How to Sleep Better So You Can Climb Better

In my nutrition sessions with climbers, I ask a lot of very personal questions: when do you eat, when do you poop every day, DO you poop every day, how much do you sleep?

Through all of this questioning, I’ve discovered that most people I work with have trouble sleeping (and if you’re wondering, most of them are indeed pooping every day). So in this article, I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned in a crash course on sleep this year so that you can sleep better…. so that you can climb better.

If you’ve ever struggled with insomnia on any level, you know that it affects every part of you.

How Sleep Affects You

your mood
anxiety levels
hunger and food cravings
desire for caffeine and alcohol
motivation
focus
climbing performance
recovery from exercise

Lack of sleep (anything under 7 hours a night-ish) has been scientifically shown to affect our mental state, our immune system, our athletic performance, and risk of injury, among MANY other things.

It’s important, and we need more of it. And we need even more sleep than the average person because we’re athletes!

As a disclaimer, I am not a sleep specialist or scientist. I am a layperson with a LOT of experience with not sleeping, but I’ve found some things that work really well for me. Additionally, as a nutritionist, I often help clients with sleep and I see amazing things happen with their sleep quality and quantity when they change their diets. So I’m going to tell you about all of it.

My Sleep Story

As a little background, I’ll get a bit vulnerable here and tell you that I’ve gone through a couple major depressive episodes that were precipitated by a lack of sleep and taking terrible care of my nervous system. Basically, I got anxious, didn’t sleep, got more anxious because I wasn’t sleeping (for weeks and months), and then ended up in full melt-down complete disaster mode.

I tried taking several SSRI’s, among other drugs, but some of them would actually keep me awake instead of helping me sleep, so those didn’t work. I finally had a brilliant psychiatrist resort to a little-known medication called Mirtazapine (aka Remeron), and it made me sleep through the night immediately upon taking it the first night. I was on that drug off and on for about 10 years until fully weaning myself off of it last year.

Figuring out how to sleep without the drug has basically been my life’s work since then (joking but sorta serious?), and MAN have I learned a lot.

We’ll start with nutrition, which I’ve been working on to improve my own and others’ sleep since 2007, and then we’ll get into some other strategies I’ve been diving into for the past 6 months. I’ll tell you my experiences with all of them throughout.

Nutrition

I talked a lot about nutrition and sleep in this blog post a while back, and everything I said there still stands. Basically, when your blood glucose is mis-managed all day, you then go to bed and if you can fall asleep despite your blood glucose being wonky, a lot of times I hear about people waking up in the middle of the night. They wake up, their mind is racing, and they can’t go back to sleep at all or it takes them a while to do so.

If you’re wondering, here are some common reasons why people’s blood glucose is “mis-managed.

not eating breakfast
eating too many carbs
eating too few carbs
not eating enough calories
not eating enough protein
having meals through the day that are wildly variable in calorie amounts
not having balanced meals (macronutrients)
having too much time between meals
exercising in a fasted state
drinking too much caffeine
drinking too much alcohol
or some combo of any of those

Anyway, what happens with mis-managed blood glucose and sleep is this:

You go to sleep and your blood glucose drops during the night when you’re sleeping. Your body does not like that – it’s really stressful for it – so it secretes stress hormones to make your body secrete stored glucose from your liver and get you through to your next meal. Those stress hormones wake you up and that’s why it’s hard to fall back to sleep. Or why it’s hard to get to sleep in the first place.

Then you wake up in the morning and you’re not hungry because those stress hormones are still coursing through your body suppressing your appetite. Then you wait to eat breakfast until after you’ve exercised and the cycle starts all over again.

I’ve written and spoken extensively about how to fix your diet and take care of all of this, and you can find all of that here. And I know changing your diet seems daunting, but I want to encourage you by saying that I’ve had clients start sleeping better within just a couple DAYS of making very simple, easy changes to their diets to manage their blood glucose better! It’s not hard. If you want personal help with that beyond those articles and podcast episodes, you can work with me or do my Nutrition Program for Climbers.

