Sleep: How to Improve Your Sleep Habits
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Welcome Players! There are 8 actionable steps you can take to improve your chances at getting a high-quality nights sleep, and all of them help you to sleep better and wake up feeling rested. They’ll give you more energy throughout the day and prevent quantifiable declines in performance. How you determine the
This article is second to Sleep: Why You Should Make It a Priortity.
Contents:
Optimal Sleep Environment
Sleep Schedule
Wind-down Routine
Positive Day-time Sleep Habits
Summary
You should prioritize your sleep habits to feel energized during the day and the potential to perform optimally both physically and mentally.
1. Sleep in a cave - cold, dark, silent & comfortable - for the most suitable environment.
2. Set up a consistent sleep schedule so that you can go to bed at around the same time each day accounting for getting adequate amounts of sleep.
3. Avoid bright lights before going to bed (especially technology/devices).
4. Be conscious of your biological clock using exposure to natural sunlight soon after waking to signal your body towards an alert and active state.
5. Actively practice calming techniques such as breath work to consciously shift your body into a parasympathetic state.
6. Reserve time in bed for sleep and sex.
7. Don’t eat big meals before bed; avoid alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and be wary of extended marijuana use or other sleep aids for potential negative effects.
8. Do all these things consistently for at least 2 weeks to settle into a routine before allowing yourself room for adjustments.
Building your Sleep Sanctuary
Where you sleep is a very special kind of temple unlike any in the world. It should promote feelings of safety, comfort, and relaxation. If you go to sleep in a peaceful environment, you’ll wake up in one; go to bed in a hectic environment, and you’re more likely to follow suit in the morning.
For a quick and easy way to remember what kind of environment you should be sleeping in, think sleeping in a cave. Yes like that kind of cave. Cold, dark, silent and comfortable. These 4 traits make up a great environment to get a restful nights sleep. Our primitive ancestors slept where they did for a reason.
Light & Sound
You want your bedroom to be dark. Very dark. Like you can’t see anything dark. Our eyes play a major role in feeding information to our brain that is used to set our biological clock. We’ll get into the effects of light later on, but the more bright light you see, the more your body will up-regulate it’s wakefulness. Black-out curtains are a valuable tool here if you live in the city or near bright street lights.
Shhh. You’ll want the bedroom to be quiet, which can be little more difficult especially if the noise originates from outside your home. Street noise or passing trains/planes are difficult to mitigate, but understand that the louder it is outside the higher chance it has to disrupt your sleep. Noise inside the house is different; do your best to limit noise inside such as other rooms’ TV’s, appliances (set your dishwasher to delayed-start if you can hear it from bed), etc.
If you have a TV in your bedroom, you should take it out. Watching a brightly-lit TV in your bed before you go to sleep is a highly-destructive habit that will limit your opportunity for quality sleep.
You want your body and brain to associate your bed with restfulness and sleep; nothing else. When you spend time in bed watching TV, working, writing, even reading, basically anything that’s not sleeping, you are doing activities that require wakefulness in an environment that should be solely reserved for sleep. This sends conflicting signals to the brain that prevents your body from completely submitting to a restful state.
You should try to sleep with all technology outside of your bedroom if possible. If you rely on your phone as an alarm, utilize a form of focus-mode that limits notifications within 2-hours of your scheduled bedtime and place it somewhere away from your sleep area so that you have to get up in order to turn it off. This ensures you don’t fall victim to the snooze-monster and also to remove the temptation to check your phone at night.
Temperature
Research shows that a temperature of roughly 66-68° F and 40-60% relative humidity is most conducive to a good nights sleep. Thermoregulation of our internal body temperature is intimately tied to our biological clock, shifting throughout a 24-hour period to best match our optimal state. This doesn’t mean YOU have to be cold, just the room. If you’re cold in those temperatures, you should get appropriate bedding to keep a stable body temperature.
There’s not much room for argument here. Some people say that they sleep better when it’s warm, but extensive amounts of research says otherwise. Unless you have monitored your sleep for > 3 months with some form of validated equipment (your wearable technology recovery score does not count) and are able to objectively say that you sleep better at higher temperatures, you can bet that you’re probably falling prey to a cognitive bias and should test out a colder environment.
Mattress/Bed Selection
You want a mattress that is soft enough for you to relax into, but firm enough to support your body and skeletal mass. If your mattress is too soft you will sink preferentially to the heavier parts of your body like your hips and can cause increased mechanical stress to your lower back, where a firmer mattress supports these heavier parts and keeps your body in better alignment.
