Week #1: Sleep and Light
It's like the ranch dressing of lifestyle improvement... it makes everything better!
Welcome! I’m Jason, and this is the first post in a year-long series of weekly ideas, which will either be a trait or a skill, that will help us become the best version of ourselves possible! It’s a process I call “Holistic Lifestyle Design.” Week by week, I’ll post an idea with a goal, how to measure the goal, how to implement the goal, and how to hold yourself accountable to reaching the goal.
Each skill or trait is measured with a number we call a Social Score. Read this post to understand the idea behind the score. Our Social Score is measured on a chart we call a Skill Chart. Blank Skill Charts can be downloaded here:
The Curvy Road Project Blank Skill Chart
As I write each post, Shelly (my lovely wife) and I will be implementing each idea, then discussing it in our Facebook Group where the folks who are also implementing the ideas can ask questions, engage in discussions, give suggestions and advice based on their own personal experiences, and get support from our community of friendly, interesting folks.
The Project officially started on February 20th, 2022. If you didn’t start on the original launch date, no worries! You can start at any time; just go through each idea one week at a time starting with this “Week #1: Sleep and Light” post. In one week, move on to “Week #2”, which can be found on the “Roadmap” page. To find the discussions about each week in our Facebook Group, use the search box and search “#week1” or “sleep and light.”
Intrigued? Join us by following these steps:
Subscribe to the “free” option using that red button below:
Join the Facebook Group.
Follow us on Twitter.
Get a few other people to take the journey with you.
Read our Ground Rules for discussions.
Start by reading this “Sleep and Light” post, then implement the ideas.
Start participating in the discussions and have fun! After one week, move on to Week #2. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This one’s optional, but if we’re not friends on Facebook, shoot me a friend request! Note to people who know me personally- this is my “normal” profile, not my Antagonistic Frenchie profile.
Invite at least one other person you know in real life to join you. It could be a significant other, friend, family member, or coworker. It’s nice to have that social support so you can see your progress and get external affirmation for your hard work, and mutual support is incredibly helpful.
If you have questions you’d like me to address here on The Curvy Road Project Website, shoot me an email at curvyroadproject@gmail.com with “Question for Jason” in the subject line.
Anyway, let’s dig into Sleep and Light!
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Week #1 Goal: Get More High-Quality Sleep
Our first goal is simple - improve both the quality and quantity of sleep each night. Before reading on, consider how you would rate your current sleep on the Skill Chart. If your sleep is terrible, rate it closer to -5. If your sleep is excellent, rate it closer to +5.
If you haven’t done so yet, read the post on Social Scores to understand how the Skill Chart Works.
We’ll revisit this chart next week, and we’ll adjust our score if needed. We continue this week after week throughout the duration of the project. This is one method of keeping ourselves accountable and developing the permanent habits we need to improve our lives.
Why Is Sleep So Important?
Sleep is one of the most important components of our lives, yet we chronically neglect it. There’s a reason it’s the first topic we’re addressing in The Project. It’s a foundational need that, along with a good diet, regular exercise, and regular meditation, has the power to absolutely change your life for the better.
When we get enough quality sleep, we’re more social, we feel healthier, we experience fewer chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, experience better moods, we have less anxiety (which helps us get better sleep), we’re less depressed, we learn new stuff more effectively, we recover from injuries quicker, we’re more creative, we have more willpower, we have better sex, it makes us more patient, and we’re better at solving problems. Basically, good sleep provides the foundation that makes EVERYTHING we’ll do in the coming year easier and more effective.
How Sleep Works
Sleep consists of two major phases - non-REM (nREM)and REM. REM stands for “rapid eye movement”, which occurs when your eyes move around under your eyelids as you sleep. Non-REM sleep is divided into four progressively deeper stages. This is when your body heals itself. REM sleep only consists of one stage, which is when the stuff you’ve learned and experienced the previous day becomes consolidated in your memory. In short, nREM is good for your body; REM is good for your mind.
When you drift off to sleep each night, you first go through the progressively-deeper nREM stages for about an hour or so, then quickly go back through the stages. When you get to the shallowest nREM stage, you enter REM for about 10-40 minutes depending on how long you’ve been sleeping (REM stages get longer as the night progresses.) After REM, you re-enter nREM, and this cycle repeats. Each cycle lasts approximately 90 minutes. If you sleep for nine hours, you’d go through six sleep cycles.
