8 Sleep Tips That Actually Work
Sleep well and avoid hype.
Post summary
Sleep advice is rife with misinformation because we all sleep differently—evolution programmed us that way. We covered that topic on Monday.
In this post, we dug through the science and spoke to researchers to determine eight sleep tips that avoid the misinformation trap.
Why it matters: Improving poor sleep is magic for your health and performance.
You might be surprised by these tips, but they’re backed by years of anthropological research and conversations I had with the world’s foremost sleep experts.
Follow these tips. You’ll not only sleep better if your current sleep is suffering, but you’ll also reduce sleep anxiety, helping you sleep even better.
Housekeeping
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Audio/postcast version
The post
The takeaway of Monday’s post was that people sleep differently for good evolutionary reasons. And that’s precisely why hyper-specific sleep advice often backfires. We read myths that makes us worry that our sleep isn’t perfect—and worrying keeps us up at night, hurting our sleep even more. It’s a sleep death spiral.
As Dr. Jade Wu, the sleep researcher at Duke University Medical School, put it:
“Just as you don’t need to have a ‘perfect’ meal at every meal in order to maintain nutritional health, you don’t need to have flawless sleep every night. In fact, sleep is designed to be elastic because your body’s needs and the environment’s conditions are constantly changing. Letting go of sleep perfectionism can take a lot of pressure off of the moment when you aren’t falling asleep right away or when you wake up during the night.”
Ask Yourself 4 Questions About Your Sleep
We’re starting today with an important questionnaire, which we got from Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman. He developed it based on this famous paper on sleep.
Before you try to correct any sleep issues you think you have, Lieberman suggests you ask yourself the following questions:
Am I generally satisfied with my sleep?
Do I stay awake all day without dozing?
Do I spend less than thirty minutes awake at night?
Do I get between six and eight hours of sleep a night?
If you answered yes to those four questions, thanks for reading. Keep resting easy, and we'll see you Friday.
If you answered no, these eight tips may help you start to solve what could be a legit issue.
1. Find your ideal sleep time and try to stick to it
You’ve probably heard of circadian rhythms. These are our “biological clocks.” But our clocks, surprisingly, don’t match the 24-hour rotation of the earth. And they aren’t all the same.
Some people’s circadian rhythms, or biological clocks, are less than 24 hours. Some are 25 hours. The average is 24.1 to 24.3 hours.
Scientists say that people with longer clocks tend to be night owls. People with shorter clocks tend to get sleepy earlier in the evening. And our clocks change over our lifetime: In our teens and twenties, we tend to be night owls, but as we age, the curve shifts, and we often become the “early to bed, early to rise” people.
Instead of fighting this, lean into it. Do these things:
First, Figure out your sleep clock. The Duke researcher Jade Wu told Forbes, “The easiest way to know your chronotype is to ask yourself, ‘If I were on vacation on a deserted island for a month, what time would I naturally want to go to sleep and wake up?’” I.e., if you get sleepy at 9 pm, it’s fine to go to sleep. If you aren’t sleepy at 9 pm, don’t force it. Forcing it backfires.