Sleep Support Guide
sleep easy
optimising your sleep experience
About one-third of your life is spent slumbering.
Make sure you’re doing it right.
Table of Contents
Correlated effects of inefficient sleep:
- Mount Lofty House, Adelaide Hills - Sequoia Lodge, Adelaide Hills - The Reef House Adults Retreat Palm Cove
We warmly welcome you and are delighted to have you as our guest.
To enhance your stay, we offer this guide to better sleeping as part of our signature inclusions.
If you are having mixed experiences with sleep, the program outlined in this guide can help explain why you have sleep challenges and can help you adopt new or improved ways of obtaining better sleep.
Even if you are fortunate enough to naturally sleep well, this guide will provide insight into why you thrive. We trust you will gain plenty of inspiration from this special guest inclusion. Our team is here to support you.
Enjoy your Sleep.
About this Sleep Support Guide
This Sleep Support Guide is designed as an introduction to better sleep – a gift from us, so you can feel more comfortable during your stay and hopefully be inspired to explore enhanced sleep experiences after you return home.
Please note that this guide is simply a set of recommendations. It is up to you and your health practitioner to decide whether these suggestions are right for your circumstances, noting that everyone has unique biology, psychology and life situations.
If you know someone experiencing sleep challenges, passing on our Sleep Guide may help them understand their situation and provide many useful tips to help them enjoy more restful sleep.
Let us know your feedback on our Sleep Support Guide and the information it contains. We want to make sure that this gift delivers the help we aim to provide.
Feel free to ask us any questions you might have about this guide, which we hope provides an informative introduction into the vast universe of sleep that you enter into every night.
Sabine Christelli
About the author
Sabine Christelli has a Graduate Research Certificate in sleep science and is currently doing her PhD in the same field. She holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Immunology and Biochemistry, and is an internationally accredited yoga teacher who has taught meditation, mindfulness, yoga and healthy living tips to people of all ages for more than 15 years.
Sabine is also a qualified hypnotherapist and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) Master Practitioner, assisting people with the release of trauma and selfsabotage.
She is fascinated with learning what helps humans thrive on all levels – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. This journey of discovery has taken her to Europe, India, Thailand and across Australia, leading Sabine into studies of spirituality, quantum physics, consciousness and nutrition.
She has created and taught many workshops, retreats, recordings and hosted public speaking events that have helped thousands of people to thrive.
Sabine loves to translate scientific jargon so the general public can best understand the facts about sleep. She wants to make the scientific knowledge practical, relevant and applicable to everyone.
“Eat healthily, sleep well, breathe deeply, move harmoniously”
-Jean-Pierre Barral
Some sleep essentials
What is healthy sleep and why is it so important?
When we think about sleep, it helps to consider both sleep onset and duration.
Some people find it easy to fall asleep initially but cannot maintain sleep throughout the night, often waking and not resuming sleep quickly and easily. Some people need more sleep, others require less sleep, depending on their age, activities, and health.
With so many variables, it’s not recommended to compare our sleep patterns with others. Instead, we need to connect with our own sleep experience to build optimal outcomes.
Quality and Quantity of Sleep
Did you know that too much sleep many cause problems very similar to not getting enough sleep?
Some people may sleep for 10 hours, but have disrupted, suboptimal sleep that leaves them feeling groggy and moody.
Some people have shorter sleeps but feel rejuvenated. Such high-quality sleep is usually connected to early bedtime and early rising, and some people wake up fully refreshed after only 7 hours of sleep. General consensus is that healthy adults aged between 25 and 64 need 7-to-9 hours of sleep every night.
Sleep quality is about harnessing optimal onset, duration, and quality of sleep.
How do you know if you’re having the best sleep possible? It’s helpful to look at how sleep health affects you:
Do you wake up refreshed and energised?
Or do you feel groggy and in immediate need of coffee as a stimulant to start your day?
Sometimes, affected sleep is just a temporary disruption, like when you move into different time-zones. Sometimes it’s the result of a temporary stressful event – either physical or emotional – which disturbs a regular healthy sleep pattern. However, some sleep disruptions can be long-lasting, such as the major adjustment of raising a family, with
children requiring attention during the night. Even the one-hour time shift for daylight saving can take the average adult one week before they are fully readjusted.