As a sidebar, the “put your friend’s hand in a warm bowl of water so they pee the bed” prank occurs in REM. If you’re curious about why it works, ask about it in the Facebook Group.
Most people function best when they go through five or six sleep cycles, which means they’re sleeping for about 7.5 to 9 hours. Most people can get by with four cycles (about 6 hours) for a few days without too many problems. Most of us need a bare minimum of three cycles (4.5 hours) to function at a really basic level, though we can’t sustain that degree of sleep deprivation for more than a few days without experiencing A LOT of negative side effects.
Humans are wired to sleep in the dark, which is an important point to understand. Before we invented electric lights, we pretty much slept from a little while after sunset to sunrise. Our eyes have special photoreceptor cells that detect light. When it gets dark, these cells send an “IT’S DARK!” signal to a part of our brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which then triggers a series of events in our brains that triggers us to relax, get sleepy, and eventually fall asleep.
If you’ve ever been camping (and didn’t bring your phone to stare at in the tent), you’ve probably noticed you get *really* relaxed and sleepy when it gets dark and you’re sitting around the campfire for about an hour. That sleepiness isn’t because you’re “getting fresh air”, or you don’t have the stress of that deadline hanging over your head. It’s happening because the SCN is telling the rest of your brain it’s nighttime, and your brain does its thing. That’s what our ancestors experienced every night.
Electric lights (and modern electronics) screw with this natural process, which often negatively affects our sleep quality and quantity. In this post, I’ll cover quite a few strategies that absolutely will help you get more, better sleep. The strategies work on two principles:
Light Management: We’ll simulate that “campfire” effect by tightly controlling the type and quantity of light we expose ourselves to before bedtime.
Relaxation: Normally, this happens as a result of low light, but modern society kinda sabotages our ability to effectively relax.
Before we get to the strategies, let’s discuss some of the common issues people have with sleep.
What Are The Common Problems?
About half of the adult population in the US experience sleep deprivation at least once per week and about 25% percent of the population could be diagnosed with insomnia. There are three variations of insomnia. Most people chronically experience one type, but some people may experience two or three types regularly. That’s okay; the strategies work for all of them. The types are:
Onset Insomnia: This one occurs when people have trouble falling asleep.
Middle Insomnia: This one occurs when people wake up in the middle of the night. It’s important to note this naturally occurs more often as you age, and often occurs when you get a lot of sleep regularly.
Terminal Insomnia: This one occurs when you wake up too early. It’s basically like middle insomnia, except you don’t fall asleep after waking up.
Personally, I experience all three if I’m not diligent about implementing the sleep strategies, often at least once per week.
Some people also experience sleep apnea, which is a sleep disorder where you stop breathing during the deep stages of nREM sleep. That causes the person to wake up for a moment, which pulls them out of that deep sleep. The result is really, really poor sleep quality. The weird part? We don’t usually remember what happens in deep nREM sleep (which is also when we sleepwalk and sleep talk), so people with sleep apnea aren’t aware they do it. Usually, they need to be diagnosed in a sleep laboratory, which can be set up by discussing the issue with your doctor.
How We Measure Sleep
Measuring sleep doesn’t require much. You can measure the number of sleep cycles by measuring the number of minutes spent sleeping and dividing by 90. You can measure the quality of sleep by assessing how you feel the following day and ranking it on a one-to-five scale (one = terrible, 5 = great.)
BUT, modern wearable technology gives us far cooler options. Most smartwatches and fitness trackers also measure the quantity of sleep and most also measure the quality of sleep. Personally, I use a Fitbit Inspire 2, which is pretty basic but incredibly reliable. This is the model I use:
I just wear the Fitbit while I sleep, and it records data using the heart rate monitor and accelerometer (which measures movement.) Because our heart rate slows as we go through the nREM stages, then returns to our waking heart rate during REM, it’s a reliable measure of which stage we’re in. Movement augments the data because we tend to change positions with each cycle, and we’re basically paralyzed during REM (which causes that terrifying sleep paralysis thing some people experience.) Again, we can discuss this stuff in detail in the Facebook Group; just ask about it.
