Sleep Smarter, Not Harder: Biohacks for High-Performing Entrepreneurs with Tanessa Shears

PodcastMindset

Aug 26

Episode 877: Show Notes

When looking to make positive changes in your life, why not start with making sure you’re sleeping well? If you are having a hard time falling asleep, staying asleep, and battling with overall energy levels, then this episode is for you! Joining us is the incredible health consultant Tanessa Shears to discuss how you can sleep smarter and share bio-hacks to become a better-performing entrepreneur. Tanessa started her business as a personal trainer and nutrition coach and she very quickly realized that so many of her clients were entrepreneurs who needed that extra push to optimize their health. Sleep is often a forgotten component of health and when Tanessa was pregnant, she became more aware of how little sleep entrepreneurs are getting and how that is affecting their businesses. That is why she incorporated a third pillar into her business, sleep! Tune into this conversation to hear a breakdown of the architecture of your sleep, how to sleep better, creating the right environment to help your brain and body wind down for sleep, wearable sleep tracking devices and so much more!

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The Architecture of Your Sleep

There are a lot of misconceptions about sleep; particularly the assumption that the time you spend in bed is the time you spend asleep. But that is entirely incorrect! The architecture of your sleep looks at whether or not you are getting the quality of sleep that your brain needs to do your job. Tanessa breaks this up into two categories for us: deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. You can think of deep sleep as the time your brain takes to shrink just enough for your spinal fluid to ‘clean out the metalloids that have accumulated throughout the day. The process actually helps your brain refresh and it happens during the first three to four hours of sleep. REM sleep happens on the other end of the night and that’s when your body does the most dreaming. Tanessa thinks of dreaming as entrepreneurial gold because there are so many things linked to dream sleep that will help you be a better entrepreneur. It helps you with creativity, problem-solving, and reading facial expressions and body gestures. Not getting enough deep sleep will cause physical exhaustion and not getting enough REM sleep will cause irritability.

How Do We Sleep Better?

So thanks to the architecture of sleep, you may have signs that your sleep is not optimal. But what do you do about it? You need to look at your very own body clock – your circadian rhythm. There are hormones that prepare you for sleep (melatonin) and hormones that help you wake up (cortisol). When your body clock is consistent and synchronized, those hormones help to put you to sleep and wake you up. If you go to sleep and wake up at around the same time every day, your body clock will be far more optimized. If you go to sleep and wake up at vastly different times, you give your body something called social jetlag. There is evidence to believe that for every day you go to sleep outside of your regular sleep window, it can take you up to two days to recover full cognitive function! If you want to improve your sleep, the first step is to hone in on your circadian rhythm and find consistency in your sleep and wake schedule.

The ’Zone Out’ Period and How to Fall Asleep Easier

What happens if you make sure you are in bed at the same time every night but can’t fall asleep? Now we need to consider what your brain is doing before bed – are you engaging in activities such as working or having intense conversations right before bed? Sleeping is a process of slowing your brain down, and we cannot expect our brains to go from 100 miles an hour to zero. It’s important to look at the wind-down process of the brain and decrease all of the information we are giving our brain. A lot of you may want to ‘zone out’ before bed by watching TV or scrolling social media but at the end of the day, that isn’t necessarily helping your brain wind down. You need to ask yourself what will give your brain what it needs and help you prepare yourself for bed. Tanessa wants you to develop an experimental mindset and try a new routine for a short period of time to allow you to figure out what works best for you!

What Slowing Down Can Look Like

There are a few ways we can look at winding down before bed; we need to consider slowing down the body, mind, and emotions. When slowing down the body, we need to let our heart rate and blood pressure slow down. Ask yourself what you shouldn’t be doing in the hours before bed. You should not be eating or drinking anything but water before bed because then your body needs to digest that food! Exercising just before bed also produces more cortisol and that will bleed into a good night’s sleep. When it comes to slowing down, consider what you can do to remove input for 15 minutes before bed. That can mean reading a light fiction book, stretching, and doing breathwork or meditation. Tenessa likes to read or do paint by numbers! If you are a high-stress person, breathwork and meditation is a really good way to help you slow down before bed.

Tanessa’s Favorite Wearable Tech and How She Incorporates it Into Her Work

In general, activity trackers like Apple Watch and Fitbit are not very good at tracking your sleep. Tanessa’s favorite wearable technology to track sleep is the Oura Ring. This is one of the only pieces of wearable tech that is validated against ECG data. This ring tracks so much data while you are sleeping and it is different from other options because it is specifically good at tracking your rest, recovery, and resilience. That is something that isn’t given enough attention due to marketing. Oura excels at focusing on how your nervous system is doing and even does live daytime stress tracking! Being able to see how you are sleeping so that you can make certain changes to improve that is an incredibly powerful tool! This allows sleep specialists like Tanessa to create specialized programs for people to get better sleep.

What to Do When Either Your Deep Sleep or REM Sleep is Suffering

If you are tracking your sleep using a device like the Oura Ring and noticing that either your deep sleep or REM sleep is suffering, you can use that data to figure out what may be disrupting that part of your sleep. If your deep sleep is being affected, maybe your partner gets into bed later than you do and that wakes you up, or maybe you are going to bed later than usual, perhaps you even had too much caffeine that day! When considering why you haven’t reached your REM sleep goal, you can ask yourself if there is a dog or child waking you up, if the temperature in the room is too warm or cold, maybe you had alcohol the night before or used a screen before bed! There are very specific things you can look at and then you will know what you can change first! If you want to learn more about Tanessa, check out her podcast, Becoming Limitless. She has even created a free playbook where you can learn how to biohack your energy! Just visit tanessashears.com/energyto get your hands on it today!

Quote This

“By going to bed two hours later, you can lose as much as 50-60% of your deep sleep.”

— Tanessa Shears

Highlights

The Architecture of Your Sleep. [0:08:37]
How Do We Sleep Better? [0:12:51]
The ‘Zone Out’ Period and How to Fall Asleep Easier. [0:16:43]
What Slowing Down Can Look Like. [0:25:33]
Tanessa’s Favorite Wearable Tech and How She Incorporates it Into Her Work. [0:30:47]
What to Do When Either Your Deep Sleep or REM Sleep is Suffering. [0:36:20]

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Tanessa Shears

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The Becoming Limitless Podcast

12 Ways to Biohack Your Energy

Tanessa Shears is a health consultant specializing in helping high-achieving entrepreneurs transform their health to drive significant personal and professional breakthroughs. She takes a hands-on approach, guiding clients through detailed, holistic health plans while addressing stress and mental challenges. Inspired by her own success with sleep recovery and nutrition, Tanessa developed the Becoming Limitless Program, which has helped her and her clients achieve clarity, energy, and focus. Her program, grounded in modern science, is designed to help entrepreneurs reach their goals and optimize their daily performance.