What would a perfectly balanced day look like?

If finding your balance is all about repeating good habits over time, then the first step is to work out what one perfectly balanced day looks like, and then repeat it as often as possible.

Let’s have a look at what that nicely balanced day might contain…

1. Seven to nine hours of sleep. According to the National Sleep Foundation, most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night. That means the perfect day actually starts the evening before, going to bed at the right time in order to meet your requirements. One scientific study even went so far as to calculate the ideal time to get out out bed - apparently it’s 7:22. The researchers found that people who rose at or after this time had lower levels of cortisol, possibly because it enabled them to get adequate amounts of sleep.

2. The ideal breakfast. Some would argue for porridge; the oats and low Glycemic Index serving to fill you up and energise you throughout the day. If your dietary choices allow for them though, you can’t go wrong with eggs. They’re packed full of important proteins to stave off hunger and increase alertness, there’s vitamins for a healthy body and good fats to keep your brain and heart in peak working condition. A study by Direct Line, yep the ones with the musical phone, found that giving yourself 22 minutes to enjoy your breakfast in a calm environment was optimal.

3. The work bit. Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones, a book about why it is that people in certain parts of the world live longer, happier lives, has reviewed research on more than 20 million people worldwide through the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, and says “When it comes to your work, try to work part-time, 30–35 hours a week.” Working less is consistently linked to increased health and happiness, but maybe surprisingly, doesn’t seem to affect productivity - people get the same amount done in less time. A working day starting at 9/9:30 and finishing around 4/4:30 would meet these requirements comfortably.

4. Free time. Returning to the Direct Line survey, they claimed we should all have 6 hours 59 minutes of awake, non-work or ‘free’ time. This includes 18 minutes on social media (some of us may need to work on this one), 2 hrs 21 minutes eating, including 53 mins for lunch, 1 hour for TV watching and another hour for ‘me’ time.

5. Exercise. In terms of cardiovascular activity, the current guidelines are actually based on weekly totals - either 150 minutes of moderately hard exercise or 75 minutes of very hard training; working harder gives the benefits in half the time. As a daily average, that equates to around 21 minutes, 30 seconds of moderate activity, or 10 minutes 45 seconds of hard effort. A very short amount of time for a very large level of reward.

6. Socialising and family time. Back to Direct Line world again, where everyone is comprehensively insured. Their report suggested we get 45 minutes-1 hour of socialising each day and research is clear; people who spend more time with friends live longer, happier lives. Another hour is given for quality family time, whether you want it or not. ;-)

7. Bedtime. And so we’re back where we started, where all days start and end. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, says that whilst there’s no specific time to get to sleep, there does appear to be an idea window somewhere between 8pm and 12 midnight. As I talked about right at the start, it’s worth working backwards to ensure you get your 7-9 hours. If you’re getting up at 7:22 this means anywhere from 10:22-12:22 should be fine. If you’re a night owl you may shift this later if you can rise at your own leisure, whilst if you’re a morning lark you’ll likely want to shift this forwards.

And there we have it, seven habits for a balanced day. Repeat them often enough and health, fitness and happiness are just around the corner. :-)

Body Clock: What makes you tick?

A fantastic Horizon special this week saw Ella Al-Shamahi, a paleo-anthropologist, standup comic and excellent presenter, working alongside a team of scientists following former commando Aldo Kane, equipped with lean physique and fashionable strongman beard, as he spent ten days inside a nuclear bunker. With no phone or watch and no other way to tell the time, Aldo was observed on camera 24 hours a day to see how it affected his natural rhythms, almost like a Body Clock Big Brother.

They put him through various experiments to see how his internal clock deep within the hypothalamus in the brain (known as the biological clock or circadian rhythm) was impacted. Watch as Aldo struggles to guess the time (he’s out by around 2-3 hours generally) and his mental and physical state alters over the course of a week and a half underground. He’s a super-fit chap so there’s a funny bit when he says how hard the experiment is hitting him, so hard that he’s finding it tough to do even an hour’s training!

They show how there are generally three types of people according to the research:

• 25 per cent of us are ‘early birds’, better in the mornings and early to bed ideally

• 25 per cent of us are ‘night owls’, better lying in late and more alert in the evenings

• 50 per cent of us lie somewhere in between

They meet a range of experts and everyday folk to uncover ‘hacks’ you can use to live more in sync with your particular body clock, and be fitter, healthier and happier as a result. Now of course, I don’t call them hacks, they’re behaviours, things you may be able to add to your routines to make improvements. Here’s a selection of the behaviours they uncover. How many do you do? Is there one you could change to help you find a little better balance?