Sometimes we get stuck in a familiar sleep pattern, without ever assessing if our sleep habits are healthy or not.
This is where a relaxing holiday can be so beneficial, providing the ideal time to change your routine, enjoy the benefits of great sleep and establish a new healthy sleeping regime.
It could be the greatest gift that your holiday provides - sorting out your sleep issues and giving you the best possible sleep quality and quantity that provides enormous benefits.
“As important as it is to have a plan for doing work, it is perhaps more important to have a plan for rest, relaxation, self-care, and sleep”
-Akiroq Brost
Healthy sleep benefits:
• Decreased pain
• Healthy hormonal balance
• Faster rate of weight loss, if you’re overweight
• Better emotional regulation, integration, regeneration and health
• Healthy skin and enhanced youthfulness
• Decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke
• Decreased inflammation
• Improved mental clarity and focus
• Strong bones
• Strong immune system
• Lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease
• Lower risk of cognitive decline
• Increased memory capacity
• Reduced clumsiness and possible accidents
• Increased energy and joy for life
• Reduced risk of cancer
• Improved digestion and assimilation of nutrients
• Increased sense of wellbeing on all levels
• Improved relationships
Unfortunately, there are consequences if you do not get healthy sleep. It pays to be aware of what happens when we neglect our self-care.
This is not to promote fear but to be inspired by what you can prevent. This is just to highlight what lack of sleep is correlated with in the scientific literature, providing an overall summary, so that you recognise the gift of creating a healthy sleep routine for yourself.
Correlated effects of inefficient sleep:
• Diabetes Type 2
• Heart-disease/stroke
• Low or no libido
• Depression
• Mental illness
• Accelerated ageing
• Weight gain/obesity
• Digestive health challenges
• Reduced immune function
• Cancer
• Memory loss
• Exhaustion
Did you know that elite athletes are trained to have optimised sleep so they can achieve their ultimate capacity for mental, emotional and physical performance?
Research on this topic leaves no doubt that sleep is vital for nourishing highest human potential. It also means that a lack of quality sleep is detrimental to overall health.
So, what can you do to achieve healthier sleep? The great news is that there are many ways to improve your sleep quality right now, and you can choose and implement what best suits your personality and lifestyle.
Being on vacation creates an ideal environment to help you discover and implement the ultimate sleep experience, so here we list aspects of sleeping that you can explore and optimise.
“ If you are not naturally waking up at sunrise, then it is likely you have some form of Circadian Rhythm Disorder.”
-Steven Magee
Sleep experience:
Circadian Rhythm Reset:
You have an internal biological clock which regulates your entire being, including your DNA and general health. This clock is aligned to both day and night light exposure and cycles, so that when we follow a regular sleeping pattern which aligns with nature, we thrive by aligning with our biology, rather than working against it. This helps us to fall asleep naturally and wake up fully rested.
We offer the ideal environment to help you reset your circadian rhythm. Most guests enjoy an early night around 9.30pm and wake up early for breakfast or to enjoy a beach walk, bike ride, yoga, or a swim in the pool. This easy routine provides peace and a sense of tranquillity, naturally aligned with daylight hours – and beathing in the fresh sea air helps tremendously.
Create a sleep ritual:
Establish a sleep ritual by creating a simple pattern that helps remind our bodies it’s time for sleep.
With little else to consider beyond deciding which wine to best complement your dinner, you truly can unwind early each evening, forget the stresses of a busy life, and harness the benefits of a relaxing sleep ritual.
Evening light, and outdoor activity:
To enjoy your best possible sleep, it helps to perform a wind-down routine each evening. Even a 5-minute walk, bike ride or swim in the pool can provide accumulative benefits, but you can decide how long you wish to spend doing a relaxed outdoor activity to suit your taste.
Allow yourself to enjoy your body’s relaxation response, which activates your heal-and-repair mode, as opposed to the flight-or-fight mode that battles stress.
Be sure that you stop all work for a short time, so your body and mind can prepare for healthy sleep. You’ll appreciate this calm time to reflect and relax.
