Sleep should be treated as a non-negotiable commitment. It should never be traded away for anything else. Good sleep improves you on every dimension in life. Likewise, bad sleep diminishes you in every dimension. Excluding exercise, there’s almost nothing else that impacts your quality of life as much as sleep.
Current Problems
- Not sleeping at the same time each day. → Addressed by tracking bedtime with Google Home.
- Light exposure all the way up to bedtime. → Bought TrueDark glasses which should help.
- No proper wind-down routine.
- Still using phone in bed (even if minimal).
- Waking up around 6-7 hours of sleep and failing to fall back asleep.
- Constantly ruminating at night on nonsense trains of thought.
Sleep Hygiene
Here are the basics to maximising the odds of best sleep:
- Get your bedroom as dark and quiet as possible.
- 18.3°C is about the optimal bedroom temperature.
- Wind down for at least 30 minutes before sleeping in dim lighting. Consider having the following:
- Reading.
- Warm shower.
- Meditation (focused less on attentiveness and more on relaxation and deep breathing).
- Journaling to dump all your worries and exhaust your thoughts.
- Stop drinking water before bed. Drink all you need 2 hours before sleeping, at the latest.
- Sleep and wake at the same time. In my case, strongly prefer early bedtime and early wake-time.
- Calmly meditating. When you notice racing thoughts, just watch them and let go and return to observing thoughts as they arise.
Why You Can’t Sleep
You are struggling to sleep either because:
- Poor sleep hygiene.
- Stress and anxiety.
The first is clear to fix. You just need to establish the habits.
The second is not something you have to be a victim to. There are proven ways to shut down the stress response.
- Breathing exercises.
- Start with 10 deep breaths when you notice you’re lying awake.
- Diaphragmatic breathing.
- 4-7-8 breathing:
- Inhale 4 seconds, hold 7, exhale over 8.
- Visualisation exercises.
- Body scan.
- This is basically a meditation technique.
- After having done some breathing exercises to relax, scan very slowly from head to toe, or toe to head, noticing everything there is to notice and letting go of all the tension.
- Visualise the exhalation of the tension.
- Body scan.
These are skills. You get better at them over time. Trust that they work, because they do, and don’t get frustrated and give up.
Here are some other anecdotal relaxation techniques people endorse:
- Tensing every muscle in your body for 30 seconds, then slowly release all the tension starting from your feet and working all the way up to your head.
Sleep Anxiety
Realise: You are most likely not able to sleep because you didn’t practice good sleep hygiene. If you did indeed practice good sleep hygiene, then you are just anxious. This is a problem like any other, approach it in the same way as you would for a chronic injury.
Principles:
- Journal about your worries, leaving tasks written down for those that are actionable, and accepting those that are not. This is essential to archiving.
- Regularly practice meditation. Have a session of this focusing on your breath, doing 4-7-8 breathing.
- Don’t look at the clock.
- Remember: Non-sleep deep rest exists. It is still rejuvenating to simply lie in bed relaxed. Apparently about 1 hour of this is equivalent to 20 mins of sleep.
- You can really only sleep if you lower your heart rate below 60 BPM. This is achieved by slow deep breathing. 4-7-8 breathing is effective. Trust in it.
Trust that this is a tractable problem with proven mitigation strategies - you just need to try them and be patient.
Lights
- Candlelight is very low light intensity apparently, only 3 to 10 lux, despite seeming really bright.
- An artificial desk lamp or overhead lamp is potentially around 100+ to 1000 lux.
- Overhead fluorescent light in particular is bad, as opposed to light that is at or below eye-level.
- Wear sunglasses at night.
- Generally, avoid artificial lights. Candlelight and moonlight supposedly does not affect your circadian rhythm as much.