Each morning, the Fitbit syncs the data to the Fitbit app on my phone, which provides the following information:
The graph at the top indicates your “sleep score”, which is a calculation the app makes based on the duration of sleep, how much time you spend in each stage, and how much tossing and turning you do. The higher the score, the better (with 100 being the highest.) I’ve found this score to be a great measure based on how I feel the next day. I’d rank a score over 90 as a “5” on the “how do I feel” scale I mentioned earlier. As you can see, this week was decent, but Thursday night’s sleep (“F”) wasn’t very good.
Below that, you see times and a little red and blue line. The time is time spent sleeping. Last night (“Today”), I actually slept in two phases, the first for 4 hours and 27 minutes, and the second for 2 hours and 29 minutes. When you sleep in multiple “phases”, we call this “polyphasic” sleep (versus one phase, called “monophasic” sleep.) I’ll discuss this in mo detail later in the post.
TMI: Shelly woke me up for… recreation.
The app also provides detail about each night, which is this screen:
This screen explains the first phase of sleep from last night. It shows how much time I was awake (which isn’t always super-accurate), how much time spent in light nREM sleep, deep nREM sleep, and REM sleep. For a dude my age, this is pretty typical. If I do a lot of hard exercise, I’ll have significantly more deep nREM sleep. If I do a lot of thinking or learning, I’ll have significantly more REM sleep (which also means longer, more vivid dreams.)
I highly recommend wearable tech just for the sleep analysis data. Especially in the beginning of working on getting better sleep, this data is invaluable. And it provides a lot of useful feedback for motivation and troubleshooting. Okay, so let’s dig into the actual methods.
How To Get Better, More Sleep
Each one of the items on this list, if done independently, will help you get more, higher quality sleep. But there’s a powerful multiplier effect. Each one will you do will make the other more effective. So do as many as you possibly can for this week. By the end of the week, you should start to see real results.
Given this is our first week, let’s talk about the process we’ll use for The Project. We'll learn about sleeping and implement these ideas this week, and we’ll continue them week after week for the duration of The Project. We’re building good lifestyle habits. That’s how we’ll get life-changing results. So let’s get started!
Strategy #1: Develop the Same Sleep Schedule Every Day
Our bodies follow predictable 24-hour rhythms called “circadian cycles.” These cycles regulate all kinds of biological processes, which includes our sleep-wake cycle. The more predictable our sleep schedule, the better we sleep. As such, go to bet at the same time and wake up at the same time every day. The more consistent you are from day-t-day, the better your sleep will get.
Strategy #2: Control Light
An hour before bedtime, shut off or dim the lights in your house. Remember, darkness triggers the onset of sleep. Thirty minutes before bed, stop watching TV or using electronics. I like to read during this time with just enough light to be able to read the words on the page. If looking at a screen is unavoidable, use a blue light filter setting. This makes everything look really reddish-orange, much like the campfire I mentioned earlier in the post. The idea is to cut out the blue light spectrum, which is closer to sunlight (which triggers the SCN.)
Also, consider light pollution in your bedroom. If there’s light coming in from streetlights, security lights, or daytime (if you’re doing shift work), buy “blackout blinds” like these:
Consider light sources inside your bedroom. LED lights from chargers, phone screens, or night lights should be unplugged, covered, or obscured. If you do have nightlights (to find the bathroom or something), get the dimmest light you can. The closer to complete darkness you get, the better you’ll sleep.
In the event you wake up during the night and plan on going back to sleep, carefully control the light you’re exposed to. As soon as you’re exposed to fairly bright light, your SCN triggers your brain to go into ‘wake-up” mode and makes it really hard to fall back asleep.
Strategy #3: Relaxation
Controlling light usually causes your body to relax naturally, but actively working on relaxation strategies can really help with falling asleep. Pretty much any relaxation strategy will work; if you have a favorite, use that. If not, here are a few of my favorites:
Eye fatigue: This one is simply magical; relaxing your eye muscles (which move your eyes around) seem to trigger every other muscle group to relax. Close your eyes, and slowly move your eyes back and forth. As the muscles fatigue, they relax. Keep doing this until you fall asleep.
