So many people I know suffer from sleep disorders, and I used to be one of them. My sleeping schedule was a mess for the better half of a year, averaging 2-4 hours each night, so I know how bad it can get.
As a result of chronic sleep deprivation, I developed severe anxiety, depression, and PTSD as a result. But I found a way out, and that’s why I am passionate about sharing what I did with anyone who needs help.
In today’s episode, I’ll tell you exactly how I overcame my struggles with sleep, so you don’t have to go through that same misery. I also share my evening routine for falling and staying asleep, including which supplements I take, what I read to fall asleep faster, and the mindset that allows me to have a deep, restful sleep each night.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- What I learned about sleep supplementation by trying dozens of sleep aids.
- How I tweaked my nighttime ritual to improve my sleep drastically.
- How the food you eat and when you eat affects how well you sleep.
- Why different books activate different parts of your brain and how that affects sleep.
- The quality of your thoughts before bed affects how well-rested you’ll wake up the next morning.
AYG TWEETABLES
“Consider that the first thought you have in the morning is the last thought you had before you went to bed. The first feeling in the morning is the last feeling before bed.”
Hal Elrod Tweet
“If you eat right before bed, your body is not resting. Even though you might be technically asleep, your body is going to work. It's got to work all night to digest that food.”
Hal Elrod Tweet
THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Organifi makes the highest quality nutritional products, which are made from whole food ingredients (not synthetic vitamins) that I enjoy nearly every day, and have for many years. Visit Organifi.com/Hal, and use the code HAL at checkout to get 20% off of your entire order. I hope you find something there that you love! :^)
Rise by CURED Nutrition is a natural supplement made from CBD, Lions Mane and Ginseng (among others) that helps boost energy, performance and cognitive function. There’s no caffeine, no jitters and most importantly, no crash. Visit CuredNutrition.com/Hal and receive 20% off of your entire order. They have tons of other products as well, hopefully you’ll find something that works for you. :^)
RESOURCES:
- The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery: Letting Go of Who You’ve Been for Who You Can Become by Hal Elrod, Anna David, Joe Polish, and Honoree Corder
- The Miracle Morning Bedtime Affirmations
- Michael Breus
- Joe Polish
- Genius Network
- Herbal Roots Pure Organic Valerian Root Capsules
- How Magnesium Can Help You Sleep by Healthline.com
- Nature’s Answer Marine Based Magnesium
- Truvani – Natural Dead Sea Magnesium
- Sleep by Pure Mountain Botanicals
- Herbatonin
- Symphony Natural Health
- Zen by CURED Nutrition
- Night Caps by CURED Nutrition
- Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell
- Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament by Michael A. Singer
- The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer
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Copyright © 2023 Miracle Morning, LP and International Literary Properties LLC
Hal Elrod: Hello and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. This is Hal Elrod, your host, and thank you for joining me today. We’re going to talk about how to sleep better. I don’t know how you sleep. If you already sleep, great. You might skip this episode. I’m sure no matter what, you’ll get some tips that might enhance your evening routine. But I personally struggled with sleep for about six months, where I was sleeping 2 to 4 hours a night. It was a severe, chronic insomnia that led to me being diagnosed with PTSD, as I’ll talk about in today’s episode. And so, basically, today I’m telling you what I did to turn that around. How I went from sleeping 2 to 4 hours a night, suffering from horrific, I mean, I don’t know what word to describe. I was a mess. I was just a mess. And it affected every area of my life. Right? It affected my cognitive ability. It affected my relationships, my emotions. I mean, every area of my life was harmed by not sleeping well.
And so, I want to tell you how I turned it around. And today I’m going to tell you everything I do from what I did that kind of didn’t work and then how now what do I do 2 to 3 hours before bedtime? What do I do 90 minutes before bedtime? What do I do 45 minutes before bedtime? What do I do 15 minutes before bedtime? What’s my full-blown miracle evening, if you will? But it’s more really about what I do for supplementation, how do I control my eating, my drinking, that kind of thing. What do I do in terms of what books do I read at night specifically so that I can calm my mind and go to sleep, that kind of thing? So, there’s a lot today. Also, I’ll share with you how I was able to get in touch with one of the world’s top sleep experts, Dr. Michael Breus, to get his coaching while I was going through it and the one supplement he recommended that I still take to this day. All right. So, I hope this episode really helps you with your sleep because after suffering it through myself, I’m really on a mission to help my friends, my neighbors, my audience, anyone that I can to overcome the difficulties that come with poor sleep.