The process of falling asleep in the healthiest and most beneficial way can take an average time of two hours for most people. This doesn’t mean you have to focus on falling sleep for two hours. It is a more subtle process that begins with a few simple routines, such as taking a gentle evening walk.
You could start your evening routine with a massage, drink some relaxing tea or write recollections of your day in a journal. The evening light signals to your body that a new set of biochemicals can be released, which lead to relaxation and excellent sleep quality.
Eating at similar times each evening helps as part of the ritual to prepare for sleep. It’s important to reduce the impact of artificial light and electronic
equipment at least two hours before going to bed. Creating ambient light in your room each evening helps you get into the right mood for winding down and relaxing.
You could try taking a gentle evening swim soon before retiring to bed, or take a hot shower, which supports healthy sleep.
Establishing a pattern before you go to sleep is a highly enjoyable and very effective way to unwind, and it allows your physiology to prepare for harnessing healthy, rejuvenating sleep.
Morning sunlight routine: Did you know it is immensely beneficial to get early morning sun exposure?
It helps your body to align with greater sleep circadian health and melatonin production – and even on a cloudy day, you still get beneficial UV rays. Your internal system registers exposure to morning sunlight as a time to energise and release a healthy amount of cortisol to start your day.
It will provide an extra natural energy boost, and your body clock will fall into a natural rhythm that allows you to relax for sleep in the evening, supporting your ultimate health and highest productivity.
“ Good sleep is vital to good mental health.”
-Steven Magee
Optimal Light Exposure:
We set ambient evening lighting for your optimal enjoyment through all the buildings and in your room.
We use candlelight in the restaurant and corridors each evening, and encourage you to use the tealight in your room to provide the same ambient evening lighting for your best sleep experience. Try to avoid bright artificial lighting as much as possible in the evening, because harsh lighting disrupts your body’s melatonin secretion and reduces sleep quality. It can even raise your risk of weight gain and type 2 diabetes through triggering sleep onset delay.
Exercise:
Yoga, stretching, walks, bike rides – these are all encouraged as part of your guest experience. We provide you with access to high-quality, comfortable bikes, so that you can enjoy a casual bike ride, feel the breeze against your skin and enjoy the bliss of exploring the local environment.
Exercise and taking in fresh air outdoors supports great sleep. Even 10 minutes of outdoor activity each day makes a difference to your quality of sleep – a simple investment that provides excellent returns. Ideally, morning exercise creates the highest quality sleep. In the evening, it is recommended that exercise should be far gentler.
Relaxation:
Learning to relax and de-stress is a key to healthy sleep. Treatments such as full body massages, spas and facial treatments release a cocktail of hormones that help you thrive by activating the relaxation response.
If you choose to enjoy these treatments in the morning, they can help set your day’s mood and state of being. If you choose to enjoy them closer to evening time, they can help immensely with promoting easy, restful, deep sleep, and be a part of your unwinding ritual.
Meditation:
Meditation is something everyone can enjoy. In fact, everyone already meditates, without even realising it. When someone enjoys the tranquillity of swimming in the pool, the peace of reading a book, or taking pause to watch the world go by, they are in a meditative state. But how, exactly, do you enter that dreamy, relaxed state?
Meditative states can be induced in many unexpected moments – when you’re watering the garden, or taking a walk along the beach, hiking through mountains, painting, riding in a train, enjoying your favourite hobby, reading a book, or being with your pet. The possibilities are endless. In these moments, we are focused and not distracted by everything else happening in the world. We are observing and enjoying what we are doing.
In essence, there are as many different meditation styles as there are human beings. So, how do we recognise and utilise them?
You might enter this relaxed state when you look down on the earth from your seat on a plane, or sitting quietly on a bench, or listening to relaxing music, or writing in your journal, or enjoying the pleasure of a wonderful meal. Realising these moments and making more time them can be life-changing – and enhance your sleep experiences.
Meditation is about awareness, presence and focus. It is a state of heightened intelligence, when you can receive insights, inspirations and figure out answers to your questions or solutions your problems. This state is also called the Genius Zone, or Flow State. Athletes are trained to enter this zone of consciousness so they can perform at their ultimate capacity while relaxed, with their body and mind functioning at their best.