For me personally, if I don’t eat enough during the day, I can’t sleep. If I don’t eat a big enough dinner, I can’t sleep. I have on many occasions gotten out of bed at 1am or later to have a snack, and then I can go to sleep. Particularly if I don’t get enough carbs, I won’t sleep well. So get those carbs, but not too many. It’s a balancing act always.

Caffeine

If you aren’t sleeping well, the absolute first thing you should try doing is decreasing–or better yet–completely removing any caffeine from your life. Yes, that is harsh and you might be mad at me right now for even suggesting it, but that’s ok. It’s science. Caffeine is a stimulant. It makes you feel more awake because it’s sending a message to your body that something stressful is happening and that your glands and organs should secrete stress hormones to deal with that thing.

We’re made to think that caffeine GIVES us energy, but really, it’s just telling your body to work harder to give itself more energy. After a while this can cause real hormonal burnout for a lot of people (I see it often). Either way, it’s a stimulant, and depending on your sensitivity to caffeine, even if you only have one cup of coffee in the morning, it can still affect your sleep. Even if you only have one cup of green or black tea, or decaf coffee, which has caffeine in it, it can still affect your sleep.

Just experiment with it. Try having no caffeine for a month and see how you feel at the end of the month once your body has adjusted and fully detoxed. Then email me and say, “Thank you, Neely, for at first ruining my life and then changing my life forever.” 😉

I personally don’t consume caffeine, unless I’m trying to send a route that is VERY important to me. It gives me a little athletic edge, but I don’t like messing with my hormones too much and it makes me feel anxious, so it’s not a regular part of my life. When I do have caffeine, it definitely affects my sleep.

Digestion

This is a big one for me. If I eat something weird or if I eat too soon before bed (maybe less than 2 hours), I won’t sleep or I at least won’t sleep well. I see this a lot with clients who eat a small snack before their evening climbing session, come home late and eat a big dinner (and dinner is almost always people’s biggest meal of the day), and then they have trouble sleeping. They know it’s affecting them, but they don’t know what to do about it.

Here’s what you do about it.

Eat a bigger meal/snack before your climbing session and a smaller dinner when you get home. The meal beforehand doesn’t need to be a standard “dinner.” It can just be a bigger snack, a protein shake; a bunch of yogurt, granola, and protein powder; an egg sandwich with avocado, 2 protein bars instead of 1, whatever you can digest well. Just make it bigger than your normal snack – more like a meal but comprised of snacky, sweet foods. It’ll help you climb better for longer and it’ll solve your late dinner quandary.

If you’re just having digestion issues in general that are affecting your sleep, you can try experimenting with different foods that might be affecting you negatively: gluten, dairy, beans, and grains are the most common offenders. Start at the top, take it out of your diet for 5 days, see how you feel, then reassess and try the next food.

But you can also take a digestive enzyme spectrum supplement with your meals and it’ll take care of a lot of the bloating and indigestion you’re having if you don’t have anything serious going on in there.

For me personally, if I eat something that gives me indigestion, I’ll take digestive bitters (bitter herbs in tincture form), which is an ancient remedy for stomach stuff that actually works. I like these.

Temperature

It’s very simple: If I’m too hot, I don’t sleep. If I’m too cold, I don’t sleep. I’ve discovered that my house needs to be at an arctic 62 degrees F in order for me to sleep well. This is terrible for the planet in the summer, but very good information for me to finally have. Conversely, if it’s too hot and I can’t cool down, no sleep. Or if I get into bed with cold feet and they then supercirculate and get really frickin’ hot, it’s over. I’ve had many sleepless nights just because of hot feet. I’ve resorted to going outside barefoot in the snow to cool them off just to get some sleep.

So now, I have a perfectly curated set of blankets that I can take off and reapply if necessary, a heating pad for just the right amount of time on very cold nights (but not too much time because I get too hot), and I warm my feet in the bathtub right before bed if my feet are super cold so they don’t supercirculate.

I feel like a diva saying all of this, but that’s how important sleep is to me. It’s the most important.

