8 Simple Strategies To Get Better Sleep
“Happiness is waking up, looking at the clock and finding that you still have two hours left to sleep.”
— Charles M. Schulz
Sleep is a big riddle. We all do it. We all like it when we’re doing it. But we don’t get enough of it.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Up until the invention of artificial light, people generally just slept when it was dark and woke when it was light. As neuroscientist Mathew Walker puts it, “Electric light put an end to this natural order of things.”
Maybe it was this shake up in our ability to sleep well that spurred the research on sleep. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that scientists even scratched the surface on the science of sleep. While we know so much there is so much we still don’t know, including exactly why we sleep.
We know that sleep improves our memory, our mood, muscle protein synthesis, and it flushes out toxins among many other things. But do we sleep because these need to happen or did our body adapt to this process because it’s less efficient to do it during the day?
The bottom line is that sleep is good and if you’re the average adult then you need more of it. Use these tips to get your best night of sleep ever.
Strategies For Better Sleep
1. Respect The Sleep Window
The 2-3 hours before you go to bed are extremely sensitive and have a strong impact on your quality of sleep.
This lesson has had one of the biggest impacts on my sleep. In the two hours before bed:
Eliminate blue light exposure
Don't exercise
Don't eat
Don’t drink alcohol
Avoid high levels of stress
Find a way to down-regulate. Do something that activates your parasympathetic (rest, digest, repair) nervous system: read, meditate, stretch, or take a bath.
2. If You Eat Breakfast, Make Sure It’s Not The Standard American One
If you eat breakfast, make sure it contains whole foods and protein to avoid a glycemic spike early on which will just set you up for a roller coaster ride throughout the day.
The standard American breakfast tends to include cereal, muffins, granola, toast, orange juice, bagels, waffles, pancakes, and donuts. These are all carb-heavy foods that lack protein and healthy fat. This leads to a glycemic spike early on in the day which sets you up for a sharp drop after the spike which leads you to craving more of these foods which sets you up for failure.
Shoot for healthy alternatives like eggs, protein shakes, Greek yogurt, and last night’s leftovers (why are lunch and dinner the only savory meals?). Also, consider skipping breakfast, a.k.a fasting (learn how here).
3. Save The Carbs For Dinner
Backloading the majority of your carbohydrates for dinner instead of earlier in the day might improve sleep.
Carbs increase the amount of tryptophan and serotonin–two key chemicals associated with decreased alertness, drowsiness, and sleep. Serotonin is also a precursor to melatonin synthesis. This doesn't mean having a ton of carbs throughout the day and even more at night though. Just shift the percentages, make sure they are whole foods, and try to do it before The Sleep Window.
4. Go For A Walk After Dinner
Eating food, especially food that has higher amounts of carbohydrates, means that your blood sugar will increase. To reduce this post-prandial spike and to improve digestion, movement becomes your ally.
Not only has research shown that walking throughout the day improves sleep quality but even as little as a 2 minute walk after a meal has a significant impact on insulin and blood sugar levels. Post-dinner walks allow your body to regulate these processes so that the body has more energy to focus on sleep at night.
Try to walk for 20 minutes within an hour of eating your last bite. Bonus points if you can do it barefoot and time it with a sunset.
5. Find Out If You Have A Sleep Disorder
Anywhere from 50-70 million Americans have a sleep disorder. These include snoring, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, and parasomnias. The impacts of these disorders include hypertension, heart disease, asthma, hyperglycemia, and depression.
Talk to your doctor about your symptoms. The good news is that you might be able to do a simple sleep test in the comfort of your own home. From there the treatment varies but it might be as simple as dropping some weight. Incredibly, “a 10% increase in body weight may make you six times more likely to have OSA [obstructive sleep apnea].”
While the obvious benefit of getting tested for a sleep disorder is improving your sleep, the less obvious benefit is that it can save your life.
6. Separate Alcohol And Sleep
Modifying if, how much, and when you drink may be one of the best strategies to get better sleep. Alcohol, being a depressant, induces a subtle withdrawal effect on the body for approximately one hour after starting to drink. This withdrawal increases your sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze) nervous system by increasing your heart rate, making you sweat, releasing adrenaline, and triggering the bladder to empty. These effects are terrible friends to go to bed with.
Research has shown that consuming more than two servings of alcohol per day for men, and more than one serving per day for women, can lead to a significant reduction in sleep quality by 39.2%.
Rule: Have one hour of alcohol-free time before bed for every drink you consume. If you’re going to drink then start drinking early. There's no quick way to minimize these effects. Time is your friend.
7. Avoid Medication For Sleep
Over half of people say that they take medications, supplements, or other substances to help them fall asleep.
This impact on the dopamine system is terrifying.
While I may be hypocritical for saying this with my near-nightly magnesium and L-theanine supplements, there is a big difference between these and common sleep aids like sedative-hypnotics (Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata) and benzodiazepines (Ativan, Valium, Klonopin). Both prescription and over-the-counter sleep aids often lead to shorter sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) and less waking at night but this sedating effect is not the same thing as quality sleep. Sleep aids often limit stages 3 and 4 of sleep–REM sleep and deep sleep–which are critical for immune system function, muscle recovery, memory, learning, creativity, and brain development. Plus, every sleep med has side effects, typically the “Morning After” effect, resulting in drowsiness, dizziness and being less mentally sharp the next day.
The most popular prescription sleep aid, Ambien (zolpidem), is linked to everything from lung infections to Alzheimer’s to addiction to feeling like you’re drunk. It’s been found to simulate a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.06%-0.11% (the US legal limit is 0.08%).
8. Minimize Blue Light Exposure At Night
For millions of years when our skin and eyes were exposed to blue light it meant it was daytime. This exposure to blue light coincides with a rise in cortisol to energize us and a drop in melatonin. By evening this reverses and the cortisol drops while the melatonin rises to help us sleep. When we are exposed to blue light at night it tricks our brain into thinking it is daytime and our cortisol increases and melatonin decreases.
Even exposure to light with our eyes closed has significant effects. Research on those with insomnia showed that preventing this exposure to the eyes with the use of blue light-blocking glasses (both amber ones and clear ones) improved the length of time slept, total sleep time, and the quality of sleep when wearing them for 2 hours before bed.
But blue light exposure doesn’t only affect us when we’re awake. A study compared participants exposed to 3 lux (extremely dim light) and those exposed to 100 lux (comparable to a very dark, overcast day) for one to two nights. While melatonin levels were equal in both groups, those exposed to the 100 lux had less time in slow wave and REM stages of sleep, higher heart rate, lower heart rate variability (HRV), and even higher insulin resistance numbers. Your TV is about 600 lux.
Do these light-minimizing strategies for better sleep:
In one survey (above), 52.7% of people did the number one thing you shouldn't do in bed before going to sleep. Don’t sleep with a TV on.
Block electronics that have any type of light on them (alarm clock, fans, TV, air conditioners, white noise machines, etc.) with basic electrical tape or LightDim stickers.
Put your phone in another room.
If you have to use your phone, change the color to red on your iPhone with this trick.
Don’t turn the lights on in the bathroom if you pee in the middle of the night.
Use red light bulbs. (See an article here for more on what to look for.)
What are your best strategies to get better sleep?
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