Meditation helps you to stop ruminating, worrying and depleting your mental energy through negative patterns of thinking. It helps us to see such patterns that are not healthy for our wellbeing and alert us to function differently.
Many of our stresses are based on thoughts or beliefs that we hold onto instead of questioning. Meditation helps you to recognise this and change your relationship with such thoughts as they arise. It empowers you to be more optimistic, clear headed and less stressed.
PAGE23.
“ Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone.”
-Anthony Burgess
Breathing:
Choosing to breathe deeper and slower helps you to enter the relaxation response, which is called the para-sympathetic nervous system activation. It enables your biology to repair by entering its healing and integration mode.
A relaxed sense of wellbeing ensues greater overall functioning. In a nutshell, when your breathing is fast and shallow, your biology perceives that the body is in stress and directs blood to flow preferentially to your muscles, enabling you to fight or run away from the perceived problem with the readiness of your blood-filled muscles.
When this mode of action is dominant during perceived stress, activating the fight-or-flight response, your body misses out on many other functions that are considered secondary to survive any imaginary or real threat: downregulated digestion (resulting in less nutrient absorption, no matter how healthy your diet is), decreased immune function (the system that removes potential cancer cells from our system every day) and increased cortisol in your bloodstream (which can trigger digestive issues, sleep issues, immune dysfunction and increased ageing, just to name a few side effects). This means that when we get stressed about every detail of life, we are depriving ourselves of optimal health and the chance to thrive.
We invite you to enjoy taking it slow during your stay with us and to practice a new habit of breathing more slowly and deeply, to help make you feel better.
PAGE25.
Visualisation:
Our capacity to visualise can cause us stress if we imagine the worst outcomes, or we can feel happy and relaxed by appreciating the positives. You can direct your mind and focus to joyful and positive thoughts, if you choose.
Too many of us are programmed to look for worst-case scenarios in our lives, yet out of all the things we worry about, only a tiny percentage are warranted.
Most of our worries never come true. This tendency to fear things is an ancient survival mechanism that certainly has its place, but when these thoughts are running on overdrive, they become counterproductive. Imbalanced, unrealistic fears trigger many health problems, with resulting mental and physical side-effects causing insomnia for many.
We can harness the gift of visualisation to feel good and project warmth, confidence and positivity to those around us. It will help us to sleep well, and therefore function with greater mental and physical health.
As part of your package, you have access to helpful text, audio and video resources that explain a soothing visualisation practice. We want to offer you the best possible sleep experience during your vacation and into the future, which is why we have created options to support your quest for a greater sleep experience.
A helpful suggestion:
Start with belly breathing, by inhaling through the nose, expanding your belly, and then slowly exhaling through the nose and allowing the belly to relax.
We have created a short text, audio and video reference that can help explain slow deep-breathing techniques.
Did you know that the dominant nostril through which you breathe changes every 90 minutes, which coincides with the 90-minute sleep and relaxation cycles our bodies naturally work through? When the right nostril is dominant, you tend to think and analyse more. When the left nostril is the active nostril, you relax more and it is easier to fall asleep.
We have a great breathing practice for you to explore this further as you are preparing to sleep. It is a calming, integrated breath practice called alternate nostril breathing, and it helps balance your nervous system.
You can also learn about the square breath, or box breath. This is when you breathe in, hold, then breathe out very gently for a count of 5 seconds. Did you know that if you exhale longer than you inhale, it will automatically help you to relax? Try it!
PAGE27.
Prompts from your journal:
The practice of writing a personal journal helps us to empty out stressful thoughts, a bit like emptying out the kitchen rubbish bin.
When we write in a journal, we process our thoughts differently than when we just try to figure out thoughts in our head, which can be overwhelming. Writing things down provides clarity and perspective, and it is immensely therapeutic. If you haven’t explored this before, we have provided you with a few journaling prompts, along with a paper and pen to jot everything down. Let us know how you go. Why not light a candle or the oil diffuser, sit back, and start writing now?
A simple but powerful place to start is by writing out 10 things you’re grateful for in your life.
Pillow quality:
You spend a third of your life in bed, recovering from the day and preparing yourself for another brilliant day.
Spending an average of eight hours with your head on a pillow has a great effect on your wellbeing. If your pillow has you twisting your neck, you’ll wake up with a sore neck – not only due to muscle and spinal misalignment, but also from reduced blood flow to your brain.