Do whatever you need to do to get your sleep temperature spot on. Experiment with different temperatures, blankets, pajamas, heating pads, bed sizes, or window air conditioners if you don’t have central AC. Make your bedroom cool down an hour before bedtime so it’s already cold by the time you get into bed.

My fellow insomniac friend recently realized she was sleeping too close to her husband in their small bed, causing her to overheat and not sleep. They got a bigger bed and now she’s sleeping. She also realized her old bed was retaining a lot of heat and her new bed, which has a wool top, doesn’t retain heat at all.

And now I want a wool bed.

Exercise

While exercise can positively affect sleep, it can also rev up our system if we exercise too close to bedtime, making it harder to sleep. More importantly for this blog post, overtraining (exercising too much) can make you into a raging insomniac. I had a client last week tell me she’s been sleeping no more than 6 hours a night (often less than that) for years. When we looked at her training regimen–which she’s been following for years–it was off the charts:

Uphill ski sprints several times a week before breakfast
Long runs several times a week
5 climbing sessions per week
3 weight lifting strength sessions per week

It was a lot, and I know–because I’ve seen it so many times before–that if she just did LESS exercise she would sleep better. Not only that, she would also perform better in all of her sports. If you’re doing even close to this amount of exercise and you’re not sleeping well, take a week off of all exercise and see what happens. Again, you may be mad at me for even suggesting such a preposterous thing: take an entire week OFF? Yes, do it. I double dog dare you.

Then you can make wise, informed choices about how much exercise you do going forward because you’ll have a better understanding of your baseline.

Your Nervous System

This is the pithy part of sleep. Everyone’s like, “I’m too stressed out to sleep,” and people are like, “You should just meditate!” As if 10 minutes of Headspace a day is actually going to make a difference. Meditation apps are the absolute tippy top of the iceberg, and we all know it.

For many of us, there is some deep, unresolved trauma and emotional chaos lying beneath the surface that we don’t want to deal with–and that most of us don’t know HOW to deal with. All of that trauma has molded us into the anxious people we are, and our nervous systems feel the brunt of that every day all day. If you have deep, debilitating trauma, please get therapy to deal with it.

Here are some ways I’ve learned to actually chill out my nervous system. I don’t think one of these strategies is enough, to be crystal clear. Our nervous systems require constant monitoring and coddling when we’re chronically overstimulated. In order to make lasting changes, we have to create better, calmer habits all day, every day. And these are just things that have worked for me – there are countless other ways to calm your life down.

Therapy

Having been in therapy for the past 20 years, I highly recommend Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) (this is my amazing therapist of 7 years). I have a wild nervous system to this day, but I was a colossal mess before DBT and IFS helped me sort out my life and calm down my brain. Five stars, would recommend to a friend.

These types of therapy have given me the tools to work through stuff on my own, even outside of my therapy sessions. I live a more rational, grounded life now because of these therapy modalities, and I have tried a LOT of therapy styles that didn’t do anything for me.

Coaching

Having gone to school to become a life coach, I know the value of the work, so I do a lot of coaching on myself that has improved my nervous system and sleep habits quite a bit.

Just last night I was having a hard time sleeping because I’m going through a difficult social scenario right now. I coached myself to acknowledge what emotions were underlying the constant chatter in my mind that was keeping me awake (I was feeling sad and worried). Then I sat there for a while and validated the emotions until I was so relieved I started crying. I really just needed to hear that what I was feeling was ok and normal, and saying it to ourselves is the most powerful way to hear it. After that, I felt so calm that I fell asleep.

Coaching has changed my life immensely, and I’m here for you if you want coaching to help you in similar ways.

Remove Excess Stimulation from Your Life

Do you have a job that’s super stimulating and stressful? Can you create some boundaries at your job that will make it less stressful? Do you come home from that job and watch really stimulating TV? Could you watch less TV or choose shows that are calming? Great British Baking Show style, perhaps?

Do you have super intense relationships with people? Can you work on those relationships (again with the boundaries) to create less stress?

Do you have young kids who take up most of your spare time and overwhelm your nervous system? Can you carve out quiet time for yourself when nobody is allowed to bother Mom/Dad, or maybe you actually leave the premises to just be by yourself? Even just for 10 minutes a day?

