672 Renew Your Energy with Arianna Huffington

“HOWEVER BLESSED OUR LIVES MAY BE, EVERY DAY HA STRESS AND CHALLENGES.” Sleep is one of the most important things in life. If you’re not getting a good night sleep, it’ll affect every aspect of your life. Your quality of work will suffer, and you will find that you’re not as productive as usual. You’ll become more irritable, and your relationships will start to strain. Sadly, people won’t want to be around you as much as usual. When you get proper rest, going through your full REM cycle, everything gets better. You’ll find more light at the end of the road. It can help with depression, lower your blood pressure, and has even been shown to help fight diabetes. The importance of sleep is something many people underestimate, but it’s an important step to achieving your greatness. To help you understand good sleeping habits, I wanted to bring you this clip from a previous episode with Arianna Huffington. Arianna’s 15th book is all about sleep. She sat down and gave me some great tips on ensuring you get a solid night’s rest. Learn how you can fully recharge your energy, on Episode 672. In This Episode You Will Learn: Arianna’s sleep routine (00:52) What’s better: a hot bath or a cold shower (1:56) What you should wear to bed (2:27) What to read before bed (2:53) How you need to think before bed (4:07) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to today's episode. We have a very special guest today. Her name is Arianna Huffington. She's here in the studio in Los Angeles, Greatness Studio, and she is the co-founder and president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group and author of 15 books. She's also been named to Time Magazine's List of the World's 100 Most Influential People and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Her 15th book is called The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time, and it's all on the science, history, and mystery of sleep.

• 0:52Lewis Howes?

  What would be the ideal routine for you in terms of going to bed and then waking up?

• 0:57Arianna Huffington?

  Great, I love that. So I'll give you my routine. I'll give you my nightly ritual. But what I recommend for everybody watching is to create your own ritual. I mean, it's almost like I give you a menu and you need to experiment and see what is it that does it for you.

• 1:16Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:17Arianna Huffington?

  For me, it's like 30 minutes before I'm going to go to sleep, turning off all my devices and gently escorting them out of the bedroom.

• 1:25Lewis Howes?

  Escorting them out.

• 1:27Arianna Huffington?

  They'll be there in the morning.

• 1:28Lewis Howes?

  You put them on a horse?

• 1:29Arianna Huffington?

  You put them in the little homes outside the bedroom. Turning off the lights, you know, the bright lights, making it sort of... I just have one nightstand light and one light in the bathroom. Then having a really, really hot, wonderful bath.

• 1:46Lewis Howes?

  Really? Warm bath?

• 1:47Arianna Huffington?

  Yeah, with Epsom salts, which are very relaxing, and flickering candles. But if you guys don't like baths, have a shower.

• 1:55Lewis Howes?

  I don't like baths. I've got one, but I've never used it, yeah.

• 1:58Arianna Huffington?

  You can have a shower.

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  And hot is better than cold.

• 2:00Arianna Huffington?

  Oh, yeah. You're basically... You basically want to slow down your brain and soothe your muscles, and everything is like powering it down.

• 2:13Lewis Howes?

  I guess when you're going to a hot tub late at night, I always feel ready to sleep.

• 2:15Arianna Huffington?

  Exactly. You feel... Exactly. The hot tub is a perfect...

• 2:19Lewis Howes?

  To do a hot tub, do you have a hot tub?

• 2:21Arianna Huffington?

  If you have a hot tub, go to a hot tub. I don't have a hot tub, so I do the bath. And then...

• 2:28Arianna Huffington?

  Put on, if you sleep naked, you sleep naked. But if you wear PJs or a nightdress or whatever, make sure that you wear clothes for bed. I used to sleep in my gym clothes.

• 2:41Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 2:41Arianna Huffington?

  And then your brain gets these confusing messages.

• 2:44Lewis Howes?

  It's supposed to go workout.

• 2:45Arianna Huffington?

  Are we going to the gym? Or are we powering down? So even if you're a t-shirt, make sure it's not a t-shirt you wear to the gym. And then, in bed, I only read physical books. I don't read anything on screens. Anybody who is reading The Sleep Revolution in bed, I will consider it a personal victory if you actually fall asleep while reading it.

• 3:07Lewis Howes?

  Read twenty pages a night, fall asleep.

• 3:10Arianna Huffington?

  Whatever, ten pages, you get drowsy, you let the book drop, you turn off the light, you're asleep. So that is incredibly important for those who have children. You know that that's how you put your child to bed. You don't just drop your child in bed. You...

• 3:27Lewis Howes?

  Read to them.

• 3:28Arianna Huffington?

  You read, you give them a bath, you put them in the PJs, you read to them. You kind of transition. You know, it's like the goodnight moon. You say goodnight to everything, which is really a demarcation line between your day with all its stresses, however blessed our lives may be. Every day has stresses, challenges, difficult things, and incompletions. There's nobody who has any interesting job or is a busy mom who finishes the day and says, "I did absolutely everything."

• 4:01Lewis Howes?

  It's always something that...

• 4:02Arianna Huffington?

  That was on my list or I should have done. Never. So you need to somehow tell your brain and your body, "We did what we did."

• 4:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:13Arianna Huffington?

  This day. And now, the day has come to a close. And we need to... Fully

• 4:22Lewis Howes?

  Cross the line, right?

• 4:23Arianna Huffington?

  We need to cross the line. We need to cross that line.

• 4:26Lewis Howes?

  Not be in bed on the screen thinking about work and then trying to sleep at the same time. Creating a cutoff line.

• 4:32Arianna Huffington?

  I just really, I wish I could sort of convey that feeling that I absolutely totally believe now to everybody watching because I promise that if you do this, every aspect of your life will improve. If you have any lingering doubt that you're not going to be as productive, just try it.

• 4:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Arianna Huffington?

  Because it's like getting in the Tesla. You're going to get to your destination faster, right?

• 4:59Lewis Howes?

  Smoother.

• 5:00Arianna Huffington?

  Smoother.

• 5:01Lewis Howes?

  Cleaner.

• 5:01Arianna Huffington?

  With kind of consuming less energy.

• 5:04Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yeah.

• 5:06Arianna Huffington?

  And also the advantage of kind of energy that is self-renewing is a little bit like the self-renewing energy of sleep.