The spine is a major communication channel in your body, so it pays to keep it healthy. Ideally, you want spinal posture as you sleep that has you waking up refreshed.
Many people sleep with pillows that are not ideal, so our houses offer you an exclusive service – you can choose your perfect pillow size and thickness to assist in your ultimate sleep.
Discover the difference in your sleep experience by identifying and resting on your ideal pillow.
Mattress quality:
For your body to rest and heal while you sleep, it must be supported by a quality mattress.
All our houses offer you a superior quality mattress, providing the best possible support for your body to enjoy excellent sleep.
Did you know it is ideal to replace your mattress after about 10 years? After this time, it will have reduced supportive capacity and possibly have mould and bacteria growing in it.
PAGE29.
Fabric quality on bedding and clothing:
It is ideal to sleep on and wear natural fibres, which enables the body to best manage temperature changes. You should aim to have bedsheets and pyjamas made from natural fabrics to best regulate your body temperature while you sleep. Even a one-degree shift in body temperature can make a difference to the quality of your sleep.
Part of the initiation of your sleep cycle involves a drop in your body temperature, which triggers sleep. This is why having a hot shower immediately before going to bed is so effective. It’s wise to keep your room cool and have a variety of blanket thickness options (all made with natural fibre) to best match changing temperatures and help you achieve optimal sleep.
Temperature regulation:
Thermoregulation refers to the regulation of your body temperature – which has a significant impact on the quality of your sleep.
A cooler room is better for sleep, so choose a comfortable room temperature between 15C and 19C – which is the scientifically proven optimal range for great sleep.
Excessive heat reduces your ability to sleep. The internal signal for sleep onset is low or no lighting, a coolish temperature, the circulation of fresh air, an uncluttered bedroom and the right sleepwear for temperature regulation, made from the natural fibres of cotton, silk, bamboo or hemp.
Essential oils:
Pure essential oils affect our nervous system and specific oils can trigger it to relax and unwind. We encourage you to experience the positive effect of essential oils for the greatest possible sleep experience. Essential oils that you may wish to explore to help with sleep are lavender, chamomile and marjoram.
Magnesium:
Most people have depleted magnesium levels, yet magnesium is involved in more than 300 important chemical reactions in our bodies. Stress is a major culprit in quickly depleting our magnesium levels. Adding a good-quality magnesium supplement to your diet can improve your sleep and also benefit many other aspects of your overall health. We recommend using a magnesium oil spray that can be applied to your legs or feet before sleep.
“ Sleep is an essential part of life –but more important, sleep is a gift.”
-William C. Dement
Spa bath:
If you have a spa in your room, enjoy a warm bath before going to bed, as this has been scientifically proven to help you to fall asleep. We have added a salt body scrub for your enhanced spa bath experience.
Herbal tea:
We have collaborated with expert tea blenders to provide the purest tea, specifically crafted to help you relax and enjoy a deeper sleep. The ingredients have been researched and provide the highest benefit for healthy sleep, with some of the primary ingredients being lavender, chamomile and lemon balm. In your room, you’ll find instructions on how to brew your sleep tea. Make it a part of your nightly pre-sleep ritual.
Earplugs and eye pillows:
Sometimes we can’t reduce the noise around us (yes, the snoring sounds of our loved ones), or find that the light in our room is disturbing and interferes with our sleep onset. Earplugs and eye pillows are fantastic tools to have in your tool kit for your ultimate sleep experience.
Other recommendations & tips
Tip 1: Routine
Start a routine. Renowned neurologist Dr Kulreet Chaudhary says “timing your sleep is like timing an investment in the stock market – it doesn’t matter how much you invest; it matters when you invest”. Sleep releases human growth hormone – the longevity and beauty hormone – along with many other beneficial hormone secretions, so to obtain the greatest benefit from sleep, you should be going to bed and falling asleep between 10pm and midnight. Going to bed at approximately the same time each night is a powerful way to program your body and keep enjoying excellent sleep.
