Sleep While You’re Alive: Cultivating Good Sleep Hygiene

Are you one of the “you can sleep when you’re dead” believers?

I remember hearing this phrase from adults in my childhood when the day was very full, offering permission to skip sleep in favor of more productivity. Well since my childhood, a lot of sleep research has happened, proving what many of us know already to be true: sleep is crazy important.

The importance of sleep
“Relative to the recommended seven to nine hours, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.” – Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep

If you are waiting to “sleep when you’re dead,” research shows it’s likely going to be here sooner than later. This comes from a combination of factors from short-term risks like driving while sleepy to longer-term risks like weakened immune systems, fluctuations in blood sugar, increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease, psychiatric issues (e.g. depression and anxiety), and weight gain (plus trouble losing weight), to name a few.

What does sleep actually do?
When we’re sleeping, we’re unaware of the world around us and the incredible tasks happening within us. There are whole books dedicated to understanding these processes, so we’ll summarize some of the amazing benefits here. Sleep helps us:

Learn and make logical decisions
Forget unimportant (and sometimes harmful or traumatic) memories
Navigate challenges with composure
Bolster immune function
Balance insulin and glucose
Lower blood pressure
Sustain a healthy gut biome (critical for physical and mental health)

What is circadian rhythm?
Your circadian rhythm is an approximately 24-hour tempo that helps determine when you’re awake and asleep, as well as when you eat and drink, your metabolic rate, and even your mood.

When the circadian rhythm is disrupted (e.g. from jumping time zones or missing sleep), you may notice you’re tired during the day, alert at night, hungry at odd times, or “snapping” at small stressors or inconveniences.

To help regulate your circadian rhythm, we can put good sleep hygiene practices in place, such as creating routines, setting up a proper sleep environment, and building habits for sleep.

While these tips can help regulate circadian rhythm and improve sleep, it’s important to talk to your doctor if you have continued sleep disruption or think you could have a sleep disorder.

Create a space designed for sleep.
How many activities take place in your bed? Reading, watching tv, sex, sleep, even working? Try holding your bed as a sacred space for sleep and intimacy only. Take your book to a chair, watch tv in a different room, and keep work and laptops the heck out of there.

While comfy organic sheets and fancy mattresses are lovely, there are some simple and cost-effective ways to optimize your space for sleep. Take a look at your sleeping space with these questions in mind:

How does your sleeping space feel? Is it relaxing, chaotic, loud, etc?
What colors do you notice in your sleeping space? Cool colors (blues, greens, purples) tend to have a calming effect, while warm, bright colors (reds, oranges, yellows) tend to do the opposite.
What do your eyes see right before you go to sleep? If it’s clutter, laundry, etc., how can you move things around so your last images before bed are more peaceful?
When you’re in bed, can you see any lights from electronics? Take a piece of black tape and cover it up.
Are there manmade lights coming in through your windows? Try blackout curtains or blinds, or even a blanket over your windows to keep excess light at bay.

Lights mean action.
Our bodies are basically designed to be awake when it’s light outside and asleep when it’s dark. As electricity in homes became available in the late 1800s and early 1900s, we suddenly had longer “daylight” hours, and human bodies started to get confused.

Help your natural rhythm out by adjusting your lighting:

Keep lights low (or light candles) in the evening to help with the transition from awake to asleep.
Limit evening blue light from computers, phones, and tvs.
If you absolutely must use a computer in the evening, try blue-blocker glasses or an orange light app like f.lux, which changes the color of your computer screen to match your environment.
Get outside during the day to help “set” your circadian clock so your body knows when it’s supposed to be awake. Sunshine is great, but even being outside on cloudy or rainy days will do the trick.

Create a pre-bed routine that starts at a specific time.
First, determine your ideal wake-up time. Then, based on how many hours of sleep you generally need to feel rested (usually minimum 7-8), work backward. If you know you need about 9 hours of sleep each night, your schedule could look something like:

7:00am Wake up
10:00pm Asleep goal
9:45pm In bed: Listen to guided meditation
9:30pm Reading with orange booklight
9:00pm Make tea, wash face, bathroom things
8:45pm Last dog walk of the evening
8:00pm Last meal or snack of the evening

While it’s tempting to sleep in on the weekends, sticking to a consistent wake-up and bedtime schedules can help sort your circadian rhythm.

We’ll explore this more in an upcoming article – stay tuned!

Keep your workouts in daylight hours.
While some people swear by post-work workouts to burn off stress, be mindful of how late you’re working out. Remember the circadian rhythm above? When we raise our body temperature during a workout, it’s a signal to the system to be awake. When the body temperature lowers, it’s a signal to wind down for sleep.

If moving before bed is helpful, try something with low intensity, like gentle yoga or walking.

Do a little stretch.
Nothing is worse than hours spent tossing, staring, and checking the clock. Don’t do it! Recent studies (Walker, Why We Sleep) advise getting up after about 20 minutes in bed and doing something like stretching, meditating, or reading for a few minutes in low light, then try going back to bed with the intention of sleeping.

Instead of napping, try yoga nidra.
Afternoon naps are great to support brain function, and if you’re not used to pausing in the middle of the day it can be helpful to have some guidance. Enter yoga nidra. This guided relaxation practice is a tried-and-true modality similar to meditation that is practiced lying down.

Yoga nidra’s unique systematic approach to relaxation helps guide the body into a resting state while the mind stays somewhat active, leaving the practitioner feeling well-rested after just a few minutes. Check out some yoga nidra practices here.

Check your relationship with caffeine.
Besides the usual caffeine culprits of coffee, tea, and energy drinks, caffeine also lives less obviously in desserts, de-caff coffee, and painkillers like Motrin. Because caffeine is so common, it’s easy to forget that it’s an addictive stimulant drug.

Caffeine works by pushing the natural “sleep pressure” (Walker, Why We Sleep) that builds up during waking hours, delaying feelings of tiredness until the caffeine wears off. It’s a major factor in the common cycle of caffeine – trouble falling asleep – more caffeine to wake up the next day.

If omitting caffeine altogether sounds horrifying, try one of these ideas instead:

Set a hard stop time for consuming caffeine. Since the substance stays in our systems so long, even an early afternoon latte can impact sleep later on.
Notice if you’re drinking caffeine because you’re tired, bored, or some other reason. If you’re bored, try replacing one cup with hot tea or bubbly water.
Try out an adaptogenic coffee alternative. There are lots of companies like Four Sigmatic, Rasa, and MUD/WTR that offer coffee alternatives that give a boost of energy without the extreme highs or crashes of regular coffee.

Photo by Spacejoy on Unsplash