Taking Sleep Seriously

You’d think sleep would be the easiest thing to coach. Free and it feels good, right? Better sleep can take your daily life from ‘miserable’ to ‘five-star resort’ in a remarkably short period of time. It doesn’t seem to have the air of preachiness that people detect in the areas of organization or weight loss. For whatever reason, though, people hang onto their poor sleep habits harder than anything else. It’s hard to get people to start taking sleep seriously.

The main reasons are obvious. Late at night is when we want to turn off the clock and indulge in all the habits we don’t want officially recorded. Late night is off the books, isn’t it? The other reason is that we want a part of our lives to ourselves, something that doesn’t belong to our employer. Pushing out bedtime means sleeping later, and sleeping later means coffee, and coffee often means treats. Why mess all that up by going to bed earlier like some smarmy goody two-shoes?

At some point, in spite of all this, we decide that we’re sick of it and we’re done. Done. We need something better. The unrested life is simply not working. It’s time to start taking sleep seriously, like, immediately.

This was me. My moment was the night I tried to shove my husband out of bed because there was “a robotic spider crawling down the ceiling” and I was prepared to let it eat me as long as he got away. Night terrors. I could live with restless leg syndrome, I could live with chronic insomnia, I could live with waking up throughout the night, I could live with grinding my teeth, I could live with occasional nightmares. Pavor nocturnus was my line. Not this. I was willing to read anything, listen to anyone, record everything, and literally try anything for weeks or months on end if I thought it had a slim chance of working.

That’s the attitude it takes to fix a chronic sleep problem, because it’s not a “one and done” kind of a project. It’s a permanent lifestyle input. Why would you only want to sleep better for a couple of nights here and there?

Another important thing to understand is the concept of the “aggregation of marginal gains.” This means that tiny incremental changes in multiple, different areas can add up to a noticeable improvement. It can also mean that doing only one thing won’t make much of a difference.

An example of the aggregation of marginal gains would be trying to get to work earlier. You lay out your clothes the night before, buy a case of protein bars to keep in your car for a backup breakfast option, make sure to fill your gas tank in the evenings on the way home, pack your lunch while you’re cooking dinner, and streamline your makeup routine. Each of these saves you five minutes. Suddenly you’re ten minutes early instead of fifteen minutes late. Aggregation of marginal gains!

This is all the stuff I really wish I knew when I first started my personal sleep research and experimentation journey. Of course, if I’d known all of this when I started, I probably wouldn’t realize how important it all was.