Tip 2: Refreshed awakening
A full sleep cycle typically lasts for 90 minutes. These repeat an average of 6 times per night. If you feel you are doing every sleep ritual correctly but still wake up groggy, set your alarm so that you wake up at the end of a 90-minute cycle, not halfway through. If you fall asleep at 10pm, set your alarm for 5.30am and you will benefit from seven and a half hours of sleep. You won’t be waking up in the middle of a 90-minute sleep cycle and disrupt optimal sleep.
Tip 3: Create your sleep sanctuary
Declutter your bedroom as much as possible and create a sanctuary which is reserved exclusively for sleeping and intimacy. This helps you to associate bed and sleep with rest, which will enhance your
capacity to feel relaxed and fall asleep much easier. Create a bedroom and bed you really love, with your ideal mattress, pillow and covers. Make sure you can keep the room as dark as possible at night, so that light can’t disturb your circadian rhythms and sleep hormone release.
Tip 4: Sleep and body posture
Check that your neck and shoulders are comfortable when you go to sleep, being correctly aligned so that your spine is straight. A pillow placed between your legs can help with this.
A weighted blanket can also help with sleep for some people. Additionally, earplugs or eye pillows can support healthy, uniterrupted sleep.
Tip 5: Hydration
Try to complete your hydrating at least three hours before going to bed, if possible. This will prevent you from having to visit the bathroom during the night, which can be very disruptive to sleep.
Tip 6: Light exposure
Unless you have a specific health ailment, leave your sunglasses off for at least 20 minutes when you go out for a walk in the morning and evening, as your retina absorbs the healthy benefits of outdoor light that keep your circadian rhythms healthy. Plus, Vitamin D from sunlight is immensely helpful for deeper sleep and is absorbed through your skin. It’s also a great anti-inflammatory agent.
Tip 7: Digestion and sleep
Try to have your evening meal as early as possible, so you’re not still in full digestion mode when you go to bed. But don’t eat too early, or you’ll wake up hungry during the night.
Light meals that are easy to digest in the evening help with healthy sleep. Limit your caffeine intake to the morning, if possible. Caffeine is a stimulant that affects sleep quality and over time it reduces the benefits of quality sleep, which leaving you crave for more coffee, and locks you into an awful Catch 22 situation.
Tip 8: Vagal tone
Vagal tone – your relaxation response – is vitally important for healthy sleep. Clenching your teeth together creates the opposite of a relaxation response and elicits the stress-induced flight or fight response. Wearing a mouthguard can help with this, along with low, deep breathing patterns that elicit the parasympathetic nervous system and allows relaxation.
Relaxing your face and jaw through simple facial massage can also help you with sleep. Simply massage the jawline in gentle circles using either your fingertips or a facial oil or cream. Massage the point between the eyebrows for deep stress release. You can also use acupressure points on your face and body. Your sleep will also become healthier if you increase your Heart Rate Variability
(HRV), which is linked with vagal tone and affected by the way you breathe. Wearable wrist devices can help you monitor and enhance your sleep experience by measuring your HRV and teaching you how to enhance it.
Tip 9: Your mind and biochemistry
Using guided visualisation helps with sleep. If you struggle with falling asleep, you could remember a time when you were totally relaxed, in a safe and happy place. As you make this memory vivid, your body won’t know whether it’s real or imagined – and it will release the matching biochemistry into your bloodstream. This will help you to relax, as you felt in that memory. Remember in clear detail what you saw, what you smelt and breathe the way you were breathing. Go right back into that memory and enjoy it fully. It will release endorphins, oxytocin and a whole cocktail of helpful hormones and chemicals that will support an amazing night of sleep.
You will benefit from the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and a whole cocktail of helpful hormones/ chemicals to support an amazing night of sleep.
Using guided visualisation helps with sleep.
Tip 10: Counter-worry technique
If you are in bed and can’t fall asleep, don’t keep lying there feeling anxious and frustrated. Your body has an internal mechanism that triggers sleep, and if you are worrying, or the temperature isn’t right, or
agitated by something, your sleep onset mechanism gets blocked, and your relaxation has been compromised. Most people then get more stressed about missing their sleep-onset cue, and waiting longer only makes it worse.
It is recommended to get up for a short time and to try to adjust your environment, then go back to bed after a few minutes.