Meditation: Close your eyes and focus on breathing in and out. As your mind starts to wander and you lose focus on breathing, just mentally move back to focusing on breathing. We’ll cover meditation in the coming weeks (it’s one of the four “foundation” skills), but this is good enough for now. If you want even more effectiveness, focus on eye movement instead of breathing.
Progressive Relaxation: The idea of progressive relaxation is to slow your breathing, then tense up and relax a series of muscle groups around your body. This one usually doesn’t bring on sleep by itself but is super-useful if you’re tense or anxious when you go to bed. I usually use one of the previous relaxation techniques after I use progressive relaxation. This can be done when you first lie down in your bed or can be used any time you wake up too early. Here’s an example of a guided progressive session:
Finally, a big part of relaxing is being comfortable. What you wear matters. Personally, I recommend sleeping in the nude which, according to the data really helps you get more, better sleep. And have more sex. ;-)
Strategy #4: Control Room Temperature
Most people sleep best when the room temperature is between 60° and 70° F, but there is a great deal of individual variability. By experimenting, you’ll find your ideal room temperature.
Personally, Shelly and I both sleep best with a room temp of about 58°. If the temperature is about about 68°, it’s really hard to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Strategy #5: Exercise Daily
Rigorous exercise daily makes it easier to fall asleep, easier to stay asleep and causes us to spend more time in deep nREM sleep (which makes us feel well-rested.) We’ll cover exercise as another one of our “foundation” skills, but for now, just know that any exercise will work. Do 10-20 minutes of moderate exercise or 5 minutes of intense exercise (that either causes you to sweat or breathe hard enough where it’s hard to hold a conversation.) If you don’t have a background in exercise, alternate between doing 10 pushups and 20 air squats until you’re sweaty.
Strategy #6: Eating
The better your diet, the better you’ll sleep. Diet is another one of our “foundation” skills, which we’ll cover next week. But for now, just follow these guidelines:
Avoid eating two hours before bedtime. Digestion can distract you from being able to relax enough to fall asleep.
Avoid carbs. This includes sugary foods. Boosting your blood sugar usually makes it harder to fall asleep, so avoid bread, crackers, rice, potatoes, candy, ice cream, cake, and so on. Foods high in fat and protein are a much better pre=bedtime snack.
Avoid spicy foods. Spicy foods usually cause some minor digestive issues, which can be distracting.
Strategy #7: Avoid Drugs
Stimulants, like caffeine, nicotine, or meth prevent sleep. If you consume these, don’t consume them about 6-8 hours before bedtime if at all possible. Alcohol, even in moderation, seriously messes with nREM sleep and should be avoided, even though it helps you relax (thus fall asleep.) I discuss alcohol in more detail in this post. If you’re addicted to any of these, we’ll address that in a later week.
I am NOT a fan of any sleep medication. Different types of medication have different issues, all of which cause more problems than they solve. If you rely on sleep medication, I HIGHLY advise you to wean yourself off them and instead use the strategies here.
Strategy #8: White Noise
White noise drowns out sounds that may wake you up (or keep you from falling asleep.) White noise also relaxes us. Different people usually have a preferred type of white noise. This also includes nature sounds, like rain, crickets, ocean surf, etc.
Personally, Shelly and I use a simple box fan on “low.” If we’re in a noisy environment, we just turn it up. The downside? It’s a pain in the ass when traveling.
A noise machine, which usually has a wide variety of sounds, can be super-useful, especially if you travel. I’ve used noise machines before, and will likely buy this one in the near future:
LecroFan Evo White Noise Machine
Strategy #9: Smart Alarms
This is another piece of technology that’s pretty amazing. There are two different types of “smart alarms” I recommend: Phone app alarms that wake you up at ideal times, or ‘wake up light” alarms that simulate sunrise. Both utilize the same principle: We feel subjectively better when we wake up at the end of a REM sleep cycle. If you want to know the nitty-gritty details on why ask in the Facebook Group.
Smart Alarm Apps: These “smart” apps attempt to determine which stage of sleep you’re in and wake you up at the end of a REM cycle. They all work the same. You set a range of times you want to get up. I normally get up at 0400 (4:00 am) hours, so I’d set it from 0345 to 0415. You set your phone on your bed (to measure movement.) As you sleep, the phone’s microphone measures your breathing rate. Based on those two data points, the app will make a reasonable guess of when you’re at the end of that REM sleep cycle, then the alarm goes off when that occurs within that specified window. They’re pretty damn amazing, but I had the problem of my phone falling off our bed. I have Sleep as Android on my phone right now and will start using it again for The Project. Here’s a good article discussing other options.