Before we dive in, I want to share with you our two sponsors that I want to thank today. The first one, Organifi, our long-time sponsor. I was going through something recently in terms of my immune system was down and to prevent getting sick, I always take two of Organifi’s supplements. I take their Critical Immune, which is a capsule, and I take their Immunity formula, which is a powder that you pour into a glass of water. You can add it to a smoothie or whatever. So, if you want to boost your immune system, I highly recommend Immunity and Critical Immune. And that’s kind of my one-two punch to boost my immune system as well as, of course, eating a really healthy diet. Head over to Organifi.com/Hal, don’t forget that part, and then you use the discount code “HAL” for 20% off your entire order. And of course, they’ve got a variety of products there from their famous Green Juice that the whole company launched from, their Red Juice which I take in the afternoon, and their protein powder, which I put in my smoothie every single day. It’s organic, it’s gluten-free. It is phenomenal. They’ve got chocolate and vanilla. So, Organifi.com/Hal. Use the discount code: HAL.
And then last but not least, our sponsor, CURED Nutrition, that actually makes the supplement that I take before bed which I talk about today and that is Night Caps. They also make Rise, which I take first thing in the morning for my cognitive function, helps with focus and clarity. And I take their Aura after my smoothie for gut health and immunity. So, CUREDNutrition.com is where you can check out their product line. And again, mostly organic ingredients and CBD and CBN infused in most of their formulas and they’ve got again a great variety of products. I use Organifi and CURED Nutrition together and it’s CUREDNutrition.com/Hal and then use that same discount code “HAL” for 20% off your order as a listener of this podcast.
And I wanted to mention one more thing before we start the episode because I forgot to talk about this throughout the episode. I talked a little bit about diet in terms of when to stop eating before bed to allow your food to digest and how that impacts your sleep. So, I go into that today but I didn’t talk about diet as a whole. That’s obviously a huge topic. But I just wanted to mention, if you’re eating crappy food, it affects your physiology, it affects your mental, emotional, and physical well-being in just about every way imaginable. I mean, to me, it’s the fundamental improvement you need to make if you want to feel better, think better, and sleep better. So, just something to keep in mind because I didn’t go into that in-depth today but just keep in mind that if you’re not sleeping well, your diet absolutely can be playing a part in it, whether it’s eating too much sugar, whether it’s eating fast food, you name it. Obviously, eating healthy should be, you know, I’m projecting. It should be one of our highest priorities to feel good and stay healthy.
All right. Without further ado, goal achievers and members of the Miracle Morning community, let’s talk about how to sleep better.
[EPISODE]
Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers, my friends, family members of the Miracle Morning community. I want to talk to you about how to sleep better because it seems like every other person I talk with is struggling with sleep. And as someone who has suffered from severe and chronic insomnia myself, where I went through a period of roughly six months that I was averaging 2 to 4 hours of sleep per night, which caused depression and anxiety, and hallucinations, and I was diagnosed with PTSD, I mean, I’ve talked about that time period in my life, not necessarily from the perspective of sleep but I’ve mentioned for sure that I wasn’t sleeping and it almost wrecked me. It almost ruined my marriage. It caused suicidal tendencies, ideation, you name it. And because I got through that and now I sleep like a baby, I fall asleep in like 15 minutes. I don’t wake up typically at all, and I want to pay that forward. When I hear someone talk about their sleep and that they’re not sleeping, I feel their pain and I want to help. And so, in fact, my wife and I were on double date the other night with one of our neighbors, and he said his sleep patterns are terrible, that some nights he sleeps 2 hours, and some nights he’ll might sleep five and it’s all over the place.
