Week eight of the Stay at the Top Summer Reset series focuses on one of the most important foundations of health and performance. Sleep.
When energy is low or recovery feels off, sleep is often blamed in isolation. In reality, most sleep issues are shaped by what happens during the day. The cues you give your brain, the rhythm of your habits and how you wind down all matter more than chasing perfect nights.
In this episode, I share simple, high leverage strategies to improve sleep quality by creating consistency and clear signals that the day is done. The goal is not perfection, but familiarity and rhythm so recovery can begin.
In this episode I share:
- Why sleep issues are often a byproduct of daytime behaviours
- The role of sleep in energy, recovery and long term health
- Why relying on instinct at night usually backfires
- The power of a go to bed alarm as a circuit breaker
- How to break the habit of late nights and endless scrolling
- What a sleep landing protocol is and why it matters
- Examples of simple, repeatable wind down routines
- The importance of consistency over complexity
- How to work backwards from your wake time to set a realistic bedtime
- Common factors that interfere with sleep and how to identify yours
Key Quotes
“Sleep is the bedrock when it comes to energy, performance and recovery.”
“Most sleep problems are created during the day, not at night.”
“Consistency wins because your brain is wired for rhythm.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:07.288)
Welcome to week eight of the summer reset series. Now, when we’re talking health performance, sustaining energy, improving recovery, improving capacity across the year, we cannot think about those things if we do not address how do we sleep better? Now, even if you think you sleep okay, or you’re fresh off the back of most of January off, I would still question
Could it be better? And if you’re like the majority of people who have disrupted sleep or you wake in the middle of the night or you struggle to get to bed or there’s some kind of sleep problem, then I really hope this episode is a quick tip that can help you unlock better sleep because sleep really is the bedrock when it comes to energy performance.
feeling our best now, but also thinking about our long-term health. And that’s what we’re here for, all of those things.
Now when most people think about sleep problems, they think it’s just a matter of, I can’t get to sleep or I’m waking in the middle of the night. But this is not the case. What often is happening here is these sleep problems are a byproduct of what we are or are not doing across the day.
Jess Spendlove (01:40.514)
The truth is to set ourself up for a good night’s sleep, it really is around decisions we make across the day. Like what we eat, what time we eat, our caffeine intake, how much and when, are we having rests or brain breaks and allowing some decompression and reflection? All of these things are really important factors to not only getting to sleep, but staying asleep.
Jess Spendlove (02:08.428)
Now, if I was to ask you the question on how do you use an alarm when it comes to sleep, everybody listening to this would say they use one to wake up. But I want to flip this on its head. I want to encourage you to start using a go to bed alarm. Look, maybe you will use both, but I can nearly guarantee this is not something that you’re doing. And one of the simplest, highest leverage upgrades that you can make
to your sleep is a go to bed alarm. Now, is significant in, this is a significant trigger that starts your wind down process. It also helps break the circuit of getting sucked into another Netflix episode. And now I really understand particularly if you’re a parent or even if you’re not and you’ve got a really full day that that time at night might be your you time or your me time.
and watching another episode of your favorite show can be really tempting. But how much do we regret that? So when we’re just relying on our own instinct, it’s really easy, our willpower is low, we’re tired at the end of the day, that we just get sucked in when that five second or eight second gap, whatever it is, kicks over. So this is why we wanna have the go to bed alarm, because it is a reminder, a circuit breaker, a signal to ourself. We actually need to turn it off.
and say we’re ignoring that. Or when we hear it, we can pause or stop what we’re doing and then start to activate our go to sleep wind down sleep landing protocol.
Now, this is another case of where consistency, my favorite word, it is forever my favorite word, but if you listen to last week’s little mini episode, it was the word of 2026 when it comes to your health and performance, but consistency wins again because your brain is wired for rhythm. Now, hopefully over the holidays, many of you have actually used this time to naturally recalibrate.
Jess Spendlove (04:16.022)
less rushing, less commitments, later starts, different evenings, more rest and relaxation. And hopefully this moment and being able to lock into a rhythm and a better sleeping pattern or a more optimized sleeping pattern that works for your real life is something that you’ve done. And now it’s about carrying that forward. But this is really about you kind of getting clear on two things. What time do you want to wake up or need to wake up?
