How I Turned Walker’s “6 Tips for Better Sleep” to Enhance Sleep Quality
Wouldn’t it be great if there were no interruptions between our X hours of sleep?
Sleeping early and waking up early is a great head start to reshaping my schedule, but what about those days I woke up in the middle of the night (for whatever reasons) despite following my sleep schedule? Those days when I woke up and couldn’t fall back to sleep were as awful as pulling all-nighters.
Integrating my observations with Matt Walker’s “6 Tips for Better Sleep,” I establish my mechanism to reduce the probability of encountering the above phenomenon and obtain better sleep quality.
Before building good sleep quality, we want to establish sufficient sleep quantity first.
Practice Your Sleep Schedule Regularly
Per Walker, it’s vital to have a regular sleep schedule for your brain to parse “it’s time to sleep” and “it’s time to wake up.” In short, you want to build a consistent time for your biological clock to operate to your advantage.
Indeed, this was my first step to setting a consistent “reminder”¹ to wake up (like leaving the window curtain a little space for light to shine through in the morning) and a wind-down mode that reminds me it’s time to sleep (a banner on my phone to stopped my digital activities). These external cues are rarely needed once my biological clock is tuned into such a consistent schedule.
- The “reminder” is not the same as setting an alarm since I found an alarm could disrupt my sleep cycle. In return, it could wake me up in an awful state despite having enough sleep.
Wind-Down Duration
Through my reminder, you can see I simultaneously leverage Walker’s idea to engage in a “wind-down” duration by setting my alarm 30 minutes before my desired sleep time (11 pm). This is because I cannot sleep right away. If I put my “reminder” at 11 pm, I would most likely stay awake for another 30 minutes or even more (unless I’m dead tired).
The key during the wind-down period is to do something that won’t require too much thinking, and it could also give yourself a buffer time to relax your mind and body.
Cool Your Body Off
Studies show “our brain and body need to drop by about 1 degree Celsius” to initiate sleep and to stay asleep.²
If you are a person like me who is scared of coldness, one method I use is to mimic the “raining effect.” Although I don’t like coldness, I do like to sleep when it’s raining outside. I obviously cannot control the weather. However, I do have the ability to play raining sound through my device with a pre-set timer. I also can turn on my air purifier (I usually need it for my allergy), which cools off my room slightly. Together, they make me think I’m sleeping in a rainy setting, which usually keeps me asleep until the morning after.
Darkness
We sleep at night for a reason: darkness triggers the release of melatonin for us to “feel” sleepy.
If I expose myself to see light, including blue light originating from my phone, I would have a much more difficult time falling asleep naturally. Walker advises us to wear an eye mask to not see the tempting devices or external light in our environment altogether.
The method I used is finding a less “detrimental” yet satisfying habit to replace my old one: “night-dreaming,” where I think of different stories in my mind instead of reading through my phone. This method consistently exposed me to darkness since I sometimes looked above my ceiling while “playing” a story in my mind.
Up til now, the methods mentioned focus heavily on getting into our sleep mode. Keeping my environment cool and dark prevents me from waking up in the middle of the night to some extent. But what if I do need to wake up, like the need to go to the bathroom? Indeed, I observed that this is the number one reason that pulled the trigger for me to stay awake for many days.
Reduce the Trigger: The Impact of Alcohol, Caffeine, and Water
The impact of alcohol and caffeine is quite a known fact that would keep us awake and even lower our sleep quality. One interesting observation is that water could be as impactful as alcohol and caffeine in affecting my sleep quality.
What role does drinking water before I sleep play in preventing me from acquiring better sleep quality?
Drinking water increases my chance of going to the restroom at night. It’s not a problem if I wasn’t tempted to look at my phone, but this is a 50/50 chance for me to go back to sleep or be awake to start my day by looking through my phone.
As Clear emphasizes in “Atomic Habits,” disciplined individuals are not necessarily good at resisting temptation. Instead, they are strategic in hiding tempting situations away from their eyesight.³
A strategic move for me is to eliminate the potential trigger in the first place by the following “not doings:”
- No caffeine consumption after the morning
- No water consumption an hour before I sleep
“Lose Track of Your Time”
Finally, one last tip Walker proposes to obtain better sleep is to “walk it out.” The idea is that “if you can’t fall asleep for 25 minutes while in bed, you should get out of bed to do something else.”² The logic is our brain formulates relationships, and we don’t want to associate “bed” with “wakefulness.”
However, when I practiced it in reality, I noticed the method only works when I don’t pay attention to time. Initially, when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I focused too much attention on the 25 minutes to know when I should leave my bed. As I walked out of bed, I also focused on my clock to see when I felt sleepy. By constantly keeping track of the time, I become more anxious since I don’t feel the sleep mode coming after I’ve been awake for an extensive period.
When I don’t keep track of the time, my worries drop, and sleepiness flows through naturally. I would not make judgments like, “It’s already 4 am. I should go to sleep; else, I won’t have time to do so afterward.”
In short, if I accidentally interrupt my sleep mode, forget the clock, forget the time.
Reference
²Walker, Matt. (2020, September). 6 Tips for Better Sleep [Video]. TED. Link
³Clear, James. (2018). “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” Penguin: Avery.
