Top 10 Sleep Tips for Balanced Hormones (Improve Your Sleep Quality)

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Sleep is essential for balanced hormones. In this post, we will cover the top 10 sleep tips you can implement in your day to improve sleep quality and your hormone health.

Why Sleep is SO Important for Hormone Health and Balanced Hormones

To reach hormonal balance we must have good foundations. These foundations are vital to our well-being. No supplement or single technique will bring you back to balance — or improve your symptoms that much — without them. Sleep is one you MUST make a priority for hormone balance and longevity.

Sleep is a restorative time for our body and brain. We flow through different sleep stages, which allows the body to focus energy on repairing and rejuvenating itself, stimulating cell growth, hormonal regulation, and optimizing detoxification. When we don’t sleep well, it has a full-body effect on our digestion, blood sugar levels, metabolism, and mood. Proper detoxification and blood sugar regulation are essential for balanced hormones. When we make sleep a priority, our body gets the time and rest it needs to complete these duties.

Top 10 Sleep Tips for Balanced Hormones

1. Get Outside and View Morning Sunlight

Healthy sleep starts in the morning. Viewing natural sunlight within 30–60 min of waking is the most powerful tool for wakefulness in the morning and the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep at night.

Before I came across this practice, I had no idea about the impact viewing morning sunlight had on sleep. Most of us have heard about melatonin and how darkness makes us sleepy, but sunlight helps us sleep better? It was an ah-ha moment and I certainly notice a night-and-day difference in my sleep.

We are programmed to rise with the sun and sleep when it’s dark, it is at the core of our physiology. Before artificial light, we relied on sunlight to go about our day — hunt, build, explore, etc — and got natural exposure to morning light pretty well on a daily basis because of this.

These days, especially if you experience a cold dark winter, many of us don’t go outside for months on end, except to walk to our cars, and head to our indoor jobs or school, which unknowingly disrupts our sleep.

Morning sunlight helps to regulate your circadian rhythm and cortisol pattern. Our circadian rhythm tells our brain when we should be awake and when we should be asleep. Our cortisol likes to be in what is called a diurnal rhythm — we want it high in the morning, right at waking, and it to steadily decrease until bedtime when melatonin starts to take over. Here you should naturally start to wind down and get ready to sleep.

When we view this morning light neurons in your eyes signal a wake-up for your brain and body. This spikes cortisol which sets off a “personal timer” for you to fall asleep at night.

Cortisol is known to be the stress hormone, although it isn’t all bad. We need cortisol for proper immune function, wakefulness, and focus. We just want it high at the right times of the day — which is morning — and not chronically high.

If you skip out on this morning’s wake-up call, your cortisol will spike later in the day when you eventually get outside, extending this “timer” and causing disrupted rhythm and sleep troubles.

You want to aim to get outside right at waking or max 30–60 min after waking up. On a sunny day, aim for at least 5 minutes of exposure, on a cloudy day — aim for 10 min, and on a rainy or really cloudy day aim for 20–30 min.

A few extra notes — sorry, but your indoor artificial lights are not strong enough to promote this response for improved sleep and wakefulness, and neither is window light or light through a car window. — you’ll also need to make sure you’re not wearing sunglasses. And don’t stare directly at the sun — if it hurts don’t do it.

If you live in a place that is very dark or can’t get outside, some light is better than nothing. So, open your blinds let the light in, and turn on all house lights. Once the sun rises and you are able to get outside, go outside.

There are certain extra bright artificial lights you can purchase that are known to better induce a response similar to sunlight If you really can’t get outside or live somewhere that doesn’t allow it. A daylight simulator can help or a ring light like this one from Amazon.

2. Dim the Lights

As morning light can help us feel awake, darkness at night can help us prepare for bed and get healthy sleep. You should start to feel tired in the evening as cortisol should be lowered and melatonin is on the rise.

The bright light of any colour can tell our bodies that it is still day, disrupting our circadian clock and sleep. This stimulates our nervous system, increases cortisol, and inhibits melatonin production. Melatonin is an important hormone that increases in the evening, stays heightened throughout the night, and declines in the morning. It is involved in a variety of physiological processes in the body, including falling and staying asleep, regulating immune function, antioxidant activity, insulin regulation, mood, and hormone balance.