And so, I actually ordered him all of the supplements that I take for sleep, which I’m going to share with you today. He’s coming by today after school. Our kids go to the same school. And after he picks up his kids, he’s going to come by and give him a little sleep kit that I made for him. And I’m going to share with you again what those things are today. I want to share with you what I did to start, what I attempted to do to start sleeping during that time. First, I ordered every sleep supplement off of Amazon and I finally found the few that actually worked for me. But I mean, I literally ordered. If it said sleep in it, I ordered it. I tried it. You know, I’m a big believer, by the way, in throwing the kitchen sink at things, meaning rather than try one thing necessarily at a time so I can monitor and know what’s what. You know, if you’re suffering, cancer’s a good example of that, right? If you’re suffering, you’re like, “I don’t care what makes me better, what makes me healthy,” as long as it’s healthy, by the way. I should mention that. So, when I say throw the kitchen sink at it, I’m not going to go get a bunch of pharmaceutical sleep aids, although, did I try that during that time? I’m sure I did. I’m sure I was desperate. I’m sure I tried that, too, but I definitely didn’t stay there.
And if I did try, it didn’t work. I literally don’t remember. I might have, you know. I’m sure we’ve tried some Ambien for my cancer journey because that was prescribed when I had cancer. Didn’t work for me then and it didn’t work for me when I was going through this chronic sleep deprivation. But ordered everything off Amazon. And when I mentioned that throwing the kitchen sink at something when I had cancer, right, I did every natural holistic practice that was available to me. And so, not to mention I did Western medicine as well. You know, I did chemotherapy. And so, it was like I literally did everything. I’m like, I want to survive for my wife and kids and myself and my family. I want to beat cancer. So, I’m going to throw the kitchen. I’m going to do everything that I read about, that I learn about, that’s vetted, that’s legitimate, that may contribute to beating cancer. And I’m going to stop putting anything in my body, sugar, chemicals, whatever it is that might contribute to my cancer. The irony, which I may have told you this before, is that one of my chemotherapy, actually multiple chemotherapies that I was taking, cause cancer. That’s one of the side effects if you will. But I think it’s not a side effect. It’s an effect if it causes it, right?
They call it a side effect. It’s actually an effect. It causes cancer. But I remember I was getting cancer one day and I was reading the side of the chemotherapy bag that was hanging on the IV tower next to me, and it said, “May cause leukemia.” And I was like, “What the… What kind of backwards ‘medicine’ is this, that I have leukemia and the drug that I’m taking to try to beat leukemia causes leukemia?” Right? So, anyway, that’s another episode. So, the first thing I did, I ordered every sleep supplement off of Amazon, liquid, capsule, you name it. Second thing I did was I consulted Dr. Michael Breus. Now, Dr. Michael Breus is known as the sleep doctor. He’s been on, I think, Dr. Oz and a lot of shows. I mean, he’s a world-renowned sleep expert. And it just happens to be that he was in the Miracle Morning documentary. My friend Joe Polish, who’s the co-author of the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery and the founder of Genius Network, but Joe, I was talking to him one day and he’s like, “How you doing, buddy?” I’m like, “I’m really struggling, man. I’m not sleeping. I’m depressed.”
For me, I don’t try to sugarcoat anything or put on a happy face. I try to be as real and authentic as I can, because otherwise, if I would have said, “Oh, I’m fine, I’m great. How are you?” I wouldn’t have got the help I needed. So, I encourage you not to be a victim but to be transparent with people. So, I let him know, “Man, I’m not sleeping,” and he said, “Have you thought about reaching out to Michael Breus, you know, the sleep doctor?” And I was like, “Dude, it shows you how messed up I am from not sleeping that you’d think that’d be the first thing I’d think of is, ‘Hey, why don’t I call the guy whose cell phone number I have because he was in the Miracle Morning Movie and he’s a world-renowned sleep expert.’ Duh.” So, got Michael on the phone. We did, I think, one or two calls and got some advice from him. So, I’ll incorporate that in what I talk about today. And then last but not least, I tweaked my evening ritual and, interestingly enough, I tweaked what I thought about before I went to bed. And I’ll talk about that here tonight. I’m going to give you guys like the regimen of what I do now, 2 to 3 hours before bed, what I do 90 minutes before bed, what I do 45 minutes before bed, what I do 15 minutes before bed.
