see trends. But you know, one of the things is, I feel like they give me so much data, I don't really know what to do, like you tell me this data. Now. I don't really know what to do about that. Is that good? Is that bad? Should I be concerned? Should I not be concerned? But one of the things that I have noticed is my deep sleep varies so much like night to night, and I haven't been able to pick up on any pattern of like, what makes it different. But like some nights, I'll have like 30 minutes of deep night. And then there was one reason it was like two hours and 45 minutes. And I haven't been able to figure out a pattern for that deep sleep. So will you speak a little bit too is deep sleep important and why is it important? And what are some of the things that can cause you to get more or less of that?

Jenn  24:44

Yeah, so good question. So deep sleep, different things happen in our body and the different phases of sleep. Deep Sleep is the super restorative, lots of chemical things happening time. And I think the challenge is, again, part of the challenge with sleep trackers is that it's looking at sleep in isolation. And that's why we can't make sense of the deep sleep because nothing in the body exists in isolation. So how do we improve deep sleep? How do we figure out the pattern of when we get more and when we get less? We have to look at everything together. So what was our activity? What were our food choices? When did we eat all of these kinds of things actually come together to create the situation of what's happening when we sleep. And so, of course, we can't figure it out when we're looking at something just by itself.

Amber B  25:52

So is there a way so what should I be looking at? That's a question, what should I be looking at?

Jenn  25:59

So we want to look at the nights where you had more deep sleep compared to the nights when you had less. What did you eat those days? When did you eat those days? What was your activity on those days? When was your activity on those days? What was your stress on those days? How was your energy and it's that day, and sometimes even for a couple days leading up to it, you know, depending on what's going on. And it's about identifying the patterns so it's not even this day. And looking at it, okay? Like, it might be that when you have certain types of carbs, it was earlier in the day versus later in the day, and that helped your body get better, you know, more deep sleep at night. Or, you know, what you did for your activity, maybe a day had more aerobic activity than a different day, and that actually improved your sleep, or maybe your activity that day was later because work and life and all the things by the time you had a minute to move, it was seven or eight o'clock at night. And that posed a challenge for your sleep versus the days when you wake, you know, when you're working out at eight or 9am. There can also be situations where sometimes, you know, our body experiences waking up super early, or certain types of exercise as trauma based on our you know, genetics and biology, and that can also play a factor into it, does your body respond better to different things, and identifying those patterns.

Amber B  27:51  

Got it. So something in I would say, in the fitness realm, the things that a lot of people look at, because you sleep is so important for recovery of building muscle, right, that's where like the repair comes. So what a lot of people don't understand is that when you lift weights, you don't build muscle, like lifting weights, it doesn't build muscle, it creates microscopic tears in the muscle, and the building of the muscle happens during the recovery, right. And a lot of that happens during sleep. And so if you're wanting to build more muscle, you have to lift weights, and you have to recover and sleep is a huge part of that recovery process. So I would say for like people who are trying to build muscle who are in the fitness realm of you know, things that I commonly hear people looking at our deep sleep, right that like restorative sleep, am I getting enough deep sleep, heart rate, especially like waking heart rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability, I would say that those are like the three things and maybe length of sleep time, right, too. But those are things that people, especially in the bodybuilding world, and like the fitness world are kind of focusing on because they are so important for determining your ability to recover. And so the next question for you is, will you for anybody who's listening who doesn't really understand resting heart rate or heart rate variability, explain that. And does that really have a good bearing on if we recover that next day like a lot of apps will give you a readiness score of like how ready you are to then go and hit hard with your workouts and hit hard with your weightlifting. Is that actually an accurate assessment of your body's ability to how much it has recovered and its ability to now undergo some more stress in the gym?

Jenn  29:32 

Yeah, so. Okay, so resting heart rate, right is the number of times your heart beats in a minute, while you're at rest. And as you know, right, like in a lot of physical activity, we're looking at our heart rate, how quickly can we get our heart rate up, how quickly can we get it back to our resting heart rate, Right. That's a big factor in understanding our cardiovascular fitness. Right.