1. Meal timing is EVERYTHING. It’s not necessarily what you eat, it’s WHEN you eat. Sleep issues, like migraine, appear to be linked to hormones in some way. Both are correlated with biological gender as well as age. There are a lot of hormones related to both sleep and appetite. The idea is to try to eat every meal and snack in roughly the same time window, each and every day. I eat basically at 8 AM, noon, 3 PM, and 7 PM.
2. Stop eating three hours before bedtime. This was the secret key to stopping my night terrors, and I think it’s the same for little kids. (Also kids with bed-wetting problems, since enuresis is a hormonal problem as well). Late-night eaters might panic over this. Look. Just double your breakfast, make sure you eat lunch and an afternoon snack every single day, and you will have eaten about 80% of your day’s calories by dinnertime. You won’t be hungry. If you want the kind of desserts you normally eat late at night, just have them for breakfast or your afternoon snack instead.
3. Drink more water. Most people don’t drink anywhere near the amount of water they should. If you ever wake up with cottonmouth, you’re dehydrated. You should never actually feel thirsty. Find a way to record how much you drink. If you hate the taste of water, figure it out. Front-load your water consumption so you’re at two-thirds by the end of lunch, and quit drinking fluids around 8 PM.
4. Caffeine affects women and small people more. This is under-reported, but taking hormones like birth control pills makes caffeine stay in the system longer. The half life doubles. So if you take the pill, and you also drink cola or coffee, consider moving your cutoff earlier. If you’re using caffeine after lunch, you’re hurting yourself.
5. Sleeping with pets. If you have pets on the bed at night, they’re waking you up, even if you don’t realize it. I have a dog and a parrot, both of whom sleep in a crate overnight, and they still occasionally wake me up with small sounds. Air quality can also be an issue if you have respiratory problems.
6. Sleeping with other people. Your bedmate’s habits may or may not be known to you. Snoring, tossing and turning, keeping lights on, and, worst of all, their phone notifications! I had a house guest once who kept his phone on high, and his notifications woke me up from the guest room down the hall at least eight times. I’d say I have no idea how his wife dealt with it, except I do know - they divorced a year or so later.
7. Electronics. Go through them all and move as many as possible out of the bedroom. Dings, rings, pings, tings, and all the other things, not to mention the lights, the hums, the buzzes, whirs, clicks, et cetera. If you’re watching TV or looking at a screen in bed, you’re basically shining a flashlight in your own face. I listen to an audio book at night so I have something to help me wind down without shining lights in my eyes.
8. White noise. My upstairs neighbors were driving me to distraction, until warm weather kicked in and we started using a fan at night. Problem solved! Then we ordered an air purifier with an even more soothing white noise. I had tried white noise generators before, and it turns out the specific white noise and volume are very personal. Don’t give up just because three or four didn’t work for you.
9. An eye mask. Again, this is something I tried that totally failed, until I got the right one. The old flat type of eye mask would just irritate my eyelashes, and I’d push it off my head in my sleep. I got a molded foam type with raised cups over the eyes. It actually stays put over my nose and keeps almost all light out. It cost $8. The difference is, dare I say it, night and day. My husband can even read with a lamp on next to the bed and I can still fall asleep.
10. The bed itself. In my early twenties, my bed was so hard it would make my arm fall asleep. The first purchase my husband and I made as newlyweds was a new mattress. We marched into a mattress store and said, “Show us the deepest pillow top mattress you have.” This is our tenth year on this mattress, which cost about $3000, and that works out to $300 a year, or less than a dollar a day. For a place where you spend a third of your life, it’s better bang for the buck than anything else you can buy.
11. General nutrition. Everyone eats differently and thus, everyone gets different results from their food intake. I don’t know a single person who I think eats enough fresh vegetables; most aren’t even within 10% of where they probably should be. I see hundreds of photos of people’s dinner plates without a single speck of green. Surely it’s worth a try?
12. Exercise. Again, most people aren’t hitting the targets. Why rule it out?
13. About restless leg syndrome, look at iron supplementation.
14. About migraine, look at magnesium.
15. Nightmares? For me, I had to look at certain food ingredients, which I’m better off if I eat at lunch instead of dinner. Garlic, paprika, curry, red chilis, and cayenne pepper seem to be the biggest culprits. My specific cuisines are Indian, Ethiopian, and pizza.
16. Track everything! Tracking your metrics may be literally the only thing that keeps your doctor from waving you off as a hypochondriac. Doctors can be very impatient and condescending, but they do like science. Write down any weird symptoms you have in detail. Headaches? Skin rashes? Digestive problems? Dizzy spells? Sleepwalking? You can do the same with your kids if they have any weird undiagnosed problems. During the three years it took me to figure out my pavor nocturnus, I tracked my workouts, kept a meticulous food log, and kept a spreadsheet with several columns for each type of sleep disturbance, including screaming, getting out of bed, whether I woke up or not, and details of what dream I had.

See that even a 1% improvement in each of these areas would be enough to get your total grade up? Try rating your sleep quality on a scale of 1-5, and track your personal adherence to these areas, also on a scale of 1-5. See if you can bump that up even a tiny bit on a consistent basis.

Sleep is a complex system, poorly understood by medical science. That’s partly because we require superhuman acts of heroic self-mortification from our medical students. A doctor is the last person to ask about sleep, because so much deprivation is demanded of them that they can’t be much more than sardonic about it. Sometimes, the best we can do is to guess why we’ve tried so many things, only for sleep to elude us still.

Other times, we know full well we’re doing it to ourselves. All it takes is the decision that that’s enough now. It’s time to start taking sleep seriously.