This newsletter comes out every other Thursday and hopefully provides you with thought-provoking content about the mundane, wacky, and weird. I will be writing until the 75th edition. If you know someone who may enjoy the newsletter, you can share it here.
We all have a bad night of sleep at some point. However, the new normal is consistently having a bad night of sleep. In America, 11% of people report insufficient sleep every night, but many more people frequently have difficulty sleeping. It is estimated that sleep-related problems affect 70 million Americans of all ages and socioeconomic classes.
Sleep is vital because it can help us physically heal, recover from illness, deal with stress, solve problems, consolidate memories, and improve motor skills. It is one of the fundamental aspects of being on this planet. Almost every animal in the world sleeps.
Restorative sleep isn’t just about the number of hours of sleep you get, but also the quality of that sleep. Unfortunately, about “62% of adults worldwide feel that they don’t sleep well when they go to bed”.
I became interested in sleep from reading Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” book.
It was an international bestseller. It was one of those eye-opening books, where I realized I can never look at sleep the same way. As obvious as it may seem, sleep is super important for how we experience our awake life.
Here are a few “rules” Walker proposes for getting a good night's sleep.
Regularity
Keep it cool
Darkness at night and light in the morning
Don’t stay in bed
Monitor alcohol & caffeine
Wind down routine
People don’t listen to rules, they want to hear reasons. Here is my take on the rules he laid out for a good night's sleep.
⏰ Regularity. Deep within your brain, you have a master 24-hour clock. It expects regularity and works best under regularity. Many of us have an alarm clock to wake up, but few of us have a to-bed-alarm. For a long time, I had an alarm that went off at 9pm that indicated to me that I need to start winding down (more on that later).
🥶 Keep it cool. Your core body temperature needs to drop 2-3 degrees for your body to sleep. The easiest way to do that is to drop the temperature in the room. Our bodies evolved to sleep at night when it is naturally cooler. That’s the reason it is easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot.
One of the worst nights of sleep I got was in a small Italian town in August 2006. Europe was having its worst heatwave in decades and none of the rooms had air conditioning in our hotel room. I remember my mom bribed/begged the cook at a restaurant to lend us their fan after they closed to help keep our room cool. The temperature was in the high 80s at night and we were all tossing and turning for hours. Ever since that night, I have always preferred to keep my room extra cool at night. Scientists recommend 62-69 degrees as the ideal range.
☀️🌑. Lights on and lights out. Turning off the lights to go to bed is intuitive. Speaking from experience, there is nothing worse than turning out the light and then realizing that the side of the curtain is letting in a stream of light. Darkness releases a hormone called melatonin which helps regulate the healthy timing of our sleep. Any visible light can disrupt the release of melatonin.
Surprisingly, it is just as important to get light into your eye early in the morning. This helps set your biological clock for the day. Andrew Huberman a neurobiologist at Stanford, says, “If sunlight reaches your eyes soon after you wake, it triggers a neural circuit that controls the timing of the hormones cortisol and melatonin, which affect sleep”. It doesn't matter whether you're a night owl or a morning dove, the important thing is to get some sun for at least a few minutes soon after getting out of bed. Going outside for light is much more effective than through a window or a phone. I’ve noticed an improved mood from taking Chloe on a morning walk. It’s a double whammy because I get light exposure plus exercise.
🚶🏽 Don’t stay in bed. If you are in bed and having trouble falling asleep, don’t stay in bed. Do anything that may make you sleepy besides staying in bed. The reason? Humans are incredibly associative species. If we look at the bed and associate it with trying but failing to fall asleep, then when we get in, we will get anxious about falling asleep.
🍻 ☕. It is obvious that caffeine doesn’t help you sleep, but it is interesting how long the caffeine can stay in your system. Take this image below of having a cup of coffee at 3pm.
About a quarter of the caffeine will still be in your system at 1 am. Imagine waking up at 1 am and taking down a quarter cup of coffee and attempting to fall back asleep.
I’ve been drinking coffee for almost 15 years and this has inspired me to attempt a week without coffee and see how no caffeine affects my sleep.
I believed for a while that alcohol or a little nightcap can help you fall asleep better. However, that is not quite true. Alcohol sedates you which is not the same as falling asleep. In truth, you are simply losing consciousness faster. Alcohol also will trigger our fight or flight system and your sleep will be punctured with these micro awakenings throughout the night. Wild stuff!
Finally, my favorite sleep “rule” is an evening routine. Here are a few things that I have found helpful.
🫖 Tea after dinner -It relaxes me and starts my association with winding down.
🕯️ Lowering lights - bright lights stall the release of melatonin which helps you fall asleep.
⏰ Alarm on phone for 9 pm - I was going to bed later than I wanted and this alarm helped me punctuate the evening of fun into the next stage of my nighttime routine. After the alarm goes off, I turn my phone on airplane mode. This eases my anxiety about being woken up from a notification.
📝 Journaling - I have a 5-minute journal and I take a few moments to recap the highlights/lowlights of the day.
🐕. Taking Chloe out to pee and putting her to bed.
😘. Goodnight kiss.
📚. Reading in bed - I’ll stop when I notice my heart-rate below a certain threshold or notice that I reread a sentence.
😴 Lights out - I’ll typically fall asleep in a few minutes.
I don’t get all of these every night, but when I do I get a good night's sleep my body thanks me for “the next day.
What I am listening to
Boyd Varty’s podcast interview on the Tim Ferriss Show was excellent. They discussed Boyd’s recent book The Lion Trackers Guide to Life. Boyd grew up on a massive nature preserve in South Africa and his tales from the bush were laugh-out-loud funny. He mixes the philosophical with the wacky perfectly. If you enjoyed Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights you will enjoy this podcast episode.
Quote I am pondering
I don’t know where I am going, but I know how to get there”
-Boyd Varty from the Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
Nifty website
Drive & Listen simulates cruising through cities across the globe, complete with local radio stations and street noise.
Hat tip to the Hustle newsletter.
Pic of the Week
My good friend Keegan came down to visit for the weekend! He and his wife Christine are having their first baby due in early May so he came down for a babymoon boys trip.