1) Eat bigger meals in the mornings and smaller meals if eating late in the evening. That’s because your digestive system is actually most active first thing and less active just before you go to bed.

2) Carry out tasks that require lots of brain power in the late morning. This is when we tend to excel at complex processes and things needing logical thought.

3) Exercise late afternoon/early evening. This is when strength, power and reaction time tend to peak meaning you can perform at your very best.

4) Get outside as much as possible during the day. Exposure to natural light helps to sync your body clock and leads to better sleep. The light that we’re exposed to in cars, homes and workplaces, even with windows is hundreds of times lower and doesn’t have the same positive impact. Our balance events are a great opportunity to get out into nature and improve your sleep in the process of course! ;-)

5. In an ideal world, live by your clock. Today’s society doesn’t always allow for this, so if you can’t, read below for more helpful tips.

6. Whatever clock type you are or your daily routine, stick to the same sleep schedule ALL the time. Avoid lying in and catching up on sleep at weekends or days off as it throws your rhythm out again, find something that works and stick to it. Here are those tips I promised:

Night owls

If you can’t work to your rhythm and you struggle to get up in the mornings…

• Get as much natural light as possible when you wake up. Get the curtains open, get outside, or make your commute active an active one.

• Shut out/cut down on blue light after sunset. Body clock expert Professor Till gets people in the show wearing special orange sunglasses to do this, but if you don’t have access to these then avoiding tablets or phones after dark or switching them to night shift function can make a difference

Early birds

If you need more sleep but find yourself awake and alert early regardless of how little you’ve had…

• Block out the morning light. Use eye masks or blackout curtains to make the room darker. This is especially good for nightshift workers who need to get some shuteye during the day.

• Get as much light as possible in the late afternoon/early evening. This can help to synchronise your body clock to your new time schedule.

Similarly, if jet lag is a problem for you, when you fly east, get out into daylight as early in the morning as possible, whereas if you fly west, get natural light as late in the day as is possible.

Better balance

Remember as always, if you feel it would help you to make a change, do ONE thing only. Try it, don’t expect it to work every time straight away, be patient with it and you’ll get there.

Oh, and here’s the link to the show in iPlayer if you fancy watching it for yourself:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bn5ys4/horizon-2018-9-body-clock-what-makes-us-tick#

Five ways to get a better night's sleep

Sleep does all sorts of wonderful things for your mind and body, yet according to the National Sleep Council, nearly half of the population get less than six hours sleep each night and four in five feel their sleep is disturbed, inadequate or extremely bad.

So here's five handy little tips to help you find better balance with your snoozing...

1) Get into a rhythm. 

Setting a routine for your day with consistent wake-up and bed times helps to train your body and mind. All of us have an in-built body clock, known as our Circadian Rhythm, and by being consistent with when we do things, we help to set our system to naturally wake up and fall asleep when we want it to. It's essentially like writing code for a computer programme.

2) Go dark

Light is a stimulant to you body in much the same way that caffeine is. When your eyes and skin cells detect bright light, they think it must be coming from that giant ball in the sky and that it's time to get up and move around. That's because for the vast majority of time our species has spent on the planet, lightbulbs, computers, iPhones and Kindles didn't exist. The problem now is that these advances in technology are tricking your brain into believing it's time to switch on, when late in the evening the exact opposite is true. Here are a few ideas to help your body to know it's bedtime:

• Set your electronic devices to dim in the evening.

• Better still, set yourself an electronic device curfew time of a couple of hours before bed

• Get yourself a set of blackout blinds or curtains for your room

• Dim the light switches later in the evening

• Read a paperback occasionally instead of always using an e-reader (then recycle it of course)

3) Cut down on the stimulants later in the day

Your body actually starts to wind down for bed mid-late afternoon, so cutting out teas, coffees, energy drinks and high sugar foods after around 4pm can help you to prepare for a good night's kip.

4) Relax

Many of us find it hard to sleep as our brains are still whirring away with thoughts of the day; work deadlines, family pressures, money and everything else that makes life so busy. I know only too well that I can sit working late into the night and when I go to bed, my mind is still running through what I've been doing and what's next. Much like screen-time deadlines and closely linked, it's worth setting a curfew time for work. Choose an enjoyable task to do afterwards; read, listen to music, take a bath, enjoy a hobby, meditate, whatever it is that works for you.

5) Boost your melatonin

Your what? It's a hormone your body produces naturally that is strongly associated with sleep. As the day wears on, levels of a stress hormone named cortisol decrease, largely because the time when you are supposed to have gone and done all of your hard work has finished. As this happens, melatonin increases, helping to relax your body and begin the process of repair and recovery. It's a wonderful system when it works well, hormones acting in pairs to balance each other out nicely.