There are a lot of options for mattresses, so I’d suggest you spend enough time researching and even getting fitted for a mattress through a knowledgeable expert. The employees at the largest mattress retailer in the US are trained well in sleep science and do a good job at helping pick the right mattress for you, just be wary of the hidden sales component as they do work off of commission.
Hand-in-hand with a properly fitted mattress is a good pillow. This is less complicated, as you want a pillow that is thick enough to support your head in neutral alignment with your spine, no more and no less. The firmness/density of the pillow is up to your comfort level, as long as the previous requirement of neutral neck alignment is met.
Lastly, you may be wondering what position is best to sleep in. I personally believe that the best position to sleep in is the position in which you are most comfortable and get the most restful sleep. Subjective, I know. Utilizing pillows underneath your arm and leg if you sleep on your side can be beneficial, as well as underneath your knees if you sleep on your back. Sleeping on your stomach with your head turned to one side is typically not great as it places a prolonged stretch on muscles of the neck that might not feel great in the morning. All in all it’s common to move around in your sleep and that’s out of your control.
Optimize your Sleep Schedule
To successfully get an adequate amount of sleep on a consistent basis is no easy task. While many things rely on the ability to control the external environment or other factors, the ability to sleep fully is solely dependent upon how you set up your sleep schedule.
Bedtime
The most important part of a sleep schedule to maintain is a consistent bed-time. Going to sleep at the same time every day helps to optimize your body’s circadian rhythm, and when paired with effective light exposure is a highly effective way to make sure you’re tired at night and awake/alert during the day.
The second most important part of a sleep schedule is budgeting your time in bed for the appropriate amount of time spent asleep. I talked about this in Why You Should Sleep, but you need to account for the time it takes you to fall asleep as well as possible (and probable) interruptions to your sleep throughout the night. Typically you’ll add anywhere from 30-60 min. time in bed to your target hours of sleep.
For example, if you wake up every morning at 7a - you should aim for 8 hours of sleep plus 30-60 min it takes for you to fall asleep (less if you fall asleep quickly, more if you wake up frequently throughout the night), meaning that your target time in bed would be 10p-10:30p. This target bed-time should be maintained for at least 14 days before you can count on having a reliable sleep-wake cycle!
If you have a great sleep schedule from Mon-Fri and then blow it up on the weekends, you’re constantly forcing your body to adjust to new cycles, never allowing it to settle into homeostasis. If your schedule of getting up or going to bed is governed by work, then you should strive to achieve the same sleep-wake cycle regardless of what day of the week it is. You should match it up with the life you want to live in order to reap the benefits of prioritizing your sleep schedule and feeling better on a day-to-day basis.
Form a Healthy Bedtime Routine
No different then building any positive habit, establishing a conducive bed-time routine will make your wind-down process stress free and put your body in the best setting to receive a great night’s sleep.
Things to Avoid
Stop using your phone/tv/tablet at least 1 hour before bed (ideally 2 hours). Artificial light, regardless of type (blue/red/yellow), will inhibit your bodies ability to fully enter a parasympathetic state. Research shows that what matters most is actually the brightness of the light you’re looking at. The higher the brightness the more it will disrupt your internal clocks and ability to fall asleep when you want.
Avoiding bright lights and screens before bed is crucial to achieving optimal sleep. Other considerations are for room lighting, where it’s preferable to dim the lights in your home to gradually reduce light exposure as the night goes on. Soft-white (yellow) light is preferable to bright-white (LED) lights from lamps or overhead fixtures. If you don’t have a dimming option, you can progressively turn off a light or two as the night goes on, slowly reducing your overall exposure until you’re ready to go to bed.
Avoid eating large or heavy meals at least 2 hours before bed. Your body needs to devote energy to digestion, and that process works best while you’re awake. Sleeping too close following a large-meal can inhibit your body’s ability to metabolize and can leave you feeling sluggish in the morning. There is some research to suggest that what you eat might affect this more than when you eat, but it is best to avoid altogether.
Things to include
Actively inducing a parasympathetic (rest & digest) state will significantly improve the quality of your sleep. This can be done in a multitude of ways but I will talk about the most impactful: breath work.
Resonant breathing is a breathing at a pace of 5-6 breaths per minute and shown to most greatly effect your body’s physiological state positively towards the parasympathetic state.1
5 second inhale. 5 second exhale.
This can be done in bed right before you go to sleep (as I often do this) or done 30 min prior (I do this pretty often too), so long as you don’t exert much energy in between.
The period between your wind down and when you go to bed is an important time. You can choose to positively impact your life with habits that improve your life, or negatively. Things such as journaling, practicing gratefulness, stretching, preparing for the following day, even light household chores or organizing will have a momentous impact on the quality of your sleep and quality of your life.
