THIS Sleep Hack Doesn’t Work
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 31st, 2023
My friend Nick Huber recently raved about the positive effects of blue blocker glasses on his sleep.
I’ve been a sleep experiment junkie for years, trying various methods to enhance my sleep quality.
What’s interesting is how individual sleep experiences can be.
While blue blocker glasses didn’t work for me, adjusting house lights’ angle and using a sleeping mask transformed my sleep quality.
Remember, sleep is a powerful tool influencing our energy, mood, and overall well-being.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Sleep is one of the most undervalued things that you can use to manipulate your energy levels, your mood, your general satisfaction with life. It’s a very powerful thing, and you spend a third of your life doing it, so it’s worth getting dialed in.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Yo. So the other day on Twitter, my budy Nick Huber, he made a post about how he has recently been using blue blocker glasses, and it’s been having a really massive positive impact on his, his sleep. And I have, over the last three years, invested a lot of time and energy and resources into running countless experiments with my sleep. Tinkering with, you know, room temperatures and light manipulation and eating schedules and supplements. I have done practically everything under the sun when it comes to sleep. And I found that certain things work really well for me, and some things didn’t work as well, and some things just completely didn’t work. And what I find interesting about sleep is that it’s so highly variable and personal for everybody, right? There are things, certain universal truths that will create a through line through everybody’s experience. But generally, you need to figure out for yourself what you need to tweak and pull to make your sleep schedule your sleep hygiene, like, as beneficial for you as possible.
And I just wanted to share some things that have been the most impactful, and then some of the things that have maybe not had as much of an impact. For me personally. That doesn’t mean that these are the things you should do, and these are the things that you shouldn’t do. Just recognize that you are a unique machine. And a lot of times when we’re talking on this podcast around the topics of self mastery, the key to self mastery is to understand yourself. And that is a highly unique creature where I can share experiences. I’ve had things that have worked, things that haven’t worked, but at the end of the day, that is highly personal to me and specific to my context. And so it might be that the things I share here completely missed the mark for you.
And you have to be willing to experiment and try things and then be willing to pivot. Sometimes what works today won’t continue working next month or next year. And so you have to constantly be evolving alongside this process. So I just wanted to share that with you. This is not a definitive. Here are the things that do work and don’t work, but just from my experience. So, from my experience, the blue blocker glasses didn’t have any meaningful effect. I wore blue blocker glasses from two different companies for around 90 days straight every day.
After 05:00 p.m. I’d slapped those bad boys on, and I would set all my screens to go into nighttime mode so that they would change the hue. So if you’re not familiar, blue light is associated with brain stimulation. It’s a type of harsh light that you see on your computer screen throughout the day. And it can activate, overstimulate certain areas of your brain, which can make it hard to wind down later on when you’re trying to go to sleep. So the idea behind blue blocker glasses is we take out that wavelength of light, and now it doesn’t activate those parts of our brain. It’s a little bit easier on the eyeballs as well. And so it just creates less strain overall.
And the theory behind this is great, and there’s research that supports it. But for me, whatever reason, I didn’t really notice any benefits from blue blocker glasses or from changing my screens. That wasn’t the thing that made the biggest impact. In fact, when I look at light manipulation, there’s two aspects of this that made a much bigger impact. And it could just be that I did this first experiment, which I’ll share with you, before I did the blue blocker. And so maybe I’d already reaped majority of the benefits. And so that’s totally possible. But one of the things that we did was before I trusted blue blockers, was light manipulation.
And what we did was every night, we set our house lights to dim at, like, six or 07:00 p.m. And we went one step further, and we made sure that all the lights that were on in the house after 06:00 p.m. Were below eye level. And so they were at chest height or hip height or down on the ground. So there was no more overhead light. And this is really important. The angle of light and how it hits our retinas is one of the signals to our brain that tells us, is this the middle of the day, or is the sun starting to go down? And therefore, I should start winding down? So when light is directly above us, your brain thinks, oh, it’s noon, middle of the day, I should be awake. When the light is low, your brain thinks, oh, the sun is going down.
It’s getting nighttime now. And so just by changing the angle of the light, not even so much the intensity, but just changing the angle can have a massive impact. And what I found was that actually did play a very big role for me. Once we started dimming the lights and moving them lower, that helped a lot, and it made me sleepier, really. Interestingly, by the time I’d go to bed in that last hour, from, like, nine to ten, I was far more sleepy than I typically was when the light was overhead or harsher, whereas a blue block of glasses didn’t really make me sleepier or didn’t really have any effect. So I would play with that, though, where you’re dimming your lights after a certain time and then moving them lower. I think that’s a really beneficial little hack. The other thing that really helped me in terms of the light manipulation was in the sleeping room itself, and we played around with turning our bedroom completely black.
Pitch black. That’s the goal. Sleeping in a dark cave where there’s no light. Right. That’s how we evolved over the millennia. But the problem is that that’s actually quite hard to do. You could put blackout curtains and you could turn off the lights, but you could still get a lot of little light pollution that you don’t even realize. For me, one of them was there was a red light on our smoke detector.
And then my phone sitting next to the bed kind of emits a little bit of a light as it’s sitting there charging. And then all of your different devices that maybe you have plugged in, like, if you have an alarm clock or for us, with the eight sleep, these things kind, they put out light, and you just don’t even realize it until you’re trying to get your room into pitch dark. And so the solution that I found very easy, actually surprisingly easy, and the cheapest was putting on a sleeping mask. Just putting on a mask that cuts out all the light. It’s easy to put on, and it puts me immediately into pitch black. I can take it with me anywhere. So when I’m traveling, it’s a great solution. The only downside is that throughout the night, as I roll around, it sometimes rolls off my head, and I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
I’ll be like, hey, where’d my mask go? That doesn’t matter, though, because what the mask really does is it helps you fall asleep faster, so you’re not spending as much time just sitting there trying to fall asleep. And so I wear it at the beginning of the night, fall asleep really quickly, and that’s awesome. If I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I come back, I put it back on, and I fall right back, sleep. So whether or not it stays on while you’re sleeping, not so important, but it’s helping you get into that deep state. So those are the two things that I found way more impactful than the blue blocker glasses. But there’s, like, hundreds of other things that we could explore here. And I’ve talked about it previously on the podcast, but I just wanted to share my experiences with that because I think sleep is one of the most undervalued things that you can use to manipulate your energy levels, your mood, your just general satisfaction with life. It’s a very powerful thing, and you spend a third of your life doing it, so it’s worth getting dialed in.
And hopefully today’s episode helps you do just that. So, as always, guys and gals, I appreciate you being here. Truly. It really does mean a lot to me, so thank you for that. I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend. Bye.
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