Sleep: Day One

Today is the first day of the seventh month in my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus is sleep. 

In case you’re interested, here are my notes from the previous six months:

• Fitness: Start, End, Books.
• Productivity: Start, End, Books.
• Money: Start, End, Books.
• Food: Start, End, Books.
• Reading: Start, End and Books.
• Outreach: Start, End, Books.

Sleep is essential for health, productivity and well-being. Yet often we don’t give it the attention it deserves. While those who shirk on fitness or healthy eating are often shamed in our culture, lack of sleep is valorized—getting too little shut-eye is a badge of honor demonstrating our work ethic and stoicism.

Recently, the popular discussion around sleep has begun to assign it the importance it deserves. Even so, culture changes slowly. When I was discussing this list of foundations with a friend, one of them gave me a quizzical look when I suggested an entire month focusing on sleeping better. Exercise, sure. But sleep?

Despite recent attention, sleep remains underrated as a driver of good health, positive mood, productive energy and all-round well-being.

My Sleep (or Lack Thereof)

Sleep is one of the hardest foundations for me personally. Much of this is owing to being the father of two small children who, lovable though they are, are not always conducive to getting eight uninterrupted hours every night.

My typical sleep routine isn’t bad. I usually go to bed between 9:30 and 10:00 pm and wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 am. On days without interruptions, this is probably close to the amount of sleep my body actually needs. In the rare cases where I do sleep past 6:00 am, I usually wake up spontaneously between 6:30 and 7:00 am.

 The challenge I have is not with my typical sleep routine, but how many nights are atypical. While both of my kids (not quite 5 and 2) sleep through the night, at least one of them wakes up before 5:30 about 50% of days.

Sometimes it’s just a quick interruption that doesn’t impact my sleep much. In other cases, an interruption becomes an early wake-up. My two-year old, for instance, was waking around 4:00 or 4:30 am nearly every day for most of the previous month. It seems like we’ve gotten her back on a normal schedule, but travel, colds or other minor changes in routines can set us back into an unfortunate sleeping rhythm.

I also tend to function poorly when low on sleep. Some people seem to need more sleep to function at their best, and others can get by with 4-6 hours without it seeming to bother them. I’m definitely in the former group, and before having kids I almost always got eight hours of sleep each night.

Still, my sleep situation could definitely be worse. I have no problems of insomnia—it rarely takes me more than 5-10 minutes to fall asleep when I lay down, and I rarely wake up in the night for more than a few minutes. I’m also an excellent napper—I can even fall asleep and wake up in about ten minutes if I need it. I also don’t, as far as I know, have any health problems associated with sleeping that can be so frustrating for many.

My Plan for Improving My Sleep

Leading up to this month, I noticed I had a bit of pessimism about whether or not I would be able to do anything to improve my sleep. My wife and I are well-versed in the behavioral strategies to get kids to sleep better (consistent bedtime routines, wake-up lights, self-soothing, etc.), and I already follow a lot of the advice to improve my sleep (consistent bedtime routines, going to bed early, avoiding caffeine late in the day).

 Some problems in life aren’t easily fixable. Fortunately, sleeping problems due to kids are typically temporary, so some of this may just be the sort of things I have to wait out for a year or two.

However, as I started a little advance reading for this month and did some brainstorming, I realized there are actually a lot of things I could do better. On top of that, even if I don’t have solutions now, spending a month rigorously documenting my sleep might point to solutions I hadn’t considered before.

So here are a few things I’m going to try to improve my sleep quality this month:

1. Start taking brief naps again. I used to be a near-daily napper. Twenty to thirty minutes is usually plenty, and it can make a big difference. I mostly stopped this habit once I started working in an office—there was never a comfortable place to stretch out, even if I knew it would be better for my productivity to nap rather than to keep working. I think if I bring a yoga mat and a small pillow I might be able to get a good setup to make 20-minute naps a regular part of my day again.
2. Be more consistent about sleeping early, especially after a night of poor sleep. If I don’t sleep well, my hardest times are usually around 4:00 to 6:00 pm when I feel like a zombie. By then whatever caffeine was in my system has worn off, and it is still hours until I would normally sleep. However, by 9pm, I am typically fairly alert, even if I only got a few hours of sleep the night before. I may not have total control over my sleep, but I can at least inch my bedtime a bit earlier when I’m in a sleep deficit.
3. Cut down to one cup of coffee per day. I drink a lot of coffee. Some days I even have three or four cups of coffee throughout the day. Since I tend to fall asleep quickly, and the research-backed benefits of caffeine consumption likely outweigh the costs, cutting back wasn’t a priority for me initially. However, for this month I’m going to stick to only my morning coffee as an experiment.
4. Avoid television or exercise after 8:30 pm. While I was a consistent 6:00 am jogger when I began this year-long project, the combination of a few months of kids disrupting sleep and my wife breaking her foot pushed running out of this slot and forced me to work out later. However, I find exercise after 8:00 pm makes it much harder for me to fall asleep, so I’m going to do my best to keep it earlier. I don’t watch a lot of television before sleep, but I’ll keep notes on this too in case this is happening more than I realize.
5. Keep a sleep journal. I’m going to write some brief notes every day this month of when I went to sleep, any interruptions, and my overall mood. This, plus the sleep tracking on my Fitbit, should help me make some empirical observations about my sleep rather than just relying on my memory.

Overall, as I consider these changes, I’m cautiously optimistic. Hopefully I can improve the baseline quality (and quantity) of my sleep at night and, barring that, at least get some restorative naps throughout the day to improve my functioning when my sleep has been poor. As always, I’ll keep you updated with how it goes at the end of the month!

The post Sleep: Day One appeared first on Scott H Young.