Floris Wouterson: ‘Balance your stress hormones’
The corona crisis has an impact on everyone. We worry more, worry and have stress because of working from home. This also ensures that many people have trouble sleeping and dream more intensely. Three tips from sleep expert Floris Wouterson, known for his book ‘Supersleeping’.
First, Wouterson explains why we now have massively more sleep problems. ‘Stress hormones make it difficult for you to sleep. The main stress hormone that influences this is cortisol. In stressful times you make more of this ‘fight-or-flight hormone’ than you need. This can make it difficult for you to fall asleep or stay asleep. So if you want to sleep better, you need to get those cortisol levels under control.
In a healthy situation, your cortisol levels should be high in the morning and low in the evening. If you worry during the day, those stress levels go up: your heart rate rises, your blood pressure rises and so do your cortisol levels.’ But how do you get those cortisol levels back in balance? Wouterson gives three tips.
1. Exercise outside in the morning
‘The most important tip to get your cortisol levels under control is to start exercising in the morning. This already partly regulates those cortisol levels. If you exercise outside, you also get a lot of daylight inside. Daylight is important for the production of serotonin: a preparatory hormone for melatonin, and melatonin makes you sleep well. So if you enjoy sports outside, you kill two birds with one stone. You balance your cortisol levels and immediately get daylight.’
2. Avoid sugars and fast carbohydrates
‘Because you don’t sleep as well, your other hormones get confused. And those are your hunger hormones, which make you crave sweet food. It is better to stay away from that, because that also increases your cortisol level. Therefore, avoid sugars and fast carbohydrates. When you talk about fast carbohydrates, they include (white) pasta, pizza and cookies. These cause an increased level of cortisol in your blood and that this is too high at the end of the day, making it difficult for you to fall asleep and stay asleep.’
3. Don’t watch too much news
“People watch the news as if it were water coming out of the tap. Stop doing that, because you can’t change the situation anyway. Negative news also raises stress levels; you’re going to worry. That doesn’t help, so just do that less. You’ll feel much better then.’
Many people now also dream more intensely. What’s causing this?
‘This is also due to cortisol and a gland in our brain: the thalamus. All kinds of stimuli enter through this ‘stimulus gate’, through the skin, through the breath, through what you see, hear and smell. It is the epicenter that regulates and directs all our stimuli. At night this is stopped, because otherwise you would start to fulfill your dreams and climb out of your window, for example. If you have too high cortisol levels, that stimulus gate closes less well and you dream more vividly. So if you have higher cortisol levels, you’ll sleep lighter, dream more, and remember more. More people now have stress and therefore dream more and more intensely. And because of that stress we project all kinds of fears and we process them at night.’
Floris Wouterson is Europe’s first sleep performance coach, author of ‘Super sleep’, owner of two exclusive bedding shops in the Antwerp region, coaches top athletes in the Netherlands and abroad to perform better and is a much sought-after advisor to entrepreneurs and high performers.