Wake Up Light Alarms: These alarms work on a different principle, but work to achieve the same result: Wake up at the end of REM. These alarms have a set time. In my case, 0400 hours. About thirty minutes before the alarm goes off, a light turns on. The light starts out very dim and red-colored. As those thirty minutes progress, the light gets progressively brighter and more yellow in color. This simulates a natural sunrise. Those photoreceptor cells in our eyes will detect the light (yes, though our eyelids) and signal our SCN to tell our brain it’s time to get up. The cool thing is the progressive light will cause our brains to start to “come out of” deep nREM sleep and into REM, so we end up always waking up in a refreshing REM sleep cycle. I’ve never actually used one of these before, but I just ordered this one. I’ll review it in a separate post in the near future.
Strategy #10: Light Therapy Boxes in the Morning
Light therapy boxes are lights that produce a wavelength of light designed to simulate the sun. They’re usually used to treat symptoms of seasonal affective disorder (abbreviated, amusingly, as “SAD”), which is the form of depression all of us get to some degree or another in the shortened day season (winter here in the Nothern Hemisphere.) Back when I lived in perpetually-cloudy West Michigan, these things were a life-saver. I don’t really experience SAD now that I live in sunny Western Colorado, but I discovered these lights can help you subjectively feel more well-rested in the morning. If I ever wake up and feel really groggy, sitting next to this light for ten minutes as I check email and social media will make me feel a lot better, even if the previous night’s sleep sucked. I use an older version of this light:
Strategy #11: The Shift Work Hack
Working shift work, where you alternate between working during the day then throughout the night, is one of the most stressful things you can do to your body. If you work a job where it’s unavoidable, all of these strategies should be used, especially the regular schedule and the light control. But the really effective, cool hack involves creating environments that simulate daytime and nighttime.
If you’re in a “nights” cycle, get a light therapy box like the one I linked above and, while you’re at work during the night, sit next to it as much as you possibly can. It’s okay if you have to go out in the dark as long as you can spend some time next to the light. The more the better, though.
When you get home and go to bed, create an environment where you can have extremely low light conditions for about an hour before you fall asleep (like I describe in the “light control” strategy), then create complete darkness for the time spent sleeping. These two light control hacks work wonders and make shift work WAY more tolerable.
Strategy #12: Polyphasic Sleep
This one’s the most “out there” strategy. The gist? Instead of regularly sleeping in one block (“monophasic sleep”), you sleep in smaller chunks spread throughout a 24 hour day.
I experimented with this part of my second senior year in college, mostly I was a curious psych major with a penchant for masochism. I’d take six 90-minute naps spaced evenly throughout a 24 hour period. Because I had classes at regular, dispersed intervals, it worked well. I was getting about the same amount of sleep I normally got, but it freed up time at night when it was quiet enough for me to do school work. It was kind of a pain in the ass socially, but it did work pretty well.
Depending on your lifestyle (cough, cough, parents with babies), the idea could have some merit. Here’s a good article explaining some of the common polyphasic sleep schedules, along with an honest assessment of the pros and cons.
How to Hold Yourself Accountable
Getting the benefits of good sleep consistently over time is a matter of implementing the ideas above repeatedly, indefinitely. Accountability is usually a matter of sticking to those routines. If the quality or quantity of sleep decreases, just go back through the list to make sure you’re doing as many of them as possible.
Our Facebook Group is a good source of knowledgeable people who can troubleshoot sleep issues, so it’s worthwhile to join. In the case of sleep, that support network can be a powerful accountability tool.
Conclusion
Sleep is absolutely one of the most important aspects of living a healthy, happy life, yet it’s one of the most commonly neglected aspects of life in modern society. For the next week, make sleep your highest priority. Implement as many of these strategies as you can. If you have questions, comments, or need clarifications, ask in our Facebook Group. Also, use the group to share your experiences. Let me know how the week is progressing.
Lastly, if you know of someone who struggles with sleep, share this post with them. It could make a huge, positive difference in their life.
Thanks for reading, and happy sleeping!
~Jason
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