The Ultimate Guide to a Great Night’s Sleep

11, Nov 2023

READ ARTICLE

The Ultimate Guide to a Great Night’s Sleep

read time 15 minutes

no time to read? watch the video here instead.

Snapshot of this Edition:

How to get a damn good night’s sleep
The conversation with my dad that changed my life
Idea of the Week: The Failure Scoreboard

The world belongs to those who can focus…

But if you’re anything like me, you struggle to cut out distractions long enough to channel your chaotic mind in a productive direction.

Thousands of competing priorities are constantly bouncing around my skull…

And for years, I was getting my ass completely kicked in the game of life ’cause I just couldn’t harness that chaos.

But I was committed to unlocking the potential I felt inside, so I kept trying… kept iterating.. and gradually I zeroed in on some systems, frameworks, and routines that’ve reliably helped me overcome procrastination, cut through distractions, and get shit done.

I’ve taken everything I’ve learned over the years about creating supercharged focus on-command and put it into The Hyperfocus Masterclass.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re losing the war for your attention (like me), then you should definitely check this out.

Learn more about The Hyperfocus Masterclass here.

The Ultimate Guide to a Great Night’s Sleep

If you sleep less than 8 hours a night, here’s the truth:

It’s killing you.

Want to live longer (and better)?

The research is clear:

You need to get better sleep.

Unfortunately, most of us were never actually taught HOW to sleep.

Let’s change that:

Here’s the Ultimate Guide to a Great Night’s Sleep:

It’s broken down into three areas:

How to Shut Down
How to Sleep
How to Wake Up

1. How to Shut Down

A great night’s sleep begins hours before your head even hits the pillow.

In particular, we need to control six things in our nightly Shutdown Protocol:

Light
Digestion
Timing
Cognitive Loops
Supplements
Relaxation

Light

Going to sleep was pretty straightforward for our ancestors…

Once the sun went down and darkness crept in, the body naturally went into shutdown mode.

Unfortunately, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era (artificial light) has completely screwed this up.

As a result, our circadian rhythms are no longer tied to the cycle of the sun because we can light up our homes like Christmas Day around the clock.

To use light to our advantage (or at least no severely handicap ourselves) there are three things to think about:

Intensity
Angle
Blue Light

Intensity:

Again, it’s helpful to think about how humans have spent the majority of their existence on this planet, and the thing is it wasn’t until very recently that we mastered light.

For millennia all we really had was firelight, which has two unique properties.

The first is that it’s not very intense.

This is important because bright light signals to the brain that it’s time to be awake.

Soft light has the opposite effect.

Now, the second characteristic of firelight which is interesting to consider is the:

Angle:

Imagine a bonfire…

Where is it?

Is it directly above you?

No… it’s probably very close to the ground and in front of you.

This means the light hitting your eyes comes in at a very low angle, which is fundamentally different from the daytime light.

One of the COOLEST things to know about sleep is this:

Your eye has particular cells whose job is to detect this low angle light and then signal to the brain:

It’s time to get sleepy.

That is absolutely wild…

Here’s how to use this to your advantage:

Change the Angle and Intensity of the light in your home a couple hours before bed. Instead of using the harsh overhead lights, get lamps and soft lights that are positioned at shoulder height or below to signal to your brain that it’s time to shut down.

Bonus point: This creates a nice cozy ambience.

The last aspect of light to consider is:

Blue Light:

Our screens (phones, computers, and televisions) put out a particular frequency of light that is highly stimulating to the brain.

You probably already know this, but you should limit screen time in the hours before bed, not only because of the blue light but also because these are highly stimulating devices and you want your brain to start shutting down.

If you simply can’t do without the screens, then get blue light glasses at a minimum.

Digestion

Digestion requires a surprising amount of energy from the body…

Energy that could be disruptive to the act of sleep.

Particularly in the early hours of the evening when your body is most likely to be in Deep Sleep, which is key for muscle growth and cell regeneration. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.

You should aim to eat your last meal at least a couple hours before bed.