You get the point. We think our lives are just the way they are and there’s no changing them, but we do have quite a bit of agency when we decide we want things to be different… when we decide that our nervous system, sleep, mental health, and physical health are worth making uncomfortable requests for.

Stoicism

I went to Greece last November with a nervous system in turmoil and a lot of insomnia after having just gotten off of my medication. Many “no-sleep” nights, as I lovingly refer to them. I had a crazy time over there and a few major epiphanies.

One was that I wanted stoicism as my life philosophy. I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast and in other blog posts, but basically, stoicism is the pursuit of tranquility and joy, and I’ve been devouring books about it to put it into practice in my life. It has been nothing short of a godsend for me, and I highly recommend you check out these books if you’re interested in learning more.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Art of Ancient Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine
The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine
Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday
Reasons Not to Worry by Brigid Delaney

Stoicism has taught me how important it is to remove things in my life that are causing stress, negativity, and undue stimulation. It’s taught me how to figure out if a thing is worth worrying about, and how to stay true to my character and values. It’s taught me how to appreciate even the mundane things I do every day and how to be overwhelmingly grateful for the big things I have in my life.

Because of this, I’m much calmer now and much more content, to the point where friends comment on it. My sleep has benefitted immensely. I don’t want to jinx anything, but let’s just say that when I wake up in the morning and my husband asks me how I slept, I can often answer, “I slept like a champion!” And my mood and productivity are evidence of that.

Yoga Nidra

I’ve also started doing yoga nidra most days. I tried mindfulness meditation many times, but it never stuck with me. I always found it to be, well, boring.

Yoga nidra is just a guided meditation where a person speaks softly and slowly, guiding you to focus briefly on certain parts of your body, relaxing them along the way, and doing specific breathing patterns throughout. I really love Ally Boothroyd’s YouTube channel. Here’s a 20-minute yoga nidra session to get you started. I’ve tried other people’s channels and she is definitely the most skilled and relaxing of them all. She has about one million videos to choose from, too.

By the end of these sessions, which I do either in the middle of my day or at night before bed, my in-breaths and out-breaths are each like 10 seconds long with a pause in the middle equally as long, just by virtue of how relaxed I am. It’s incredible and the calmness definitely stays with me through the day, and my sleep is great when I do it.

Breathing

Which brings me to my next sleep strategy: breathing. Let’s do a little experiment. Breathe normally for the next minute and count how many breaths you take (a breath being the inhale and exhale combined). How many was it? Was it more than 5.5? If it was, then you’re breathing too much. Ok, really only Buddhist monks breathe at a rate of 5.5 all day, so don’t worry.

But read this book to find out more:

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Holy moly did this book blow my mind. It’s fascinating! The main point of this book is simple: as often as you can, breathe out for 5.5 seconds and in for 5.5 seconds. That’s it. You don’t even need to read the book (but you should).

So when I can’t sleep, or when I’m anxious, I do that for as long as I can concentrate on it, and I’m immediately calmer. It’s put me to sleep a lot of times now. If that doesn’t work, try something even more relaxing:

Breathe in for 8-10 seconds filling up your lungs completely
Hold your breath for about 7-10 seconds
Breathe all the way out, slowly
Repeat a few times
Always through your nose

And as often as you can, let there be space between your exhales and your inhales. I’ve found this to be really important. When you’re trying to relax, breathe out, then don’t breathe in for 2-5 seconds (or as long as you can) and then calmly breathe in again.

Try it, it works!

Do Your ABC’s

This one gets credited to Paige de Kock’s (Claassen’s) cousin, who I want to thank publicly because it’s really been giving me a fun way to go to sleep. This helps stop the racing thoughts by giving you a specific task to focus on that’s mundane enough to allow your thoughts to wander off… eventually all the way off to sleep. It sounds silly, but here’s what you do.

Pick a category (animals, foods, places, etc.) and go through the alphabet naming one thing in the category for each letter. So if you choose animals, you’d say A for alligator, B for bobcat, C for chinchilla, and so on.