Support this natural response by dimming the lights in your home. All bright lights should be dimmed as much as you can safely do, 2–3 hours before bedtime and particularly between the hours of 10 pm and 4 am — any color, even red lights, and especially blue lights. Opt for dim lighting, low to the floor, or ideally use candlelight if safe to do so.

Timers on your lighting or setting an alarm can make this easier and blue-light-blocking glasses like these can enhance and protect your eyes from strain from electronics or tv if you must use these at night.

To further help blunt the effects of artificial lights on your circadian rhythm and enhance sleep. View outdoor light in the afternoon when the sun is setting. This can help blunt the negative effects of artificial light in the evening if you do happen to view bright lights between 10 pm and 4 am. The light from a setting sun has a different wavelength than morning sunlight. This triggers your neurons to send a message that it is evening and to prepare for sleep — that is so cool.

I use these blue-light-blocking glasses at night and when I work on my phone or laptop. I find they prevent dry eyes and strain — and hopefully are helping optimize my melatonin production too!

3. Wind Down for the Night

Winding down in the evening around an hour before bed helps prepare our minds and bodies for sleep. It allows us to get out of the sympathetic stress response of the day and into a more parasympathetic rest and digest response.

Creating a nighttime practice — it doesn’t have to be the same every day — helps you reflect on the day and can help you relax before bed.

Try exploring these helpful practices;

1. Avoid watching tv and being on your phone scrolling social media. This is because these both can be very stimulating, lead to endless binging and scrolling and increase cortisol, disrupt melatonin, your sleep, and hormones. If you are in the habit of comparing yourself to others, socials may lead to an evening of self-loathing and frustration. Do yourself a favor and turn off devices to give your mind a rest.
2. Take a warm bath with Epsom salts. This can help relax the muscles, and the mind and help detox your body due to magnesium sulfite. Some even include relaxing essential oils like lavender if you aren’t sensitive to them. Relaxing in a warm bath, hot tub, or sauna for around 10-20 min will help reduce body temperature once you get out. This drop in temperature will help promote sleepiness. Perhaps read a book while in the tub for some extra relaxation.
3. Do a wind-down stretch or mini-yoga session to ease tension and release the energy of the day.
4. Try meditating or writing in a journal. A common practice that helps lots of people who tend o lay awake at night with worries or to-do lists is writing all of them in your journal so that they are safely kept in there and you don’t have to think “I better not forget to do that” at night.

4. Time Your Eating Habits Appropriately

Eating early in the day within an hour of waking can help to improve wakefulness and support this biological rhythm. This will increase metabolism, thus increasing temperature, which will improve wakefulness. Eating early in the day also improves hormone imbalance, as it helps regulate the cortisol response in the morning and prevents it from coming too high and keeping steady blood sugar.

Eating a big meal, especially a sugary and heavy greasy meal before bed can disrupt deep sleep. This can spike cortisol causing a stimulating effect and pushing our bedtime. if our bodies are working on digesting our food while sleeping, it could cause some discomfort and limit our body’s ability to recover during sleep.

The impact of our meals on our blood sugar can also affect our sleep and keep us awake, depending on what we ate. If you find you wake up around 3-4 hours after you go to sleep, this may be due to a blood sugar response waking you and saying, “Hey, we’re hungry eat something”. Try eating a light blood-sugar stable snack before bed that includes a bit of protein to help keep this table and be sure to eat enough during the day!

If you eat enough during the day you may be able to get away with eating your last meal 3-4 hours before bed. If you find you’re hungry before bed, have a light-balanced snack to help keep you full and blood sugar stable so you don’t wake up.

Try the “The Viral Gut-Loving Sleepy Gummies Recipe”! A fun movie snack that’s healthy and delicious.

Let’s touch on alcohol briefly. Although you may find it makes you drowsy and helps you fall asleep or take the edge off, the truth is that alcohol disrupts sleep — even one drink. It affects your melatonin production, circadian rhythm, and sleep cycles, in particular, REM sleep (when you dream) which is restorative sleep for your HPA axis (stress responses). This can cause you to wake up in the middle of the night and feel groggy the next morning. To have healthy balanced hormones we need healthy sleep. I’m all for having a beverage here and there — celebrating, on vacation, etc — but keeping your alcohol intake to the minimum preferably none is best for hormone and general health.

5. Create a Sleep Sanctuary

Make your bedroom a sleep sanctuary to help you fall and stay asleep. Your bedroom is important even the colour of your walls can surprisingly affect sleep.

