Snooze Strategies
A sight for red eyes
Lack of sleep is becoming a public health epidemic in America. Sleep deprivation compromises relationships, productivity, safety, and puts you at risk for diseases like cancer and diabetes. If you’re a member of this army of the walking dead, maybe it’s not all your fault. Maybe you just had a child or you’re constantly shifting time zones for work. But maybe you’re just not making sleep a priority. Neither was I. Inspired by my successful experiment in planning my food, I decided to apply the concept to my slumber.
Earlier this year I began tracking my sleep with an app called Sleep Cycle that uses my iPhone’s accelerometer to measure and track my sleep quality and habits. An adult athlete like myself needs eight to nine hours of sleep per night to recover and adapt. On average I get eight hours of sleep, but I’ve been sleeping less than eight hours a night five nights per week. I slept the least and poorest on Monday and Wednesday nights when l coach in the morning earliest. Being an early riser is part of my job, so if I was to get the optimum amount of sleep, I needed to go to bed earlier than I had been.
I decided codify some of the existing practices and new ones I wanted to try into a schedule of the last couple of hours before bedtime. This schedule would act as a period of downregulation, a time for both my body and mind to chill out so I could fall into a deep, restful sleep.
Here’s the schedule:
No caffeine after noon. Caffeine in the afternoon or evening makes it difficult to fall asleep and diminishes sleep quality.
Take a warm shower. During sleep, your core body temperature falls to its lowest levels. This is one reason why the room you sleep in needs to be a cool, dark, quiet cave. A warm shower a couple of hours before bed you fall asleep quicker by helping the body temperature fall.
Put on the orange glasses. Orange glasses block blue light which tricks our bodies into thinking it’s time to wake up instead of fall asleep. I first saw orange glasses on one of my best friends during a Skype session. He has chronic sleeping problems and the glasses have helped him overcome them.
Turn off all devices. This goes along with the orange glasses. Smartphone, tablet, and computer usage is ubiquitous in our lives. Use your down-regulation time to disconnect.
Supplement. I take creatine, fish oil, and magnesium supplements. The magnesium promotes sleep and should be taken before bed, so one time for taking all supplements helps me to remember to take my supplements every day.
Read. Relaxing in bed with a book is one of my favorite things to do. Reading is crucial to my creative and professional development, but it can be hard to make room during the day when I feel I need to be doing other things.
Work on your soft tissues. I ask my students to get hot and sweaty before they work out instead of foam rolling. Do you feel ready to get in a fight or pull a car off of a child after getting a massage? Probably not. After a workout or before bed is a more appropriate time to designate for your mobility practice.
Lights out. I hadn’t had a consistent bedtime since I was a kid, and I needed one for the benefit of my internal clock and to mentally make it a habit. It had to be a time where I could get eight hours of sleep no matter what I had the next morning, so I chose 9pm. Your bedroom should be like a cave: cool, dark, and quiet. Eye masks, blackout curtains, and ear plugs are all effective for making good sleepy-time environments.
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