Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, Family Physician and

Former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!

I'm here today with Dr. Matt Dawson of CrossFit Precision Care and we're going to be talking

about sleep. So first of all, why is sleep important for my health?

Sure, it's important for your health because it basically affects every aspect of your

health. If you're not getting enough sleep, for example, less than six hours a night,

you have a four times increase risk of dying over the next 10 years, not getting enough

sleep, increase your chance of Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and multiple other things, and

just your performance and how you feel the next day.

Okay, so sleep is really important. How much sleep do I need to get in order to reap those

benefits?

Everyone's different. In general, we know kind of seven to eight hours is a good little

thumb, but I think even better for yourself to gauge how much you need is, are you waking

up rested and without an alarm clock? That's a good role to remember.

Something for me to work on, for sure.

All right, so say you're not getting enough quality or quantity of sleep. What are the

top recommendations you would have to improve sleep?

Yeah, there's a thousand things you could try, but honestly, if we stick to the basics,

I think that's where you get 80% of the benefit. So if you just think about, for example,

cool, dark, and quiet, and you think about ancestorsly, how you sleep a thousand years

ago, imagine yourself sleeping in a cave where it's cool, it's dark, and it's quiet,

...