Some dos and don’ts for the bedroom include;

1. keeping work and studies out. Set up your desk somewhere else, if possible, to not bring any extra stress and clutter into the bedroom.
2. Don’t put a tv in the room, this begs for binging and late-night blue light.
3. Keep the bedroom for sleep and sex only.
4. keep the temperature around 68 degrees Fahrenheit or 19 degrees Celsius. This is because your body must drop a couple of degrees in temperature to fall into a deep sleep. Increasing temperature tends to wake us up at night.
5. Sleep in a pitch-black room. Use black-out blinds or a sleep mask, even the light from your alarm clock or streetlights can be enough to disrupt melatonin and sleep.
6. Choose a quality mattress to help support your sleep. Many mattresses are unknowingly full of flame retardants, Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), Formaldehyde, Phthalates, and Heavy metals.

I have these silk sleep masks at home, and they are SO soft and cute. They’re 100% silk which was important to me. I find they honestly fall off in the middle of the night — like all sleep masks, but they’re so good for when the sunrise is early and you’re not quite ready to get up yet!

6. Gut Health Check

Everything comes back to the gut — immune health, hormone balance, and sleep.

Your gut microbiome is a community of microorganisms that inhabit your digestive tract, they can play a crucial role in regulating sleep patterns and overall sleep quality.

Your gut buddies can produce neurotransmitters like serotonin, which helps regulate mood and sleep. Serotonin is used to make melatonin and in fact, up to 90% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut and an imbalance in gut bacteria can disrupt this process! This is also why a not-so-happy gut can lead to a not-so-happy mood.

Chronic inflammation in the gut has been linked to sleep disorders such as insomnia. Inflammation can cause an increase in stress hormones that can interfere with the body’s ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Lastly, your gut health can also affect sleep indirectly through its impact on your overall health. Poor gut health has been associated with health conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes, estrogen dominance, PCOS, and endometriosis, which can interfere with sleep.

Taking steps to improve your gut health through a healthy diet, regular exercise, and stress reduction may help improve your sleep quality. Diversifying gut bacteria through different fruits and veggies, probiotic foods like yogurt and sauerkraut, and addressing any underlying gut dysbiosis or infections can make significant improvements.

7. Stick to a Bedtime Schedule

Sticking to a bedtime schedule can help back up your circadian rhythm, helping you fall asleep quicker, and wake up energetic.

The body’s circadian rhythm is responsible for regulating several important bodily functions such as blood pressure, hormone production, and body temperature. Therefore, it makes sense that aligning our sleep patterns with this internal clock can promote better, more restorative sleep.

We want to aim for at least 7 hours of good quality sleep, and ideally 8–9 hours for women. The truth is, the time in which you go to sleep is just as important as the hours you get. The more hours before midnight, the better — you may have heard the phrase “An hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after”.

The phase of sleep before midnight is the most replenishing and healing. It helps our bodies recover, organize information of the day, detox, and can do wonders for our hormone health.

Aiming to go to bed by 10 pm and awake at 6 am ensures enough daylight hours to help support our circadian rhythm. Sometimes this isn’t possible depending on your schedule, aim for the best you can, and try not to put pressure on yourself if you get less. Sometimes a 7-hour sleep is more restful than a 9-hour sleep.

8. Are You Drinking Caffeine at the Wrong Time?

If coffee is your savior and you rely on it to wake up, you’ll want to take advantage of these habits to help implement a more balanced circadian rhythm. Getting morning sunlight, taking a cold shower, and eating in the morning can wake you up and give you sustained energy more than any coffee ever will.

Coffee can however support your circadian rhythm, but we must know when it is appropriate to drink it and how tolerant your body is to it.

For hormone health, I recommend sticking to no more than 1-2 cups of coffee per day, and especially limit if you experience bad PMS, anxiety, and cramps. Drinking coffee first thing in the morning on an empty stomach can artificially stimulate the adrenals to release cortisol and boost adrenaline. This creates a more stressful environment, causing additional hormone chaos.

Delaying your cup until after you eat a blood-sugar balancing meal, not having it until about an hour after — to help nutrient absorption, plus waiting until 90-120 min after waking, will help limit or prevent the negative stress response from the caffeine and the afternoon crash that tends to occur around 2–3 pm, helping to extend your energy.