But a big part of it was shifting what I was thinking about. So, this sleep deprivation thing happened in the first half of 2020. Basically, it started in like right around December 1st of 2019, and it went for roughly six months until I stopped taking chemo, May of 2020. And that’s when my sleep got better, interestingly enough, is when I got off pharmaceuticals. So, I guess that I should include that in the strategies. I stopped taking pharmaceutical drugs. You know, that is true. I did not ever take any pharmaceutical drugs to overcome the sleep. I remember. I’m going to do this naturally because I believed and I still believe that pharmaceutical drugs, chemotherapy, and the steroids, and all the things that they had me taking for cancer, I believe that those are what caused my sleep deprivation. I don’t know what else led to it. And I also know that once I stopped taking my pharma meds, then I started sleeping again. So, I would imagine there’s a correlation there that started taking these drugs, pharmaceutical drugs = stop sleeping, stop taking the drugs = started sleeping again. Pretty common sense, potential cause and effect. Of course, I don’t have any data. I just have anecdotal evidence.
But to me, anecdotal evidence is one of the most over-underrated and disregarded evidence. It’s like, “Oh yeah, all these people did this thing and got this result, but we don’t have a study to show it. So, you know, it doesn’t count. It’s just anecdotal.” Or I’m going to look at what other people do, what result that they get. And if I want that result, I’m going to model what those people did. So, hopefully, what I share with you today will be helpful for you. And I’m going to keep this relatively straightforward to the point and just kind of go through this very tactically.
So, I’ll start here. Two to three hours before bedtime, I eat my last meal. Ideally, I’d do it 3 hours before bedtime, but it just depends. My wife makes dinner every night, bless her heart. She’s amazing. She takes great care of our family making homemade dinners every night and they’re nutritious as well. But sometimes my preference is we’re ready to eat by 5 p.m. I get off work at 5 or ready by 5. But sometimes it’s 5:30 or 6 or 6:30 or whatever. But, ideally, I go to bed, I just bumped it up earlier to 8:30 p.m. I was going to bed around 9:00, 9:30. But right now, I’ve got this huge writing project and so I really wanted to get back to waking up at 3:30 a.m. because that gives me just a really long runway for a Miracle Morning straight into a couple of hours of really focused writing when my mind is, you know, prime in the morning. But anyway, so I’m going to bed at 8:30, so I try to be done eating by between 5:30 and 6:30 and gives me a couple of hours to digest food. And the reason for that is that digesting food is one of the most labor-some processes that your body endures. And if you eat right before bed, your body is not resting. Even though you might be technically asleep, your body is going to work. It’s got to work all night to digest that food.
And it usually takes 2 to 3 hours, depending how big and how hearty the meal is. If it’s a bunch of fried food and stuff, it might take 4 hours to digest it. But if you’re eating a decently healthy dinner, then 2 to 3 hours should be pretty sufficient. And then that way when you go to bed, your food’s already digested and your body doesn’t have to take that task on while you are sleeping. And I also stopped drinking probably not 3 hours. I usually try to finish drinking when I take my last supplement. I just sip it, which is like 45. So, I stopped drinking typically like 2 hours before bed. And then there’s a couple of sips just to take a couple of these supplements that I’m about to share with you. So, that’s nothing there because I try not to get up and pee in the middle of the night because, obviously, it interrupts your sleep and that’s not necessarily a good thing. You know, if you’re waking up to go pee, that’s not your body saying, “Hey, we got all the sleep we need. We should wake up now.” No. Your bladder is full and now you have to wake up and disrupt your sleep cycle, which might have been right in the middle of REM. And then that may affect how you feel the next morning. You know, back when I was going through my sleep deprivation, if I woke up, I did not fall back asleep. And maybe you’ve experienced that, right? Couldn’t fall back to sleep. For the most part, I was wired once I woke up going through that PTSD phase of my life.