Also, it’s probably a good idea to stop drinking water so you’re not disturbed with middle of the night potty breaks.

Timing

More important to a good night’s sleep is WHEN you go to bed rather than when you wake up.

Consistency is the key as this primes the body and mind to get sleepy at the same time each night.

It doesn’t necessarily matter when you go to bed, just that you strive to always be in bed at the same time.

Side Note:

To set your bedtime, just work backwards from when you want to wake up and how many hours of sleep you want to get.

If you want to wake up at 6 AM and get a full 8 hours sleep, then you need to be unconscious no later than 10 PM.

Which means you probably need to start your shut down routine around 8 so you can be in bed by 9:30 at the latest.

Cognitive Loops

Up to this point we’ve primed our BODY for sleep…

Now it’s time to turn to our MIND.

And for many of us, this is the hardest part…

In the quiet hours leading up to sleep, our thoughts only seem to grow louder.

These are called Open Cognitive Loops which your brain cycles through for two reasons:

So you don’t forget the thing To find a resolution to the thing

You can solve for both of these by simply keeping a nighttime journal where you brain dump all the thoughts swirling through your chaotic mind.

This simple five minute practice is a great way of clearing your mental slate right before bed.

Supplements

I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on tv) so take my thoughts here with a grain of salt.

First, I believe that supplements (both for sleeping and day-to-day nutrition) are a 20% solution that you should only bother with once you’ve focused on the foundational things which will drive 80% of results.

If you want to tinker with supplements, just make sure you’ve already done the basics of light management, setting a bedtime, and timing your digestion.

If you have, then there’s really three supplements to consider: Melatonin, Magnesium, Multi-Purpose.

Melatonin is a powerful hormone that the brain produces in response to darkness. It is in some ways “the sleepy molecule”.

So if you’re having trouble falling asleep, it only makes sense to take something like Melatonin to give you a quick dose of sleepy-time, right?

Wrong.

Like I said before, Melatonin is a HORMONE. As such, you should be very careful introducing it artificially into your body.

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the potential downsides and would steer clear. Only play with Melatonin after consulting with your doctor.

Magnesium is another compound people use to induce feelings of sleepiness and alleviate symptoms of anxiety.

It’s generally a widely accepted supplement, but just note that some people (like myself) have adverse reactions to Magnesium in too-large-of-quantities, so be careful.

For myself, I never really noticed Magnesium making much of a difference on the quality of my sleep, so I don’t bother with it.

With that said, some people swear by it.

Multi-Purpose Supplements are concoctions of multiple compounds all scientifically engineered to optimize your sleep.

Here’s an example from Prestige Labs.

Be careful with these because I can almost guarantee there’s no real scientific engineering happening behind the scenes.

These supplements are often filled with low quality ingredients that have dubious support in the scientific literature.

If you are going to go with a multi-purpose supplement, I recommend going with this one from Momentous.

These guys are committed to sourcing only the highest quality ingredients and these particular supplements (including Magnesium) were hand selected by Dr. Andrew Huberman who really understands the science behind these recommendations.

P.S. I get no kickbacks from any of the companies mentioned in this newsletter.

Relaxation

Alright, last thing to mention about creating an effective Shutdown Protocol is that it’s really all about priming the body and the mind for deep relaxation so that sleep can occur naturally and effortlessly.

Sometimes in an attempt to optimize things, we end up just making them more complicated.

Here’s 3 really easy ways to induce relaxation in the hours before bed:

Take a hot shower
Drink some hot chamomile tea
Read a book

Seriously, let’s not make this any harder than it needs to be.

2. How to Sleep

Alright, it’s time to hit the hay…

Now, one of the things that makes sleep so frustrating is that you can’t actually control it.

It’s not like blinking your eyes or taking a breath.

All we can do is manipulate ourselves and our environment in a way that’s conducive for sleep.

Then we just have to let nature do its thing.

So, what is it in our environment that we need to control for?

There’s three things in particular:

Light
Sound
Temperature

Light

We’ve already touched on the importance of light in our shutdown protocol, but we’re not done with it yet.

