Top 10 Tips To Improve Your Sleep
Author: Marius Norheim
Table of Contents
Improving Sleep = Improving Health
The SINGLE most important thing you can do to improve your health is to improve your sleep. If your body is a house, sleep is the floor. The foundation for everything else. It affects everything you do. Getting at least 7.5-8 hours of sleep every night increases your mental and physical performance and reduces the risk of disease. First, ask yourself the following.
Are you Person A: I Need Sleep?
—> Great! Jump to the Top 10 Tips For Sleeping Better
Are You Person B: I Don’t Need Sleep
—> Just continue reading
Why Is Sleep Important and Why Do We Sleep?
If you think you don’t need sleep and function perfectly fine on low levels of sleep, know that less than 0.1% of the population has the gene that enables this. For the rest of us, a lack of sleep literally makes you dumber. The best part is that you don’t even notice it and still think you are performing as usual!
Matthew Walker is a world-renowned sleep expert and the author of the book “Why We Sleep”. If you want to understand more about the “why” I highly recommend reading his book and listening to the 3 special episodes of the Peter Attia podcast with Walker.
Top 10 Tips For Sleeping Better
If you agree that sleep is important and want to improve your sleep, here are the Top 10 Tips For Sleeping Better in a prioritized order.
- Prioritize Sleep: Acknowledge that sleep is the single most important thing for your health and prioritize it accordingly. If you don’t think it’s important read “Why We Sleep” or take a couple of years of your life expectancy. Your choice.
- Chronotype: Take a test to know your chronotype (morning bird/evening owl). The max you can wiggle around your natural circadian rhythm is +- 30 min.
- 8 hours: Get 7.5-8 hours of sleep every night. To achieve this, you need to give yourself a sufficient sleep window. If it takes you 1 hour to fall asleep, you need to go to bed 9 hours before you wake up in order to get 8 hours of sleep.
- Wakeup Time: Get up at the same time every day. Yes, even on the weekends*.
- Can’t fall asleep?: Do not lie in bed awake for more than 15 min. After 15 min, go do something else for 15 min with dimmed light. I read for 15 min, then try again. Read up on CBTI if you want to learn more about this. But in practice, what’s written here is what you need to do. Also, the only thing you should do in your bed is sleep and have sex.
- Avoid alcohol: If you are going to drink, make it early in the evening so you have hours without it before going to bed.
- Avoid Screens: No blue screens or things that make you alert 1 hour before sleep. Ideally 2-3 hours. I’ve bought glasses that block/reduce blue light, but I can’t really say that it’s made a noticeable difference.
- Cold Room: 18-20 degrees Celsius is ideal. I use a Chilipad to regulate my body temperature. It’s expensive but a lifesaver during summer. In the fall/winter, I just have the window open and regulate the thickness of my quilt.
- Exercise/Food: No exercise and food 2 hours before bed. If you are still hungry at least make it a high-protein, low-carb meal.
- Sleep Setup: The bedroom curtains are large enough to shut out all light, but on top of this I use a sleeping mask and earplugs. Also, our bed is large enough and we use separate quilts so that I don’t notice when my girlfriend moves. Google Sleep Divorce if this is an issue for you. For a couple of months now, I have also started duck-taping my mouth in order to breathe through my nose (TLDR: Your nose is built through evolution to breathe. Your mouth is plan b. Check out "Breath" by James Nestor if you are interested in learning more).
Important! Sleep Apnea:
If you have sleep apnea, Matthew Walker says you should see a doctor asap, as this will take years off your life expectancy.
5 Tips If You Have Trouble Falling Asleep
If you are like me and have trouble falling asleep, here are some additional tips:
- Only Early Morning Coffee or Avoid it: If you are caffeine sensitive, don’t drink coffee 14 hours before you sleep, because caffeine has a really long half-life.
- No Napping! Adenosine is the sleep pressure chemical. If you nap during the day, you reset the adenosine build-up and have less sleep pressure in the evening.
- Journaling: If you have trouble falling asleep, try writing down your thoughts in a journal. I have trouble shutting off my brain at the end of the day and really benefit from doing this.
- Meditation & Breathing: For a minimum of 10 min. Headspace and Calm are good apps. Try Wim Hof breathing exercises.
- Reading: Reading non-fiction books the last 30-60 min before going to bed.
Do you want to get more tips?
41 Tips for Improving Your Sleep
If you want the full list of things to try based on my personal research, check out this link. People are different so there could be elements that did not work for me that work great for you.
Alcohol & Sleep Rhythm
*Alcohol obliterates sleep quality. If you are going to drink, try to stop several hours before you go to bed. When I drink on weekends I typically don’t get to bed in time to get my 8-hour sleep window. Because my sleep quality is awful, I still find it easy to fall asleep at the normal time the next evening. Thus it does not really affect my sleep rhythm too much, beyond the one bad night. Which is worth it for the fun it brings.
Sources
The sources for this post are Matthew Walker (Sleep Scientist), Peter Attia (Doctor and Longevity researcher), and my own experiences.
Author: Marius Norheim