If you are worrying, get up and sit in a different room (with dim lighting) and write down your worries for about 10 minutes, to empty them from your mind. Circle the concerns and worries that you can control or change, but don’t circle anything you cannot control, such as the weather, or someone else’s perceptions. You have to let go of those.
For everything you’ve circled, write down ways you can sort them out and implement an action the next day – or tell yourself you’ll have more clarity tomorrow. When you let go of these thoughts, you allow the unconscious to process everything during your sleep. Then go back to bed, and as you lie down again, the body receives the signal to trigger another sleep onset cycle. It should be much easier for you to fall asleep.
Tip 11: Gratitude to boost your mood
Before going to bed, write down 10 or more things that you are grateful for. Some simple prompts to write in your journal are: What makes you smile in your life? What do you love right now? It could be
appreciating the gift of your life, the roof over your head, your loved ones, your health, your pet, your garden, your creativity, your capacity to go on a holiday and relax, your capacity to choose how you want to live, your clothes, the availability of food, the bed you get to sleep in, fresh water, your money in the bank. The list is endless.
Tip 12: Winding down with your body
Do 10 minutes of gentle stretching about 60 minutes before going to bed, slow your breathing, or give yourself a foot massage, because your feet have many acupressure points that will help you relax. If you have a sore back, perhaps use a foam roller or a massage device that you find provides effective relief.
These techniques all help with sleep and can be part of a nightly sleep ritual, which is also a great selfcare habit. You’ll to look forward to this routine and therefore look forward to sleep.
Positive association neurologically will help you achieve a wonderful restful night of sleep. Learning to de-stresses yourself in healthy ways will help improve your inner wellbeing and always guarantee a good night’s sleep.
“ I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
- Ernest Hemingway
Thank you for reading our Sleep Support Guide and we hope that you have obtained some helpful hints.
You can’t think your way to sleep, so we’ll support you on your path to better sleep and wellness by providing you with our guided meditations, blogs, videos, podcasts and more.
If you would like to know more, please refer to our Sleep Easy webpage at
The Reef House Sequoia Lodge Adults Retreat
Privately owned bespoke Hotels in breathtaking locations delivering Curated Experiences and Outstanding Traditional Service guests return to.
Mount Lofty House Estate -
Iconic Adelaide Hills Luxury Escapes
High up on the escarpment of the Piccadilly Valley, just moments away from the multifaceted city of Adelaide, lies Mount Lofty House. Enriched with 175 years of history, the heritage estate is best known as Australia’s most awarded hotel with a three-hat fine dining restaurant, indulgent day spa experiences, conference retreats and breathtakingly beautiful weddings. www.mtloftyhouse.com.au
Sequoia -
Exclusive Adults Only Luxury Lodge
The exclusive, adults-only Sequoia has 14 contemporary, luxurious suites with unparalleled views over the Piccadilly Valley, vineyards, villages, and bushland. Providing the highest level of privacy, Sequoia boasts its own reception area, lounge and breakfast room, a large, heated infinity pool as well as a range of inclusive guest experiences. www.sequoialodge.com.au
The Reef House Adults Retreat
The Reef House Adults Retreat and multi-award winning spa and restaurant, encompass intimate, friendly ‘Our House’ service and attention to detail. We are famous for our luxury services and complimentary guest inclusions and activities. Return to a time of gracious hospitality and relaxation at The Reef House. www.reefhouse.com.au
PAGE42.
Our member benefits
Bespoke Collective Members save 10% on every Escape Package booked at our unique destinations including Mount Lofty House & Estate and Sequoia Lodge in the beautiful Adelaide Hills and The Reef House Adults Retreat in stunning Palm Cove, Queensland.
Join today via www.australianbespokecollective.com.au/membership
We hope we are able to welcome you again soon at one of our unique destinations.
Malcolm Bean & David Horbelt Co-Founders & Directors
PAGE43.
My Sleep Notes
My Sleep Notes
My Sleep Notes
My Sleep Notes
My Sleep Notes
www.australianbespokecollective.com.au
Palm Cove, QLD www.reefhouse.com.au
Adelaide Hills, SA www.mtloftyhouse.com.au
Sequoia Lodge Adelaide Hills, SA www.sequoialodge.com.au