And then based on that, you need to work backwards in terms of your ideal bedtime. Now, this is not about what sounds impressive. So often people say what they think they should say, but this is about what is realistic to you and repeatable. Now, if you don’t know what your sleep chronotype is, I would highly recommend that you go and do one of the sleep chronotype quizzes. You can just Google it. The sleep doctor one is generally where I send people.
and it will tell you what your sleep chronotype is, which might give you bit of an idea on what your ideal wake and go to sleep time is. But I find most people innately know this. It’s just about being able to remove the barriers that allow them to put that into place. But I guess it’s time for us to get really honest. I want you to ask yourself, what is actually interfering with your sleep right now? Or maybe not right now, but normally.
Again, like I said, you might be fresh off a holiday, you might’ve had most of January off, and you might be getting back into things. So have a think about what typically gets in your way of getting to bed when you want and getting a good night’s sleep. So some common ones, I’ll give you a little list you can check off. Might be screens, late work, late meals, alcohol, doom scrolling, the mental load that you take to bed that you reassess and go over or ruminate in the moment.
Which one is it? Is it one of those? Is it all of those? Is it a combination of those?
Jess Spendlove (06:17.176)
But the truth is, whatever’s getting in the way, whether it is just overstimulation at that time of night, your brain cannot go from being on and being stimulated and solving problems or watching something stressful on TV and being activated to being to sleep. It needs to switch gears and downgrade into different brainwave states. So this is where the sleep landing protocol is very important.
Now, it’s really just a series of cognitive cues that tells your brain the day is over and recovery is starting to begin. And the best thing is if you can have a sleep landing protocol, that is something that you can activate wherever you are, whether you’re at home, whether you’re traveling for work, whether you’re traveling for pleasure, whatever it might be. So the first step is the go to bed alarm, which we’re gonna test for the next few weeks or so and see how that goes.
When that goes off, that’s our first cue to start to downshift. We’re getting out of this high alert, whatever activity we’re doing system, and we’re switching into recovery mode. So you need to figure out what your sleep landing protocol is. And I’ve done so many sleep episodes before, highly recommend you go back to them, but it can be quite simple. It just needs to be a series of events that starts to trigger. I’m going to bed and it’s relaxing and it’s something that you can rinse and repeat.
So that might be a hot shower or a bath, that might be a stretch, that might be brushing your teeth, that might be reading, that might be breathing, that might be journaling. It does not have to be all of those things. Mine is as simple at the moment of a hot shower, brushing my teeth, a quick three wins for the day, three wins for tomorrow. Now interestingly, I used to write that, but at the moment I just say that in my head.
But the thing that I’ve added in is a 12 or a 20 minute meditation. Now that is only something that I used to do when I couldn’t sleep and I used to do the journaling of the three winds of the day three winds for tomorrow, but I’ve switched that up at the moment. And I think that’s a really important point to say you can switch things up. You should switch things up, but whatever it is, it just needs to be consistent. So it’s giving your brain that cue.
Jess Spendlove (08:36.972)
that it’s this time of the night, I’m doing my wind down routine, I’m allowing space for reflection and relaxation so I can get to bed and I can stay asleep. Because we don’t wanna be waking up between that one to four a.m. with all of the thoughts. And if we’re not allowing for reflection or relaxation across the day and that is happening to you, then it’s definitely your sign and signal to start implementing not only the go to bed alarm, the sleep wind down protocol.
Now these are not just habits the important thing with this series of events that you repeatedly do they are cognitive cues that guide your brain that go from doing into resting This does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be familiar and it needs to be repeatable for yourself
That brings us to the end of episode eight in the summer reset series. I’d absolutely love to know what you’ve thought of the series. This is something a little bit different. I wanted to bring you a tip or tool or a tactic each week to help you reset across summer and get ready for 2026. If you’ve particularly loved any of the episodes, I would love to know which ones. And if you know someone you think that would benefit from listening to these, send them the link, send them the…
on socials or a text or WhatsApp or whatever way you communicate with these people. And otherwise I’ll be back again next week for another episode. We’ll be back to more regular programming and I can’t wait to help you not only reach the top, but stay there in 2026. See you all then.