As I write this, I’m reaching the end of my month-long effort to sleep better. This is part of my year-long project to improve my foundations [1] in life, following previous months dedicated to fitness [2], productivity [3], money [4], food [5], reading [6] and outreach [7].
Overall, I’m pleased with how the month went. According to my Fitbit, the average time I’ve spent actually asleep this month was seven hours and fourteen minutes, compared to my average for the previous six months of six hours and forty-eight minutes. This is an improvement of twenty-six minutes per night.
Twenty-six minutes may not seem like much but, subjectively, the difference has been dramatic. I’ve felt a lot better most days, which has made it easier to concentrate at work—and hopefully made me a bit more pleasant to be around.
Sleeping Better: What Worked for Me
I started this month fairly pessimistic about improving my sleep. As I mentioned in my introduction [8], I have two small children, so mid-night interruptions in sleep and early awakenings can make sleeping a regular eight hours difficult. I had largely resigned myself to accepting I wouldn’t sleep well until our kids are a bit older.
While sleep this month was a bit easier than it was the previous month, the frequency of interruptions didn’t actually change all that much. As I review my sleep journal, I was woken up at least once before 5:30 a.m. on nearly 50% of the nights this month. (Although, fortunately, our daughter managed to get back to her typical 5:30-6:00 a.m. wake-up time, after last month’s bout of 4 a.m. wake-ups.)
Instead, the improvement in my sleep was really simple: I became deliberate about going to bed earlier. Instead of lingering in bed until 10:30-11:00 p.m., I set a curfew for myself not to watch television or use any devices after 9 p.m. This led to me going to sleep about half an hour earlier, which in turn meant roughly half an hour more sleep each night, interruptions notwithstanding.
“Go to bed earlier” is such brain-dead simple advice that I think the fact that I didn’t earnestly try it until now requires some self-reflection.
I think my failure to apply this advice came from a few places:
- Drinking too much coffee. I had always told myself that caffeine didn’t impact my sleep, in part because when I did try to sleep I fell asleep quickly. But it may be that my afternoon coffees were bumping back my perceived sleepiness by half an hour or more.
- Prioritizing entertainment over sleep. Like many, I was tempted to watch one more episode, check email one last time or otherwise stay up a little later than I should. Especially after a busy day, it was often hard to cut short my entertainment time to get to sleep. Having the curfew limit has been enormously helpful in removing the temptation to procrastinate on going to sleep.
- I had a bad attitude. In retrospect, it was easy to point to my kids’ sleep habits as the culprit in my own sleep difficulties. And while these may have been the proximate cause of some poor nights of sleep, my fixation on this prevented me from recognizing how much of my sleep was under my control.
The Limits of Sleeping Better
While my improved sleep has been a welcome change, doing the research for this month also helped me shift my attitudes toward sleep.
One idea that I found particularly helpful was Jade Wu’s comment that tiredness is not the same as sleepiness. Sleepiness is a lack of sleep. Tiredness is a lack of energy. The two are not interchangeable.
Sleepiness means you need sleep—and you will sleep if given the opportunity. Tiredness, in contrast, can come from stress, boredom, mental overload and more—it means you could use a break, but if you don’t fall asleep right away when given the opportunity, you’re probably not sleepy.
Reading Wu’s book, Hello Sleep [9], also helped me recognize that I had some unhelpful beliefs and attitudes about sleep that were exacerbating my problems. In particular, I had the notion that any time I wasn’t brimming with energy, the issue was due to not sleeping well enough in the night.
Now, I realize this was probably not the case. While there were definitely some days in my past where I could have dropped into a deep nap, if given the chance, there were probably also a lot of days where my energy levels would have perked up almost instantly if I were to switch to hanging out with a friend, watching a fun television show or doing an activity I really enjoy.
Of course, if you’re extremely tired (but aren’t technically sleepy) such a distinction may seem like semantics. But I found it helpful, because it suggested that sometimes I needed to look elsewhere from just my sleep itself to fix moments of low energy. Sometimes what I needed was to get outside, chat with a friend or do something fun.
Similarly, I used to get a bit of frustration surrounding my sleep quality. My deep sleep scores provided by my Fitbit were always under my desired benchmark. But the accuracy of those metrics is fairly low, so I’m learning to trust that my body gets the rest it needs. If I needed more deep sleep, I’d get it, so worrying about sleep quality is a waste of time.
Plans for Future Sleep
Above all, my biggest takeaway from the month was that my sleep will be good if I make it a priority, and that sleeping well is under my control, even if I don’t always get to choose the ideal conditions to make it happen.
I don’t plan to be obsessive about forcing an early bed time on all occasions, especially if that means missing out on opportunities to socialize with people who don’t go to bed at 9:30 p.m. But I do think my decision to cut out screen time after 9 p.m. forced me to realize how much I had been trading off sleep for entertainment of dubious value.
I also plan on sticking with my one-coffee-per-day rule, keeping it decaf after that. While the allure of a mid-afternoon pick-me-up is appealing, I think I’m better off without it.
Finally, I’m going to be better at distinguishing genuine sleepiness from the desire to take a break in my day-to-day life.
Updates on Other Foundations
Some quick updates on the previous foundations:
- Fitness — Continuing to go well. In seven months, I’ve only missed two days. (Although I’ve allowed myself some easy options, like stretching, on days my body needs to recover.)
- Productivity — The full-capture system is still going well. There’s always more to do than time to do it in, but I’m pretty happy with how my current system keeps the stuff that really matters from slipping through the cracks.
- Money — Just finished a big annual review and budget for the year.
- Food — I’ve been pretty good about sticking to the dietary changes I started previously. My weight has been holding steady at around 15 lbs. lighter than my weight at the beginning of the year.
- Reading — The research for this project has kept me busy, so I expect to keep on track to finish 8 to 10 books each month.
- Outreach — Fairly successful, although there are still improvements to be made here. I think being more rigorous about tracking might help.
That’s it for this month. Next month, I’m focusing on reflection, which is a month dedicated to thinking about thinking.