Last night I made it all the way to the letter R, and then it was lights out.

Recount Your Day

This one helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something that day when it’s so easy to feel like you just left a lot of things undone. That kind of unbuttoned feeling can keep people up all night just spinning, so this helps to tie a bow on your day to let your brain rest.

Recount the day from morning to night and think of all the things you accomplished. Then take a moment to acknowledge yourself for each of them. (Got out of bed, took a shower, made breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, wrote a blog post, published a podcast episode, wrote some challenging email responses, climbed at the gym, etc, all of it.) See how far you can get through your day. We’re not recounting the bad things that happened, by the way. We’re focusing on the things we did and accomplished.

This always makes me feel really warm and fuzzy inside because we rarely acknowledge our own accomplishments – we look to others to do that (which rarely happens). So it’s good practice for validating your climbing progress and accomplishments, too.

Gratitude Practice

You know how they say that forcing yourself to smile can make your body release endorphins to make you happier? This is kind of like that, but for sleep. I actually do this now any time I’m spinning in my head, day or night. But at night it really breaks the cycle to let me sleep.

Think of all the things you’re grateful for that day and in general. The list usually becomes longer than you think it will be, and you’ll find your worries just sort of melting away. It’s like a smile for your nervous system.

Reading

This one was actually pretty life-altering for me. I stopped reading at night for a long time after I read the Game of Thrones series (which I read before it was cool, by the way). That’s because I didn’t want to put the books down and I would stay up until like 3am reading and not be able to fall asleep due to all the murdering and raping I’d just witnessed in my mind’s eye.

That’s not the kind of reading I’m talking about. Find yourself a nice, relaxing book about things that are lovely and interesting. Like that Breath book I told you about above or any of the stoicism books. This is a big reason why I’ve gotten so into self-help books lately, because they help my self sleep. I’m never stressed out reading them and they always make me tired, but in a good way. I read on my kindle so it’s dark in my room to help lull me to sleep.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel the same way about reading and its effects on sleep. Turn off the TV, even just for 15 minutes before bed, and read.

Book about Sleep!

OH and I almost forgot! I read a book about sleep, too (of course I did) and I highly recommend it! It really helped me feel less stressed out about not sleeping, and it gave me strategies to sleep better.

The Sleep Prescription: 7 Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest by Aric A Prather, PhD

Conclusion

Wow. That was way longer than I thought it would be. I apparently have a LOT to say about sleep! There’s a lot more to say here about sleep hygiene that I didn’t cover: having a dark room, using a white noise machine, supplementation (don’t take vitamin B’s before bed! and make sure you know what supplements contain caffeine), sleep masks, etc. And then there’s blood testing to see what’s going on with your particular body, and all kinds of other stuff that affects sleep. But I think I’ve said enough for now.

I really hope that even one of these things helps you if you’re struggling with sleep. I’ve found that having a lot of options to help me sleep is comforting because if one doesn’t work, I can try a different one. And moreover, all of them together have really had a huge impact on my life.

I went from sleeping like .5 to 4 hours a night for many months to now sleeping a solid 7-9 hours per night, and sometimes not even getting up a single time to go to the bathroom during the night. This has affected every aspect of my life, obviously including my climbing and my motivation to climb. I genuinely hope you can improve your sleep, too. Good luck with this, and please let me know in the comments what strategies have worked for you and how you’ve found it’s changed your life to get more sleep!

If you want to work with me on any of this, I’m here for you as a life coach or a nutritionist and I’d love to help you out. We can even work on sleep strategies together if you want!

About the Author, Neely Quinn

Neely Quinn is the owner and founder of TrainingBeta.com, the host of the TrainingBeta Podcast, a Certified Professional Coach (life coaching), and a nutritionist specializing in rock climbers. She has been climbing since 1997 and has climbed up to 5.13c and V9. She lives in Longmont, Colorado and Las Vegas, NV with her husband (and tech-guy for TrainingBeta), Seth Lytton and their heeler mix, Willa.

Work with Neely on Mindset

Work with Neely on Nutrition

2 Comments