Hack Your Sleep: The Art and Science of Sleeping

Research shows that the quality of sleep matters more than the amount of sleep you get, but what are the best ways to perfect your sleep? This post explains all of the biohacks you can do to get the most out of your sleep, such as:

1. Track your sleep. There are apps that track your sleep quality based on how much you move during the night, and these apps will help you discover what works — and what doesn’t — so you can optimize your sleep patterns.
2. Make your room as dark as possible. Unplug everything that glows, cover your windows with black curtains. Your bedroom may look like it belongs to the Unabomber, but you’ll sleep like a baby.
3. Develop a bedtime routine that starts about 2 hours before bed, and start eliminating glowing screens then. I use Zen Tech screen protectors to block blue light from my devices.
4. As much as you love your energy jolt from coffee, stop drinking it around 2 p.m.
5. Make sure you go to bed before 11 pm.
6. Don’t exercise within 2 hours before you go to bed.
7. Consider taking supplements like Magnesium, Collagen and Krill Oil, all of which can improve your sleep in different ways.

Getting good sleep is both an art and a science — yet the overwhelming majority of people have trouble sleeping, even the very high performance people who come to me for Bulletproof coaching. Even if you had time to sleep an entire 8 hours a night, would it be optimal, uninterrupted sleep? Would you awake feeling 100% refreshed? Either you don’t get enough hours of quality sleep, or you get too much sleep and still wake up feeling groggy and unrested. Indeed, research shows it’s not the number of hours of sleep you get that matters the most — it’s the quality of the hours you are getting. The largest sleep study ever conducted on 1.1 million people shows that it’s quality not quantity that matters most! This post covers the Bulletproof practices to upgrade your sleep, from getting the right food and nutrients to technologies that can improve your sleep itself. I’ve written about some of this before, and this post should sum up your top action items nicely in one place.

The Basics of Sleep That Don’t Cost Anything

Whether or not you currently have trouble sleeping, there are several key things you can easily do to improve your current sleep. These are the most basic yet most critical hacks that will help you upgrade both the quality and quantity of sleep so you can optimize your rest every night.

• First, sleep in a pitch-black room. Make it as dark as you can possibly make it. Block all the light sources you can, whether it’s a curtain or just pinning up fabric as needed. Seriously, if you live in a city, you need blackout curtains that don’t allow in all the light pollution. Cover LEDs with black electrical tape.
• Start winding down at least two hours before bed. This means less bright lighting at night, as well as eliminating, or at least dimming, computer screens and TVs.
• Third, though it may seem obvious, caffeine is not a sleep aid — stop drinking it by 2:00 p.m. each day, or at least 8 hours prior to bedtime (earlier if you’re sensitive to it).
• Go to bed by 11:00 p.m. when possible because your body creates a cortisol surge after 11 p.m. to keep you awake.
• Don’t exercise within 2 hours of bedtime, unless it’s relaxing yoga or something similar.

These are basics that are easy to implement immediately at zero cost, and they ensure you’re starting off on the right foot — or right side of the bed, rather…

Top Hacks for Better Sleep

Even if you read no further, you can implement just these 5 things to dramatically improve your sleep. This is because they prepare your body for sleep hours by lowering stress and activity levels in the hours prior to bedtime.

• Consider a high quality coconut charcoal when your sleep cycle is disturbed, such as in jet lag. When your circadian rhythm is off, your gut bacteria can make more endotoxins that will slow you down the next day. It makes sense to bind them.
• Put your phone on airplane mode to avoid EMFs which can disturb sleep. This is surprisingly effective.
• Use the HeartMath Inner Balance™ sensor or emWave2 exercises to turn off your fight-or-flight response, which lets you go to sleep faster and stay asleep longer
• Only drink caffeine in the morning, up until 2 p.m. Test to see if your sleep is impacted by coffee at 1 p.m. or even noon. Different people clear it at different rates. Don’t drink it at all if a cup in the morning hurts your sleep.
• Use Upgraded™ Glutathione Force as an antioxidant and to help your liver do its detox work at night.