Jenn  30:01 

Heart rate variability is the time between heartbeats. And surprisingly, we actually want that number to be higher. The more variability in our heart rate, it said, the more resilience we have, the more our body's able to adapt to what's going on. And it's also an indicator of the connection between our nervous system and our body. So heart rate variability is really interesting. And it is surprising to people that we actually want higher heart rate variability. I do think it can be a really interesting barometer to look at our readiness as all these, you know, devices are calling it and what that saying is, is our body in a place and ready to handle the next stressor.

Jenn  29:32 

So sometimes, for example, it might say, you haven't really recovered. And this also sometimes looks at body temperature, like your readiness score is often a function of more than just resting heart rate and heart rate variability. But you know, in looking at those things is your body ready and equipped to handle a super intense workout, a moderate workout, or maybe only a mild workout? And there could be a whole host of reasons for that. So for example, our heart rate variability will drop when our body you know, like when our immune system is in overdrive when we're trying to fight something. So, your device might be saying, hey, you need a more, you know, mild workout today, your readiness score isn't as high, it might not necessarily be because of your sleep, it might be that your immune system is on overdrive, you're trying to fight something, and you don't even realize that there's like a cold coming on.

Jenn  32:06 

So I think there is something to be said for the readiness scores and paying attention to that, so that we're giving our body and have a better understanding of what our body actually needs in a given moment. At the same time, just back to what we were saying before, a lot of these devices, like they can't be the be all and end all, there's still a lot of information they don't have. And to be most accurate, like, at least with some of the devices, a single app or function requires another app or function to be most accurate. So for example, like some devices have a heart rate monitor, but unless you're also doing, for example, like on the Apple Watch, to understand heart rate variability, a readiness score, your resting heart rate, and your sleep tracker for all that to work together. Like you actually have to use the breathe app. And you know, like when the watch tab soon is like, Okay, you got to breathe for a few seconds, like, your readiness score from the sleep app is better when we actually do the breathe app. And I think we don't necessarily realize that like, it needs this collection of information to give us the most accurate tools to work from.

Amber B  33:25

I'm curious, what do you use to track your sleep?

Jenn  33:29

So I have been using what's it called? I threw my phone over there. So it didn't make noise. It is called something sleep,

Amber B  33:42  

Auto sleep

Jenn  33:42 

Yes, thank you, auto sleep.

Amber B  33:44  

I'm like, that sounds like the app that I use, because I have to breath. Like when I wake up in the morning, I do like the breathe so it can get like the resting heart rate and the heart rate, right? Yeah,

Jenn  33:54  

I use auto sleep. And again, I have a love hate because it does require that I use the breath because it's giving me this like cumulative debt or credit of sleep, which is just completely not science. You know? Like, love hate?

Amber B  34:08

Yeah, yeah. We'll link that up in the show notes. Cuz I know people are gonna ask me, it's auto sleep is the app, but I'll link it up in the show notes. If you're looking for a sleep tracking app.

Jenn  34:18 

I will say I think that some of the other devices like the whoop, the aura ring, and some of those are better equipped at some of these particular tracking things, then, some of the Apple Watch thing, but I'm a bit I don't have any desire to have six devices on my plane.

Amber B  34:38  

Literally, my thing is like I have an Apple Watch already. So autosleep works with that. Whereas if I got a whoop, it would be like another device that…

Jenn  34:45 

I have another thing on my wrist and then the ring and then the bit and I'm like how many devices. It's because the other side of all of this like going back to your point of we now have technology that tells us everything, or potentially everything, I think it's really important that we don't lose our own perspective, and paying attention to how we feel, and that we don't become obsessive about that data collection.

