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Real Sleeping Pill
Why it matters?
We spend so much attention and energy on perfecting our diets and exercise plans — but what about our sleep cycles? As ‘the’ foundational pillar of our health, sleep and wake regulation governs all the other physiological processes in our system and is the key to putting us on a track towards being able to move the needle on optimizing health.
Though science hasn’t figured out a single purpose for sleep, we do know the important functions that are affected by it, and necessary for the cascade of health benefits it can offer. Therefore, sleep should be a number #1 priority.
To prevent over complicating optimal sleep the way we have nutrition and exercise, here is the 80/20 of sleep management that will get most people to fall asleep, stay asleep and start the next day with “low sleep pressure” (or how our desire to sleep mounts according to our biorhythms) so that we can tackle our day.
How it works?
- Chase Daylight and Blackout: match your ‘active’ parts of the day with sunlight and less active – with direct sunlight to the eyes and skin first thing in the morning (for at least 10 minutes) – and minimal (if not zero screen time) at night to a total blackout space in your bedroom before sleep (ie. buy blackout curtains).
- Power Down: remove self from over stimulating activities (minus sex) at least 30 minutes before bedtime.
- Chilly Nights: as humans were evolved to sleep outside of temperature-controlled environments, keep room temperature cold (your core body temperature needs to decrease by 1 degree Celsius – lab testing has found ~18 degrees does the trick here.
- Fasted Sleep: do not eat 3 hours before sleep to avoid activating your system (with spikes in insulin and cortisol that will disrupt the release of melatonin). Note: unless dealing with the need to manage insulin levels specifically for conditions like diabetes.
- Wake Drive: instead of setting an alarm to wake, set one to sleep so that your natural sleep process (called “wake drive”) will naturally counteract your mounting sleep pressure through the night and produce the alert signal to wake you up after 7-8 hours without the jolt.
Examples
Get your sleep right before tackling anything else with your health.
Sources:
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
The Neuroscience of Sleep Neurohacker interview with Dr. Dan Pardi, PhD