The only 5 sleep tips I use to get 100% sleep scores every night.
Either free or a negative cost (will save you money)
Sleep is important. Take any amount of time on the googles, it’s not a difficult position to come to.
I normally score in the 90-100% range on my apple watch for my sleep so I thought I’d include my top practices for the best sleep. (and I only don’t score 100% if I don’t follow 1 or more of these 5 things).
And these ARE listed in order of importance, 1 being the most impactful.
Bonus Tip #1: Track your sleep. This is really the tip to rule them all. I won’t count this as an actual tip because it doesn’t directly affect sleep. But it truly is eye opening to see what things affect your sleep and to what level. Each person has their own unique quarks. Something that works for one person might not work for another, and data and experimentation is the only way to know for sure what works for you.
Bonus Tip #2: Heart rate is king. The best metric to look at (and most sleep tracking apps prioritize) is your heart rate. It’s the #1 indication your body is shutting down and resting properly. Most of these tips work because they help your heart slow down or reduce activities that speed your BPM up artificially.
Don’t drink alcohol, or if you do, as far away from bed as possible. Most people think, because alcohol is a depressant, it serves as a calming function on the body. But in actuality alcohol increases your heart rate quite a bit, and stops your body from shutting down at night. Hangovers are primarily a factor of bad sleep.
Eat your last meal as early in the day as possible. Food in your stomach causes your heart to pump extra blood to the stomach to do its digestive thing. This causes your heart rate to go up until all that food is processed. This is especially true if you have a carb heavy diet that spikes your insulin. I can usually get away with a small protein heavy snack close to bed, but not much else. If you do intermittent fasting consider dinner the meal you skip (most people skip breakfast). I try and eat my last meal by 5pm at the absolute latest if I get dinner with someone, but my ideal time is 2pm. Feeling hungry 1-2 hours before bed is a good indication for me I’m eating at the right time and my stomach won’t be digesting anything (and raising my heart rate) while I sleep.
If you want to supercharge your sleep take a hot shower, as hot as you can stand without burning yourself 60-90 minutes before bed. Your body associates cooling down with shutting down. Heating your body up causes it to start up it’s cool down processes so counterintuitively, heating yourself up before bed causes your body to go into shutdown mode. And of course the inverse is true. If you want to wake up taking a cold shower causes your body to go into heat-up mode, causing a greater sense of wakefulness.
Watch the sunrise and sunset outside. I got this from Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist who posts a lot of great content on youtube. He talks about this a lot, but the reason why this works is our body, just like most of the animal kingdom, is very attuned to the sun. Having triggers for your brain in both the morning and evening to tell your brain “The sun is rising” and “The sun is setting” tells your body it’s time to wake up or time to shut down respectively. The sunrise and sunset specifically aren’t necessary, but our brain can recognize the different light waves the sun makes in the morning and evening, so the closer you can view those events, the better. 3-10 minutes is about all it takes for a minimum effective dose, the cloudier it is, the longer, the clearer the sky, the shorter.
Hydrate well on the front end of the day so you can stop drinking liquids 3 or more hours before bed (this pairs nicely with tip #1). This stops you from waking up in the middle of the night (which often happens subconsciously ). It’s both important to hydrate well on the front end of the day, because hydration makes it easier for your heart to do its thing, and also to stop before bed so your bladder isn’t working when your body should be sleeping.
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