Amber B  35:17 

Yeah, so much. And I do want to piggyback off of kind of what we were talking about with the readiness score and the stress. And I think it's really important for people listening to understand that like, the body sees stress as stress, workouts are a stress on your body. A cold is a stress on your body, a bad relationship is a stress on your body. And our body doesn't differentiate between the stress in the gym and the stress in your relationship and the stress to your immune response. And so Sunday, you know, that Jenn was talking about was like that readiness score may not be that you hit the gym super hard yesterday, but rather that you experienced more stress at work. And because the body doesn't see those as different that the stress recovery adaptation cycle that I talked about so often if you're applying more stress, and your body is able to recover, you aren't actually getting stronger, you aren't actually getting fitter. And so it's important to understand that stress is stress. And sometimes we're intentionally applying stress, like when I go to the gym, I'm intentionally applying stress to my body because I want it to create an adaptation in my body but you have a holistic perspective of like, where else am I getting stress in my body? And is my body able to adapt and recover from those stresses? And if not, if you keep stressing your body, you're just beating your body down. Your body isn't good, right?

Jenn  36:34  

I mean, we could do a whole other conversation on stress. Like I have a whole soapbox about stress. Because listen, not all stress is bad, too.

Amber B  36:43  

Right? Exactly.

Jenn  36:44  

But our ability to recover and have the waves and you know, that means constant stress response is when we have a problem.

Amber B  36:53

Yeah, when stress exceeds our ability to recover from it, then it ceases to be productive.

Jenn  37:00

And sleep intrinsically gives our body time and space to recover from stress.

Amber B  37:07  

Yes. improves your stress. It's going to make you fitter.

Jenn  37:12

Yeah, in every aspect of fitness

Amber B  37:15 

In so many aspects. Yeah. So good. What do you see as some of the most common sleep mistakes that people make?

Jenn  37:27  

I mean, it's where we started right, not getting enough. The biggest mistake is not prioritizing it, and realizing how important it is. But more specifically, I think blue light. Our devices, and that includes our laptops, our TVs, our phones, the iPad, all the devices, because really quick, so blue light to our eye, right, like thinking back to like seventh grade science, the cones and rods in your eye that perceive light and the light spectrum. Blue Light is the closest to daylight and the light spectrum. So if our eye is receiving the equivalent of daylight at 11 o'clock at night, because we're watching TV to try to relax, our brain is getting signals of I'm seeing daylight, I think you should be awake. And our brains like it but I'm tired. So I'm either going to send you hunger signals so that I have energy to stay up at night. Or I'm just going to stop producing all of the inhibitory hormones that help us calm down. And I'm going to try to get myself to producing all the excitatory hormones that we need for daytime. And sleep becomes much more challenging.

Jenn  38:44

So I think some of the biggest mistakes that we make around sleep is not realizing the impact of our environment. The bright lights, the blue light, a cool temperature in your room. Even like an evening routine, so that we can certainly, like if we do the same things in the same order. We can develop like Pavlov's dogs in response to getting tired and going to sleep. So like your eating routine doesn't have to be seven hours. But just doing the same process for a few minutes before bed. Eventually, we can start to do those things and we'll get tired even if we weren't tired when we started.

Amber B  39:27  

Sure. Yeah, that makes total sense. That's awesome. If somebody is wanting to connect with you, Jenn, where can they go and find you?

Jenn  39:36

Yeah, I think Instagram is probably the easiest place. Although all social media I'm @Jenntrepeck. I would love to hear from you. Tell me what's interesting about what we talked about with sticking with you and tell me what you've tried to improve your sleep since hearing everything today. And of course my podcast Salad with A Side of Fries. So you can also find Send us over there.

Amber B  40:01  

I love it. And we'll link all that up in the show notes. So you can go and visit there. Thank you so much, Jen for coming and sharing your expertise. And you made me excited about going to bed tonight.

Jenn  40:13  

Thank you for having me.

Amber B  40:14

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Amber B  40:16  

I hope you found that episode informative, maybe a little bit motivating. Maybe you're excited to go and try some of the things that she talked about in the episode and see if you can prioritize your sleep a little bit more, right? Move it from maybe number nine on your priority list a little bit up. And I'm sure that you're coming away with some idea of something that you can do to improve your sleep and what that looks like to start to implement that moving forward.

Amber B  40:44

That wraps up this episode of biceps after babies radio. I'm Amber now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.

Outro

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