The Absolute Best Thing You Can Do For Better Health: Sleep
Sleep impacts the way you feel and how healthy you are for the rest of your life. Stop pushing it aside. Read below for more tips on making your time in bed more efficient.
Everyone it seems is lacking in sleep, constantly filling the void left by quality sleep with drugs like caffeine. Yes, the Starbucks you drink every day is technically a drug. No judgment from me, I love caffeine and go through stages of addiction. Today isn’t about caffeine though it’s about what caffeine covers up. Poor quality sleep.
Poor quality sleep impacts your risks of heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
My name is Keegan Hanks, I am a personal trainer and coach. I have been working with clients for almost 10 years now. Many of the topics I cover have a medical topic. This is not medical advice. If you have concerns about sleep related health issues, make sure you reach out to your doctor about a potential treatment plan.
Sleep is a big topic and there is so much more to sleep than I can cover in this article. If you want me to go further in depth on sleep leave a comment below!
To make it quick though, modern lights and screens are not helping. The blue light emitted by all our screens and light bulbs are great during the day to help keep us awake but slow down the production of melatonin when it is time to sleep. Delaying and disrupting our natural sleep patterns throughout the entire night.
Not to mention the disruption caffeine has on our sleep. Most people do not know that caffeine has a half life of about 5 hours, meaning if you have a cup of coffee at 3pm you still have half of the caffeine circulating in your body at 8 pm.
In Matthew Walkers, “Why Sleep Matters” he states that as a society we have seen a reduction in sleep time by about 20-25% since the 50’s. But why does that matter and why is it so bad there is a reduction in sleep time?
Why is it important to sleep?
Sleep is the foundation of everything we do. If you have ever had a bad night’s rest, you know how little you are able to do the next day. This compounds repeatedly until you are unable to keep your eyes open during the day.
Hundreds of thousands of accidents each year are related to drowsy driving. Leading to thousands of deaths. Caffeine can only keep you so sharp.
Please pull over if you are drowsy while driving. It’s not just your life at risk.
There are also long-term effects of poor-quality sleep. Your risk for heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s drastically increases with bad sleep.
At 5 hours of sleep researchers found a 200-300% increased risk of coronary artery calcification. PMC2661105
Along with lack of sleep increasing blood pressure it is a recipe for a heart attack.
Another very important thing happens when we sleep.
Your brain cycles through and cleans itself. The same debris cleaned out during this process is found in abundance in the brains of patients with dementia. Sleeping more and with better quality is believed to help prevent and delay the development of neurological diseases.
Hopefully by now you see how important it is to get good sleep. Not only for your long-term health but for the health and safety of drivers on the road.
Good sleep and how to improve it?
What is good sleep? How much should you be looking for? How can I make mine better? These are all the questions you may be asking yourself.
To improve your sleep, we want to improve two things, sleep efficiency and quality of sleep.
The standard advice of 7-9 hours is a good start. It doesn’t answer the whole question though. When people hear 7-9 hours of sleep, they usually associate that with time in bed.
Which is not the same thing. Time in bed is called your “sleep opportunity”, and the amount of time you spend sleeping compared to this number is called your “sleep efficiency”. The higher your sleep efficiency the better you are at sleeping.
Consider how long it takes you to fall asleep once you get into bed and if you have regular wakeups during the night. These are both going to decrease your sleep efficiency.
If you are in bed for the ideal 8 hours but are awake for 50 minutes of that. You should increase your time in bed by 50 minutes to get your 8 hours of sleep.
I know many people don’t get enough sleep because they are busy. What can do instead is focus on the other side of the equation. Which is quality of sleep.
Quality of sleep can be defined by increases of your time in deep sleep, the most restorative part of the sleep cycle. Deep sleep is when our brain essentially solidifies memories and rejuvenates the body. Increasing your deep sleep specifically is linked to decreases in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
It can be incredibly eye opening to wear a fitness tracker that tracks your sleep. Recently I gave my girlfriend my old Garmin watch that tracks sleep, she was regularly getting an hour less sleep than she thought and barely getting any deep sleep. Regularly scoring in the 60’s and 70’s for sleep.
Not that fitness trackers are 100% accurate but when we compare nights where we got comparable amounts of sleep, my time in deep sleep would be 2x the amount of hers.
Now it’s not a competition but if it was, I definitely won.
But why is hers so bad compared to mine? Some of it is probably genetic. The other side is sleep hygiene.
I’m not talking about brushing your teeth every night and washing your sheets. Which you should do.
Sleep hygiene is the routine you do in the hour to 30 minutes prior to going to sleep.
The basis of good sleep hygiene:
Consistency:
Having consistency in bedtime and waking up helps your body regulate the hormones necessary to sleep well. So many people wake up early to get to work during the week then sleep in on the weekends making it harder to wake up the following week.