All right. Two to three hours before bed, eat your last meal. Give yourself time to digest and stop drinking fluids so you have the ability to empty your entire bladder before your head hits the pillow. 90 minutes before bedtime, so, for me, this is at 7 p.m. right now, again, if you’re going to bed at 10, this would be at 8:30 p.m., but 90 minutes before bedtime, I take two supplements. I take organic valerian root and you can find this brand, I’m holding it in my hands right here, Herbal Roots Organic Valerian. It’s organic valerian root. You can get this on Amazon.com. Two capsules, 900 milligrams of valerian root. And I actually am down to one capsule, so I took two for quite a while but once my sleep got dialed in and a lot of it was psychological, by the way.
You know, you think about this like I had not slept for so long that it literally created trauma, I mean, PTSD, major trauma for me to where when bedtime would approach like an hour before bed, I would literally start shaking because I was dreading staying awake all night and all these negative thoughts going through my head and thinking, “Oh my gosh, sleep is so important to health and if I’m not sleeping, my cancer is going to come back.” I mean, it was this out-of-control spiral. Again, this started in around November 2019, lasted for six months. So, valerian root helps your body and mind to relax. It’s been used for hundreds of years. It supports restful sleep and a healthy stress response. And grab that on Amazon. Herbal Roots is the brand. So, I take that 90 minutes before bed and then I also take magnesium. Now, magnesium, I was doing a little research so I could give you some sort of technical answer as to why, because I remember that a lot of times I research and I don’t have a great memory, so I forget why I landed on something that I’m taking. I just remember that at the time I decided this was the right thing to take. I had done the research. According to Healthline.com, magnesium helps activate neurotransmitters that are responsible for calming the body and mind.
So, the brand that I take is Nature’s Answer. It’s a marine-based magnesium that’s derived from red algae and seaweed. I got it on Amazon. I actually buy mine at a local store called Sprouts because I just try to support my local economy whenever I can. So, if there’s anything I can get locally and not have to order on Amazon, I do. I actually pay like I think it’s like $8 more per bottle or something at my local Sprouts store, but I’d rather support the local business. But again, you get on Amazon, Nature’s Answer Marine-Based Magnesium and then they didn’t have any in stock when I went online. So, the one I got from my buddy, my neighbor that I’m giving to today, the brand is Truvani Magnesium from the Dead Sea. So, I have not taken that yet but that’s what I got my friend because they were out of the marine-based magnesium that I normally take. So, 90 minutes before bed, I take the valerian root and magnesium and I find that that helps my body and mind to calm down.
And then 45 minutes before bedtime, this is where I go all in. I take quite a bit. I take Sleep by Pure Mountain Botanicals. Now, this was from Amazon. This was the sleep supplement I found that worked the best for me. It actually has valerian root, it has hop strobiles. I might not pronounce that right, fresh skullcap herb, passion flower herb, chamomile flower, fresh California poppy herb, and three milligrams of melatonin, as well as non-GMO soy lecithin, vegetable cellulose, medium chain triglycerides. That I find works really, really well for me. So, again, it’s called Sleep and it’s by Pure Mountain Botanicals. And I get it on Amazon. That’s the first thing I take 45 minutes before bedtime. The next thing I take is Night Caps. You’ve heard me mention those often in the commercial for CURED Nutrition, one of our sponsors. I love this product and it has CBD and CBN oil. I believe it’s 30 milligrams of CBD and 5 milligrams of CBN oil and those I believe CBD helps you feel tired so you can fall asleep and then CBN, I believe, helps you stay asleep, if I’m remembering that correctly. Actually, what does it say here on the, oh, it just says, “From anxious to calm, from restless to rested. Take one capsule 30 minutes before bed.” I take it 45 because I like a little extra runway.