One of the most important signals for falling (and staying) asleep is darkness.

And I mean Darkness with a capital D.

Most of us are sleeping in rooms with a surprising amount of light pollution coming off our phones, alarms, or windows.

If you can navigate from your bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night without any assistance…

Your room is probably too bright.

Simple solution: Black Out Curtains.

But there are problems with this…

Namely, your midnight potty break is going to be a terrifying toe-stubbing experience.

My preferred solution: Sleeping Mask.

It’s a personal black out device and VERY effective.

Sound

Our ancestors were rewarded for waking at the slightest sound in the night.

The people who slept through those sounds probably got eaten by a lion.

Waking to sounds is a survival mechanism…

But there’s probably not an existential threat lurking in the other room when you hear the floorboards creak.

So in the long run you’d probably be better served by just staying asleep.

To do this, play White Noise or Binaural Music on a speaker to drown out those little noises that go bump in the night.

Temperature

Don’t know about you, but I love crawling into a toasty bed. It feels great.

However, that cozy bed is PROBABLY compromising your ability to stay in deep sleep.

The reason for this again goes back to our evolutionary history…

See, it gets cold when the sun goes down…

And it only gets colder throughout the deep hours of the night before eventually starting to warm up in the early hours leading up to sunrise.

Our bodies mirror this temperature graph because our bodies take the cue that cold means it’s nighttime (thus sleeping time) and warm means it’s time to be awake

So what do you suppose happens if you’re sleeping beneath a heavy pile of blankets in a warm room?

That’s right, you struggle to really sink into the deep states of sleep where muscular and cellular regeneration occurs.

The optimum sleeping temperature is probably somewhere in the 60s, and from what I’ve found there’s really only two ways to accomplish this:

The first is to cool the room you’re sleeping in via air conditioning, but this isn’t a perfect solution because the truth is, modern beds are designed as heat traps.

So even if the air temperature is cool, the mattress beneath you and all those blankets is heating up beyond our ideal threshold.

The second solution is to buy a cooling mattress. These are mattresses that either use cold water or airflow to keep the mattress at pre-set temperatures throughout the night.

Now, full disclosure, these things are kinda pricey. I hemmed and hawed for over a year before finally pulling the trigger on an 8-Sleep Mattress and I’ll say this…

I regret having waited so long.

It’s probably been the single best investment I’ve made over the past two years.

We went with the topper from 8-Sleep and just fitted it to our current mattress and it’s worked wonders.

One of the ways I ultimately justified this investment was by just sitting down and doing the math.

I figured that over the next 3-5 years I’ll spend around 1/3rd of my life laying on this thing and if it could lead to just a 1% improvement in the quality of my sleep and therefore quality of my energy throughout the day, then it was really a no-brainer.

3. How to Wake Up

One of the most interesting things I discovered in all my research around sleep is that HOW you wake up plays a large part in how you will ultimately fall asleep again later that night.

In particular, the thing that seems to matter most is getting natural sunlight in your eyes first thing upon waking.

We’ve already discussed the importance of light in getting a good night’s sleep multiple times, but here it crops up yet again.

See, for millennia our ancestors woke with the rising sun and so that initial burst of light had a regulatory effect on our circadian rhythm.

Here’s an overly simplified way of thinking about it:

That first dose of sun sets a timer in your brain that says in X-number of hours, it’ll probably be time to start winding down and getting ready for bed again.

The problem for modern-man is that for many of us, we don’t really go out into the sunlight first thing upon waking. In fact, it might be hours until we finally go outside.

So our circadian rhythm never really gets that priming dose of sunlight which sets our internal clock. As a result, our bodies are left in a weird sort of limbo.

The solution is simple:

The first thing you should do when you wake up is get sunlight in your eyes for at least 15 minutes.

Okay, so that’s the simple solution, but not necessarily easy.

If you live in a winter-state like me where the sun doesn’t really come up until noon for 4 months of the year, I recommend using a “happy lamp” or red-light therapy panels in the morning.

This has been a game-changer for me as I tend to struggle with Seasonal Affective Disorder.