Pro-Sleep Habits during the day
Let’s shed some light on the brightest part of your day: the sun.
Our eyes have a specific group of cells called ganglion cells that are responsible for acting as brightness-detectors within our retina, and it’s information within these cells that contribute to the suprachiasmatic nuclei tuning our internal clock to have a circadian rhythm that matches the turn of the day/night cycle. (SOURCE)
Research shows that in addition to the brightness of light, the composition of light based on the wavelengths (ex, sunrise/sunset containing more orange/blue contrast) play a role in helping set your biological clock. (SOURCE)
Viewing sunlight soon after waking provides a novel stimulus that can be used to establish a firm sleep-wake cycle. The earlier your body ditches its parasympathetic state for a sympathetic one (fight/flight) the more likely you are to revert back to sleepiness when it’s time to go to bed. Your body won’t know whether it’s 7am or 11am if you get up, but if you get up and view natural light within an hour of waking, it sets the 14-17 hour timer that regulates your wake cycle, at the end of which it will naturally transition into getting ready for sleep by down-regulating physiological processes like the release of melatonin, preparing for a restful night. (SOURCE)
Substances & Sleep
There are further in depth-resources outside the scope of this article, for our purposes this covers the most important points for you to know when identifying how common substances will alter your sleep.
Alcohol: Although toxic in all aspects, alcohol does help you fall asleep faster and will extend the amount of NREM sleep gained in the first half of the sleeping period, but it reduces the total REM sleep and causes frequent disturbances in the second half. The extension of NREM sleep does not make up for the extension of REM sleep, for it is the balance between the two that optimizes the benefit of sleep in humans (SOURCE). Alocholics are known to suffer from insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness, and altered sleep structure as a result (SOURCE).
Caffeine: The effects of caffeine on sleep are well-studied. As a stimulant caffeine is highly disruptive to sleep and should not be consumed within at least 6 hours before bed based on this study, but you should get used to limiting it within 8 hours to ensure it does not negatively impact the quality of sleep.
Tobacco: Impairs sleep continuity and architecture (the rhythmic transitions between multiple stages of sleep throughout the sleep cycle). It causes an increase in time to wake from resting state, and reduces the time and quality of short wave sleep (NREM stage). (SOURCE)
Melatonin: Our bodies naturally release melatonin as a hormonal response to ferry the transition from a waking state to a sleeping state. OTC melatonin supplementation to correct short-term sleep disturbances can be helpful in some cases, but caution is advised: In a study of 31 supplements on the market, the amount of melatonin contained in the supplement was found to range from −83% to +478% of the labelled content. Supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and as such great discrepancies in actual drug content are present. Melatonin should not be taken as a chronic solution and if you do choose to use it as a supplement it should be third-party tested and verified.
Cannabis: While most midnight tokers report subjective improvements in time it takes to fall asleep and less disturbances throughout the night, the few objective measurements taken tend to show less REM sleep, less slow-wave sleep, and greater sleep fragmentation. Some research also seems to suggest that marijuana can be a short-term sleep aid, but prolonged use of the chronic might lower the positive effects and eventually become detrimental to quality sleep.
Don’t Sleep Around the Bush
1. Sleeping in a cave - cold, dark, silent & comfortable - is the most suitable environment.
2. Set up a consistent sleep schedule so that you can go to bed at around the same time each day accounting for getting adequate amounts of sleep.
3. Avoid bright lights before going to bed (especially technology/devices).
4. Be conscious of your biological clock using exposure to natural sunlight soon after waking to signal your body towards an alert and active state.
5. Actively practice calming techniques such as breath work to consciously shift your body into a parasympathetic state.
6. Reserve time in bed for sleep and sex.
7. Don’t eat big meals before bed; avoid alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and be wary of extended marijuana use or other sleep aids for potential negative effects.
8. Do all these things consistently for at least 2 weeks to settle into a routine before allowing yourself room for adjustments.
If you truly value your own time and health you’ll devote significant effort into making sure you’re able to meet as many of these prerequisites as you can. Your body will thank you, as well as your performance in all aspects of life. Every person will have a unique situation as well as individualized responses, so you’ll need to implement these strategies in the way that you respond to best. Journaling / tracking changes in your sleep based on what you’ve done is a great way to hold yourself accountable and maintain a log of your efforts for future use should you need them.
Take care of your health and your performance will benefit.
Sleep well my friends!
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. The content is purely educational in nature and should be filtered through ones own lens of common sense and applicability.
There is much to explore within the realm of breath work. In the future much of my writing will be devoted to it. For now do not take the importance of resonance breathing (5s in 5s out) lightly, as it is the basis of all the breath work I teach.