So, I take Night Caps by CURED Nutrition. And again, you can get 20% off of those if you use the discount code “HAL” at CUREDNutrition.com/Hal. So, you might as well all listeners of the podcast, myself included, we get 20% off if you go to CUREDNutrition.com/Hal and then use the discount code: HAL. The next product I take was recommended to me by Dr. Michael Breus, the sleep doctor that I mentioned to you a few minutes ago. Now, Dr. Michael Breus said, “Hal, do you take melatonin?” And I said, “No.” I said, “I have not.” And now that I think about it, yeah, I don’t know if I was taking that sleep supplement that I just mentioned that has melatonin in it. I might have been and I just didn’t remember that it had melatonin in it but specifically melatonin supplements. I told him, “No, I’m not taking it because I can’t find one that’s natural. They’re all just lab-made. I don’t know what the heck they’re made out of.” And he said, “If I can give you one that’s natural, would you take it?” He said, “It’s literally made from grass.” I was like, “Yeah, it sounds good. Take some grass.” And so, the product is called Herbatonin. And I’ll put all these in the show notes at MiracleMorning.com/467. This is Episode 467 so MiracleMorning.com/467. I’ll have all these in the show notes so that you can, you know, if you’re driving right now or something and you can’t write them down, that is fine.
So, Herbatonin. Now, they make a 0.3 milligram very small dose. That’s what I take most nights because I’m taking the sleep supplement that already has 3 milligrams of melatonin. So, I then combine that with the Herbatonin. So, that’s a 0.3 milligram. They also have a 3-milligram plant melatonin. On certain nights where either I’m having trouble like I feel wired or whatever reason, I just want to, I’m like, “Dude, I feel like I might not sleep tonight,” I will take the 3-milligram Herbatonin in combination with the 3-milligram melatonin. And I will tell you this, I can’t remember the name of the doctor, but I worked with a doctor who was phenomenal. A friend recommended him to me. He’s pretty local near Austin here. And she had this, like, autoimmune disease and every doctor had tried to help her. No, doc, nothing helped her. And then she found this doctor locally. I forget his name. It’s been like a year or two since I worked with him but I said, “You know, does melatonin make it so that you don’t produce your own melatonin and you can’t, then I won’t go to sleep?” And he said, “I wouldn’t worry about that.” I don’t know if I finished the story that he was the only person that was able to help her. Did I say that? Maybe.
Yeah. So, she just raves about this guy and then I guess she’s recommended a ton of people to him. They rave about him. He’s helped people cure things that were considered incurable. So, I was like, “All right. I trust this friend of mine, and I’m going to give this a shot.” But anyway, he personally takes like 20 milligrams of melatonin a night. Now, he’s older, he’s like 65 or something and he said the older you get, the less melatonin your body produces. And so, that’s where I thought 20 milligrams seemed pretty intense. But he said that from his professional medical opinion that taking melatonin was not problematic. So, again, actually the brand is Symphony Natural Health but if you go to Amazon, I would just search Herbatonin, and again, there’s 3 milligrams or 0.3 milligrams. I have both with me at all times, including when I travel so that I can choose the serving size based on which I think would be necessary. Usually, it’s the 0.3 milligrams. So, those are my sleep supplements. I want to mention one more and it’s Zen by CURED Nutrition. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is I don’t take this because there’s an ingredient in it that I am allergic to. I’m allergic to ashwagandha.
And if I told you how I found that out, I don’t think we have time. I’ve got a, yeah. I’ll tell you that later. But anyway, I’m allergic to ashwagandha and this product Zen by CURED Nutrition has ashwagandha. So, every month I get Zen from CURED Nutrition. They send me like a little package of stuff to see what I like. And my neighbor, she loves this. And so, I literally just get it for her. And so, it’s Zen. So, you might try that. Again, I’m not recommending it because I haven’t taken it. I’m only recommending it based on the fact that my other neighbor, she loves it. And so, this I have some right now and I’m giving it to the other neighbor that I just mentioned that I had dinner with that has sleep problems. I’m putting it in with the kit I’m giving to him and just letting him know that, “I don’t take this but you can try it.” So, throwing that in there. The other thing I do 45 minutes before sleep, so there are three supplements I take. I take Sleep by Pure Mountain Botanicals. I take Night Caps by CURED Nutrition. I take Herbatonin 0.3 milligrams by Symphony Natural Health. And then that’s when I start reading a book that here’s an important piece of it.
