3 Day Sleep Hacking Experiment Results

I recently bought a Jawbone UP24 and wanted to experiment with my nighttime routine to see how it affected my sleep.

As an entrepreneur productivity is a big priority, and one of the ways I’ve figured out how to be more productive is through better quality sleep.

With better quality sleep, I can sleep less and get more out of it. Effectively giving me an extra hour (maybe two) more than my competition. So now having a device that tracks my sleep activity, I wanted to put some ideas to the test.

I partly wanted to see if this device was bullshit or not. Much more testing is needed and I’m sure there are better devices, but the early evidence was exciting.

The first night I went to sleep with no routine. Just walked into the room and went to bed. Here is my sleep graph…

I think that’s representative to how most people sleep. They wake up a few times at night, but overall there is some good moments of deep sleep.

Orange bars represent being awake.

Light blue bars represent light sleep.

Dark blue bars represent deep sleep.

The next night I decided to try a cup of warm tea before bed to relax myself. I also wanted to see if caffeine really had an effect on my sleep or if that was just B.S. Here is my sleep graph from when I drank some tea before bed…

You can see that I was wide awake at one point in the night and my deep sleep was erratic. There was more light sleep than deep sleep. I physically felt the results of this in the morning. I was tired and my eyes had a heavy burning sensation the whole next day.

Now, last night I decided to try a supplement before bed. Many people believe supplements don’t work and they’re “snake oil.” I’ve been a very big advocate of supplements over the last couple years though.

In fact supplements helped me cure my battle with doctor diagnosed severe anxiety and panic attacks. That’s a story for another day though.

Last night I took a supplement called 5HTP before bed. It’s something I used to take for my anxiety because it raises your serotonin levels and helps with mood support. Serotonin happens to also be one of the most important chemicals in your body for regulating your sleep cycles.

So I knew this was going to be interesting…

I know the Jawbone Up24 isn’t the most medically professional measuring tool.

I know 3 nights isn’t a large enough testing period by any means.

However, I thought it was interesting to see such clear differences between the 3 mini-experiments. And regardless of whether this was medically perfect testing or not, I’m damn sure taking some 5HTP before bed from now on.

This was fun.

I’m going to look up other common sleep advice and test them. I’ll update you in a month or so to let you know how things are going.

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this I’d really appreciate a share.