So for example, if you wake up at 7 am, you could eat at 7:30 am, go for a walk, and then have your coffee around 8:30 am.

Try to limit intake after 10 am and aim to completely stop consuming caffeine past 2 pm. Caffeine has a half-life of 6 hours and could negatively impact sleep if you consume it later in the day. Although many people can crush a double espresso and doze off, thinking they had a good night’s rest, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that they are not sleeping as optimally as they could be.

9. Up Your Magnesium

Magnesium is a powerful mineral that roughly 80% of Americans are deficient in. There isn’t really a point in doing a blood test for magnesium, as it resides in the cells of your body and chances are you could use a little more anyway.

Magnesium plays a role in over 300 enzymatic reactions within your body, helps calm the nervous system, can help boost progesterone, and lessen period cramps, PMS, migraines, and anxiety. It’s no surprise that it can even help you fall asleep, stay asleep and improve sleep quality.

Many women find that sleep suffers leading up to their period. This is quite common due to the drop in estrogen and progesterone near the end of your cycle. Magnesium has helped many women sleep better during this time along with 50mg of vitamin B6 (P5P form) if you tend to wake up in the middle of the night.

Aim for 350mg of magnesium per day from foods like dark leafy greens, nuts and seeds, dark chocolate, avocados, and beans. If you feel you need to up your intake, you can take a supplement like magnesium bys-glycinate (sometimes labeled as glycinate — “bys” means “two” — there are still two glycine molecules on the magnesium glycinate but companies just use glycinate for short and interchangeably with bys-glycinate) or you can try magnesium malate (can also help promote energy due to malic acid). These tend to be well-absorbed and easy to find. Magnesium citrate is another common form, although this one tends to cause diarrhea in some people — but this may be a good option for you if you’re prone to constipation.

I like to take 165-330mg of magnesium per day in bys-glycinate form, after dinner or before bedtime. I find it relaxes my mind and helps me sleep throughout the night. You can find many supplements at your local health food store, grocery store, or online.

I trust and have been using Pure Lab Vitamins Magnesium Glycinate, they have 165mg of magnesium and even added glycine for an extra relaxing punch that can help improve sleep quality.

10. Timely Exercise

We all know exercise is beneficial for us both physically and mentally but it also has been shown to improve sleep quality, increase sleep duration, and decrease the amount of time it takes to fall asleep.

One of the main ways that exercise enhances sleep is by reducing stress and anxiety, which can interfere with the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Exercise also promotes the production of endorphins, which are natural chemicals that can help you feel more relaxed and calm.

Working out helps to increase the amount of deep sleep we get, which is essential for restoring the body, mind, and hormone health.

Exercise can also support the body’s circadian rhythms. By working out in the morning, we can increase our core temperature, metabolism, and wakefulness. Be careful not to work out too close to bedtime, as this can disrupt sleep. If you do want to work out before bed, keep it to light yoga, an easy swim, a nightly stroll, or stretching. Keep the HIIT workouts and training to the morning to early afternoon to prevent heightened cortisol and body temperature from keeping you awake at night.

We want to aim for 150 min per week of moderate intensity. Try to include lots of stretching and calming activities like yoga, walking, swimming, or pilates and some strength training sessions. Most importantly do something you enjoy! I love playing sports and trying new activities — right now I’m taking an adult gymnastics class and I love it!

Conclusion

I think I’ve made my point, that sleep starts in the morning — bright and early 😉 — and carries through the entire day. If you’re not sleeping well, try implementing these sleep tips that can easily be overlooked and can help lead you to better hormone balance.

A quick recap of things you can try to optimize your sleep and help your hormone health flourish.

• Get morning sunlight
• Eat breakfast
• Keep caffeine consumption before 2 pm and 90-120 min after waking
• Exercise in the morning or early afternoon
• Look into your gut health
• Try not to eat a heavy meal before bed
• If you tend to wake up, try eating protein before bed and make sure you’re eating enough during the day and at dinner.
• Dim the lighting, use blue light blocker glasses, and avoid screens and bright lights between 10 pm and 4 am
• Wind down — read, journal, take a bath, etc.
• Keep your bedroom cool at 19 Celsius or 68 Fahrenheit
• Keep your bedroom dark
• Increasing magnesium or supplement, especially after dinner or before bed can work wonders.

This post was all about the Top 10 Sleep Tips for Balanced Hormones.