Light:
Blue light or bright lights signals to your body that it is time to be awake. This is necessary in the morning to set you up for the day and being in the dark at night starts your body’s sleep cycle earlier. It’s also important to sleep in a totally dark room. Even the smallest amount of light from a clock can disrupt your sleep.
Temperature:
Most people sleep better being in a cooler room than warmer. Our body naturally drops our core temp down when we sleep, so we are helping that along by being in a cooler room. This comes down to individuals though. Being too cold is also bad. Around 65-70 degrees is usually ideal. Also taking a hot bath or shower prior to bed can help with cooling your internal body temperature.
Caffeine:
As mentioned above caffeine wakes you up and disrupts the natural cycle of sleep. Stopping caffeine after about 2pm is recommended.
Alcohol:
You may feel that alcohol helps you relax and feel sleepy. It does for many, but it doesn’t provide quality sleep. There is significant micro wake up throughout the night when consuming alcohol close to bedtime.
Only lying in bed for sleeping:
Spending time doing other things can associate them with laying in bed. Taking away from the desire to sleep. Get up and do something else if you find yourself laying in bed for 20 minutes without falling asleep.
I have spent the last 3 years developing a sleep hygiene routine that works for me. This is what I do, it’s not perfect and it’s not what everyone needs to do. I have found that no matter how much time I have for sleeping, I get better quality sleep when I do these things.
My sleep hygiene routine:
I am a very early riser; I wake up at 4:30am every day, including weekends. This consistency is important. No matter how mentally tough I am, waking up before the sun every day is hard.
This means to get my 8 hours of sleep I need to be asleep by 8:30 pm.
To be honest, I don’t always get 8 hours of sleep. Over the course of the last year, I have averaged just over 7 hours a night with an average sleep score of 85. It is difficult during the summer in Texas to go to bed when the sun is still up for another hour. But since the start of winter this year, I have averaged about 7 hours and 40 minutes with a sleep score of about 90. The exact score is kind of arbitrary to you, but it gives me information on how my quality of sleep improves with more time.
Because of how early I go to bed and wake up I stop drinking caffeine before noon at the latest. But I usually only have one caffeinated beverage around 5-5:30am. This allows for most of the caffeine to get out of my system before I go to bed. For someone going to bed around 10pm, stopping caffeine at 2pm would be ideal.
If I do drink alcohol which is very rarely, I drink during the day. Allowing for at least 1 hour before bed for each drink I have. For example, if I drink 3 alcoholic beverages, I do that 3 hours before I go to bed.
Next thing I do is about the lights at night. Ideally you wouldn’t look at any screens or use lights for the hour prior to bed. I can’t do that. So instead, I set an automatic shift on all my screens to night mode and turn them up to the highest setting.
For my phone specifically which I am using more often than other screens right before bed. I set a very aggressive red shift to automatically happen around 7pm then have it turn off around 4am.
At this point, my apartment is set on a schedule for cooling down. It slowly drops the temp to about 65 degrees then completely turns off in the winter or stays locked at that temp in the summer.
I also have an overhead fan that I turn on to help circulate the air. I am a very hot sleeper but need to be covered to be comfortable, so my temp is probably lower than most. I also grew up in New Hampshire in a house and room that had no heat or proper insulation in the walls.
At about 7pm I turn as many overhead lights as I can off in my house. When I start to brush my teeth around 8-8:30 I turn everything off. At this point I use little amber colored reading lights.
Red/amber lights emit the lowest amount of blue light. My eyes start to adjust to the dimmer lights, and I’ll start getting more and more sleepy before even lying in bed.
At this point I want nothing more than to get into bed.
Which I happily do.
This isn’t the end of my sleep hygiene process though.
At this point I take out my Kindle and start reading until my blinks get slower and slower.
The Kindle is an important part of this as there is such low light coming from this screen. I found that even with the amber reading lights it would be too bright.
There is a purposeful decrease in the level of light as I get closer to bed.
It’s important if you read before bed not to choose anything stimulating or thought provoking. We want the brain to continue its process of slowing down. For me fiction books work for this.
The perfect way to do this would be to read for 30 minutes before lying in bed while sitting in a chair away from my bedroom. This is what I do and isn’t perfection.
Once I hit that point of struggling to keep my eyes open, I turn off the Kindle and put on a sleep mask. This is something I added recently to totally block all the light going into my eyes.
I try not to get to a point where I fall asleep while reading.
This doesn’t usually happen to me but if I have a hard time falling asleep for whatever reason, I get out of bed and read on my Kindle until I am able to fall asleep.
Hopefully today helped you understand the necessity of sleep and making sure it is of good quality. Sleep hygiene has been the foundation of me getting good quality sleep. Use the foundations and tips from this article to improve your sleep and feel your best. If you found it helpful and learned something, make sure you share. See ya next time!