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The 5 Best All-Natural Ingredients to Help You Get Some Legit Sleep

By Pamela Vachon
|
June 10, 2022

Getting regular, high-quality sleep is one of the best things you can do for your overall health and well-being. We all know how much better we feel after a night of decent shut-eye in terms of energy, mood, and ability to concentrate — but proper sleep has myriad benefits beyond that. It can help you maintain a healthy weight, it regulates your blood pressure thereby lowering your risk of diabetes and heart disease, and it keeps your immune system in fighting form. Adults need at least seven hours of sleep a night, ideally on a consistent schedule. 

Of course, this is easier said than done. You might already be aware that you need more sleep, but that knowledge doesn’t actually translate to actually being able to get in bed, drift off, and stay asleep for hours on end. There are a lot of factors that can keep us from getting the rest we need, including busy lifestyles, stress, and poor eating habits.

Read next: 9 Totally Natural Ways You Can Fall Asleep Faster

In addition to good bedtime habits, there are also many natural elements, from plants to amino acids, that can help you get better sleep by working with the systems in your body to promote relaxation and ease you into dreamland. Any one of these ingredients can do wonders, but functional wellness company Beam harnesses them all together in Dream Powder, a delicious, healthy hot cocoa for bedtime that incorporates five powerful, natural sleep ingredients to help you get some legit sleep. Here, we take a closer look at these functional ingredients and how they interact with your body for a more peaceful slumber. Sweet dreams are made of these:

L-Theanine

L-theanine saw an uptick in interest during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, as many people sought to remedy stress with natural approaches. Stress and sleep are basically nemeses, and managing stress and promoting relaxation are essential to getting quality sleep. L-theanine is an amino acid, which are the building blocks that make up proteins in the body. In addition to aiding in relaxation at bedtime, studies have shown that L-theanine increases sleep quality throughout the night, in both REM and non-REM sleep stages.

Reishi

Reishi, a particular type of mushroom indigenous to parts of Asia, has long been used in traditional Eastern medicine as a healing agent. (In fact, its Chinese name, linghzi, refers to both spiritual potency and immortality.) In addition to its use in Beam Dream Powder, reishi is often enjoyed as a tea or supplement.

Its use is on the rise in the Western Hemisphere in the last decade, as the adaptogenic category has been exploding. Adaptogens work in subtle ways over a long period to help your body adapt to and strengthen its stress response, promoting a goal of balance, or equilibrium, even while stress triggers are present. While adaptogens traditionally only include plants in the herb family, mushrooms like reishi are also considered adaptogenic because of their ability to foster relaxation, including the ability to create a relaxed feeling at bedtime.

However, reishi is also known for its bitter, unpleasant flavor, so it really needs some other ingredients and flavors to mask its taste. That’s another reason we love Dream Powder: it’s delicious, like salted caramel mixed with creamy hot chocolate, and it’s also sugar-free and gluten-free, so it’s an ideal bedtime treat. Dream Powder really is the best way to get a dose of reishi — you can’t taste it, but you still get all the full effects.

 

Beam sea salt caramel

Image Credit: Beam

Magnesium

To put it mildly, magnesium is more than just good for you. Magnesium is an essential mineral — meaning it’s crucial to many body processes, and that we must get it from our diets or supplements since the body doesn’t produce it itself. It’s beneficial to both blood pressure and blood sugar regulation, but as far as getting good sleep is concerned, its biggest impact is on our nervous system, where it regulates muscle and nerve function. Like most nutrients, unfortunately, most adults aren’t getting enough of it in their diets. If you experience restlessness at bedtime, especially in the form of restless leg syndrome, supplemental magnesium can work to correct this. According to one clinical trial, magnesium supplements can increase the amount of melatonin your body produces, and can not only help you fall asleep faster, but can help increase the amount of sleep you get. 

Melatonin

Melatonin is one of the most common, and longest standing supplements in the better sleep category. It is as natural as supplements get because, while produced synthetically, it is a hormone that already exists in the human body. Your brain’s pineal gland produces melatonin in response to darkness. It is the reason that we are programmed to sleep at night, as it establishes your circadian rhythm, and cues your systems to prepare for unconsciousness after the sun goes down. This worked especially well in times before electricity, when the sun was the only significant light source that humans had.

In our modern world, the production of melatonin can be stifled by numerous sources of light. How many of us are guilty of getting in bed, turning off the lights, and then continuing to watch TV or look at our phones? We assume we’ll eventually just get tired enough to want to sleep, and don’t realize that the thing we’re hoping will help us drift off is the very thing that’s preventing our body from running its normal shut down sequence.

While creating better bedtime habits is a better long-term solution, in the short term, melatonin can help your body signal darkness and access its natural desire to sleep.

Nano CBD

Unless you’ve actually been asleep for the last decade, (which, if you’re reading this, you probably haven’t) then you’ve witnessed the meteoric rise in CBD. Short for cannabidiol, CBD is a compound that comes from hemp, and it isn’t psychoactive (meaning it won’t get you high) but it does produce other desirable effects in your brain such as relaxation and mood support. If you’re someone who’s prone to worry before bed while taking stock of tomorrow’s to-do list, clinical studies have shown that CBD has value for managing these conditions.

Beam’s Dream Powder utilizes broad spectrum Nano CBD, a variation that gives your body an increased ability to absorb the CBD molecules and receive its benefits more quickly.

For your best sleep yet, try Beam’s new Sea Salt Caramel Dream Powder. Use code CLEANPLATES for up to 35% off.

Read next: The Science-Backed Technique That Can Calm Your Anxiety in Under 5 Minutes

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