In terms of what book I read every night, I start reading at 45 minutes before bedtime but it’s a book that I’ve already read so that I don’t have to underline it, take notes, that I don’t do really like learn new information. So, it’s a book I’ve already read, and it’s a book that makes me feel peaceful. It’s a book I’ve already read and a book that makes me feel peaceful. So, it’s what I’m recommending to you. So, all I’m reading are the underlines. Now, I don’t know if you do that. I underline everything that I would ever want to reread in a book. So, I underline probably anywhere from one-fourth of a book to one-third of a book. I mean, I underline anything. And the point, though, is it’s a lot of underlining, you might think, but it’s like, “Well, okay, I can go back now and I can read that entire book.” If I’ve underlined roughly a fourth of it, I can reread the entire book in terms of what I want to remember in one-fourth of the time, rather than having to read the whole book again to get the ideas. So, it’s really an efficient way to turn a book into a resource that you can go back and visit. So, those are the only books that I read at night. I don’t read any new book that I would have.
Now, if you’re reading fiction, it’s probably fine to read a new book but I don’t read fiction. Not that anything is wrong with that. In fact, that’s actually something I probably should do more of but I don’t typically read fiction. And so, since I’m reading like self-help or books on spirituality or parenting or marriage or business, I don’t want to have to use major brain power to try to recall the information that I’m reading and underline and decide what’s worthy of underlining. So, all I do is grab a book. I’ve got a whole drawer full of books that make me feel good. Like Byron Katie, Loving What Is. That’s a book I reread. Right now, I’m actually rereading two books and I’m rereading, like, literally, I love these two books to where I want to master them. It’s Michael Singer’s books, both of them, Living Untethered, his newest book, and then his classic book, The Untethered Soul. Right now, those are the two books on my bedside and depending on what I feel like, grab one of those and I just pick up a chapter and I just reread something I’ve already read. And it makes me feel peaceful and it reminds me of, you know, my spiritual truths, etcetera, etcetera. So, that’s part of my 45-minute before bedtime routine is I take those three supplements, and then I read a book that I’ve already read that makes me feel peaceful.
And then last piece of my sleep routine is 15 minutes before bedtime, just simply I put the book down and I just meditate in a state of gratitude. You don’t even call it meditate. I just literally sit there in a state of gratitude. I think of what am I grateful for as I close my eyes to drift off to sleep. And I’ve shared that part with you before, right? But you consider that the first thought you have in the morning is the last thought you had before you went to bed. The first feeling in the morning is the last feeling before bed. I wake up feeling peaceful and grateful because that’s how I fall asleep. Now, a bonus, if it serves you, is to read the Miracle Morning Bedtime Affirmations. I don’t do that because I’ve read those for many, many, many years, probably five years. They’re just ingrained in me. So, it’s like they’re a part of me. I don’t need to read the affirmations anymore because I’ve lived them for so long. They’re a part of who I am. But I do want to throw that in as a bonus because they are extremely effective if you don’t already have them memorized and embody the Miracle Morning Bedtime Affirmations, you can go to TMMBook.com to download those. Again, that’s TMM like The Miracle Morning, TMMBook.com to download the Miracle Morning Bedtime Affirmations.
[CLOSING]
Hal Elrod: But that’s all I do. That’s it. That’s my routine. So, it starts 2 to 3 hours before bedtime with eating my last meal. Then I’ve got my 90-minute before-bedtime supplement ritual. I’ve got my 45-minute before-bedtime supplement ritual, and reading a book that makes me feel good, peaceful. And then 15 minutes before, I just lay there and I literally fall asleep in 15 minutes. I sleep for 7 hours. And after a long period of time, roughly half a year of just nightmarish sleep patterns, I am so grateful to be sleeping again. And I hope, I truly hope that if you’ve struggled with sleep or you’re struggling to sleep right now, that this ritual, this routine is helpful for you. And maybe you don’t adopt every single piece of it, maybe it’s just certain pieces, but whichever pieces you adopt, I hope it’s helpful. And please leave me a comment and let me know if this resonated with you. If you’re going to implement this, you can leave a comment at MiracleMorning.com/467, and again, the show notes will be there as well where I will put a list of all these supplements and probably links to them and all that good stuff. So, that’s it. Goal achievers, members of the Miracle Morning community, friends, family, loved ones, I love you so much. Thanks for being here and I will talk to you all next week.