Food and Sleep

Your brain uses a lot of energy while you’re sleeping for critical resting, healing, and repairing functions. It helps to fuel your brain optimally so it can get its job done! There is a powerful connection between what you eat and how you sleep. Following the full Bulletproof® Diet is one of the most important things you can do to ensure better sleep quality over time. Within this spectrum of healthy eating, these specific sleep-focused guidelines will optimize your sleep even more:

• Eat low-mercury fish and seafood at dinner, or take krill oil 2 hours before bedtime: omega-3’s aid in your sleep processes, and krill oil in particular works in the brain because its omega-3 is bound to phospholipids. It helps with my sleep. More fat keeps your energy level stable for longer, and it takes energy to sleep efficiently.
• Some clients do very well with adding up to 1 Tbsp of Upgraded™ Brain Octane or Upgraded™ MCT oil before bedtime, blended into herbal tea as a way to provide fat to the brain for stable energy during sleep. Try it to see if it works for you. This hack is compatible with the next one.
• Try up to 1 Tbsp of raw honey before bed on an empty stomach. Your brain uses liver glycogen (carb storage) at night, and raw honey replenishes this supply and can create stable glucose levels for hours. You can take it with Brain Octane so your brain can burn glucose (from the honey) and fat (ketones from the Brain Octane) while you sleep.
• Other clients have improved sleep by taking 1–2 tablespoons of collagen protein before bed. If you are short on amino acids, the enzymatically processed protein does not require digestion the same way that normal proteins do.
• Reminder: Only drink coffee before 2:00 p.m. or less than 8 hours before bedtime! Coffee is awesome but it doesn’t make sense to ruin your sleep with it.

Putting everything food related together, the exact protocol for the above steps looks as follows:

• 1 gram of krill oil
• 1 Tbsp of Upgraded™ Brain Octane (best) or Upgraded™ XCT oil
• 1–2 Tbsp of Upgraded™ Collagen protein or 1–3 teaspoons of raw honey

You may not want to do everything all at once the first time because you won’t know which part worked best; isolate them and try them out one by one. We’re all a little different, so a personalized bedtime plan makes sense.

Supplements and Sleep

If you are looking for additional natural supplements and home remedies to improve your sleep quality, there are several potent ones I’ve written about to try. Here are my favorites:

• GABA: good for its natural calm and relaxation effects
• Valerian: a powerful herb for sleep, insomnia, and anxiety (Warning: It smells bad and leaves me groggy in the morning. Don’t use it every night.)
• Passion flower: an herbal supplement that acts like Valerian, but less intense
• Kava Stress Relief tea: (like chamomile on steroids)
• Natural Calm Magnesium: or other forms except Magnesium Oxide: (Brush your teeth after drinking; it’s acidic.)
• 5-HTP: stimulates more natural melatonin production, which makes you sleepier

And if you’re interested in lucid dreaming — just take Choline Force four hours before you go to bed, followed by 5-HTP about 45 minutes before bed. Et voila!

How to Track — then Hack — Your Sleep

Download my favorite iPhone sleep app, called SleepCycle, in order to track your regular sleep patterns. You just put your phone on your mattress, under your top sheet, and set the alarm. It will track your sleep quality using the microphone on your phone, and wake you feeling more refreshed at the top of a sleep cycle. I would pay $100 for this app. Do it for at least a week, so you get a sense of your baseline sleep quality.

Important: Make sure you put your phone on airplane mode so you don’t cook your head with RF.

Once you’ve tracked your sleep, you’ll have the data ready to hack your sleep — this ensures you know what you’re doing is actually working, and you can make adjustments along the way based on both how you’re feeling when you wake up, as well as what the numbers are telling you. Once you have your baseline, you can experiment with the sleep hygiene, supplements, and food hacks above, or you can try these: Here are a few more of my favorite sleep upgrades to try:

• Install easy plug in lights that don’t put out any blue spectrum. I turn off the overhead lights and turn these on an hour before bed. They help the kids (and me) get ready for sleep and make the house seem candle-lit.
• Pair these with electromagnetic field (EMF) filters to cut down on these fields that interfere with deep sleep (seriously!)
• Use acupuncture points to help deep sleep: a large body of evidence shows how well this works!

Learn More:

• My Improve Your Sleep series goes into way more depth on the topics above
• All my sleephack articles are listed here
• My creativeLIVE: The Bulletproof Life series on how to hack your sleep

Photo by: Annie Mole