Darkness is known to boost melatonin levels, so following the tips in point 2 will help, but you might also get some benefits from nutrition too. Certain foods are high in a protein called Tryptophan and this is the thing your body uses to make melatonin. The research is still hit and miss, but the theory is that if you increase Tryptophan levels, you may just boost melatonin and therefore improve sleep. Try these as part of little evening snacks to see if they make any difference for you:

• Milk

• Turkey

• Cheese

• Lettuce

• Wholemeal bread

Summary

Hopefully there are a few helpful tips there to help you find better balance. As always, we'd suggest choosing just one to try first so that you can successfully embed it into your daily routines. Any questions, feel free to post here or get in touch.

Sleep well,

Paul and the balance team :-) 

balancing light and dark

That time of year has come. Your alarm goes off, your eyelids peel open slowly, feeling heavier than a truck full of elephants. You press snooze, they close, your alarm sounds again. Surely that wasn’t five minutes? You fight back, hitting snooze for a second time, managing a rather smug grin for cleverly setting your alarm ten minutes before you actually needed to get up. But there it goes again! Have you entered some sort of time warp??? 

This time, there’s no back-up plan, and no wry smile. Instead a reluctant hand creeps from beneath the nice warm duvet and pulls slowly at the curtain, looking to let in a bit of light and stir your brain into action ready for the day ahead. But to your disappointment all you are greeted by is yet more darkness, somebody has stolen the sun. And the warmth you’ve become accustomed to in summer, especially this year for a nice change.

Zombie-like you rise, arms hanging loosely by your side as you shuffle to the bathroom in your fluffy animal slippers. You know you’re still half asleep as after getting out of the shower you find yourself trying to comb your hair with your toothbrush. Time for a coffee.

If you recognise the scenario above you’re not alone. This scene, and many like it are repeated at least five times a week across Britain between the months of September and March. And that’s over half the year!

So what’s going on? Well it’s all to do with your big warm friend in the sky, the sun. As well as offering warmth in the summer months, he also gives you something essential for life, light. Sunlight is a rich source of vitamin D which helps build healthy teeth and bones. It also helps your food to grow and gives it the nutrition you need to perform at your very best. And very crucially, it helps to regulate levels of hormones like cortisol, melatonin and others that play such a big part in regulating your mood and energy levels.

A lack of sunlight can leave you feeling down, as in Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD, lethargic and demotivated. Obviously too much can be bad for you too with sunburn and the associated risks, but in British winter you’re far likely to get too little.

So what can you do about it?

Well, quite a lot actually. To start with, you can realise that your body clock, or circadian rhythm changes with the seasons. In the shorter days of the year you’ll probably need more sleep and be more tired. Up until Thomas Edyson interfered with nature with the invention of his now fairly widely used lightbulb (you may have seen them in the shops), people generally went to bed much earlier in the winter months. In fact, research shows that before TV’s, the internet, 4G phones and electric lighting, people slept for many more hours than they do these days, averaging over 9 hours a night if not more.

OK, so you may not be able to hibernate for winter (some remote villages in France and other parts of the world still effectively do this) but you can get yourself to bed at a reasonable time and prepare your sleeping environment as best you can to wake feeling refreshed in the morning.

Try these tips to help manage your way through the darker months:

• Get to bed before 11pm. In fact get to bed and switch off by 10:43 pm as on average it takes just over 15 minutes to fall asleep.

• Sleep in complete darkness. Get good curtains and switch off standby lights on electrical goods, or remove them altogether. Charge phones elsewhere or away somewhere if possible. Even the tiniest amount of light on any part of the skin can interfere with sleep quality.

• Don’t have it too hot. Sleeping in a cooler environment can help improve sleep quality.

• Light up your mornings. Try a Lumi clock, it wakes you up with a gradually increasing light instead of the stress of a noisy alarm clock. Not convinced it will work? Try it on a weekend morning when you don’t have to get up, you’ll be surprised.

• Get outside - make the most of breaks at work and in life to get some light in the day. Wrap up warm and get out for a walk, a run or just a trip to the park with Autumn in full splendour.

• Get away - plan a winter sun holiday, it’s amazing what an energy boost it can supply.

• Try a classical wake up - ditch the aggressive alarm for a calmer start to the day. Annoying alarms can be stressful causing big surges in adrenaline levels, which may be followed by a subsequent slump and not particularly good for you.

• Synchronise - if you can rise with the sun. This isn’t possible for everyone, but if you can, try it and watch your mood rise like the warm orange ball over that hill you can see out of your window.

Sleep well, wake better.

balance your light and dark, balance your life, balance your scales :-)