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- 20 | 🛌 3 simple steps for better sleep
20 | 🛌 3 simple steps for better sleep
Good morning,
As always, this email is me thinking out loud about how to live a happier, more fulfilled life. If that’s what you’re into, don’t forget to subscribe.
💤 Sleep quality vs sleep quantity
Sleep is arguably the number one factor that affects happiness and get-more-out-of-life-ness.
On the surface, it seems like an easy, passive thing we do. It doesn't require any effort, it just happens.
But, there's 2 important qualities that determine how effective sleep is. Quantity and quality.
Sleep quantity is well known already - 7-9 hours a night. Any less than 7 hours shortens your life expectancy due to a higher risk of heart disease and other nasty effects.
Sleep quality is much the same. Similar to quantity, the lower the quality of sleep, the higher the risk of death in later life.
We tend to focus on quantity, but not so much quality - so that's what I'm going to focus on. Here's 3 simple and easily replicable changes we can all make to improve our quality of sleep.
🌡 Room Temperature
🤫 Quiet
🔦 Light
🌡 Room Temperature
For the majority of my life, I thought it was important to be warm enough to be able to sleep. In fact, it's the exact opposite - just think about the number of times you sleep with an exposed leg.
To fall asleep, the body needs to drop by around 1C. This is obviously made more difficult with thick bed covers and various layers of sleepwear.
To achieve this, we need to aim for a room temperature of around 18C. The simplest ways to achieve this are:
Adjust the thermostat to 18C
Avoid too many covers or blankets - a lower TOG rating for the duvet should help
Leave a window open or a fan on
Take a hot bath or shower before bed - this causes the body to try to lose as much heat as possible
🤫 Quiet
The problem with noise, and the reason we need quiet to sleep, is that noises interrupt our sleep.
The name of the game is to reduce the number of interruptions. Traffic is often the first thing to focus on.
We can't control the traffic, but we can control your environment. Closing the window and having thick curtains can help reduce the noise level, and muffle the sound.
Try and position the bed as far away from the window as possible, and if possible, sleep in a room away from the road.
Then, focus on noise within the bedroom.
Phones should obviously be left on silent with no vibrations (away from the bed), and it's worth looking around for another other objects that can make a noise and wake us up.
Even with all of this, I am occasionally woken up anyway. My go tos in this situation are:
Ear plugs - which are inexpensive and very effective
Ambient noise - the constant stream of sound can block out other, more interruptive sounds. I like the sounds of rain and thunder
💡 Light
There's 2 elements to this: before sleep, and during sleep.
We all know by now that screens before bed harm our quality of sleep.
Blue light harms our ability to wind down, and some studies have suggested that brightness of light is even more harmful than the temperature.
Some wear glasses that block out blue light or use settings on devices to reduce the levels.
But, it's better to just avoid screens entirely for an hour before bed. This sounds more difficult than it actually is.
An hour flies by when you account for getting ready for bed, reading and so on.
Then, there's light during sleep.
It's a great feeling towards the end of March when you wake up to actual daylight.
But, for most of summer, it can start to be frustrating when the sun rises at 5AM and your alarm isn't set until 7AM.
Complete darkness is key to a good night's sleep.
From personal experience, it's quite hard to achieve, so I wear a sleep mask.
It took some getting used to but now it's completely normal. An alternative is blackout curtains.
🥱 Time for bed
To be happier and healthier, we tend to chase holidays, yoga, multivitamins - things that are usually either difficult, or expensive.
But the answer to health and happiness is much more simple. Good sleep.
The simple fact is that there's a million and one benefits of good quality sleep. Improved concentration, weight loss, recovery, you name it.
Just a few simple changes is all it takes for the best contribution we can possibly make to our health. No excuses!
Thanks! 😎
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How am I 1% better this week? 📈
I ran my first half marathon in 1h48m 🏃🏻♂️
What have I learned this week? 🤔
Turns out audiobooks are pretty good!
This Week’s Recommendation 🔝
App 📱 - Wunderfind
If you lose anything that isn't stapled to you, then this is the app that you need in your life. It tells you how far you are from anything you can connect to via Bluetooth (within reasonable range obviously). I use this app at least once a week to find my Fitbit or my headphones.Thank me later!
This Week I’m: ⬇️
Reading 📚 - Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
Listening to 🎧 - I just finished listening to the Project Hail Mary audiobook (Andy Weir). The book itself is phenomenal and definitely one of my all time favourite novels. It's bloody brilliant - basically a more sciency, more sci-fi version of The Martian. But, the audiobook improved my experience of the story so much more - it's narrated by by Ray Porter who added so much to the book with accents, little details here and there, and Rocky’s voice with the added tones is great. Huge recommendation from me
Learning 📧 - To stop email surfing at work. If I want, I could probably be a professional emailer with the amount I get, so I'm training myself to stop checking emails every 5 minutes and getting distracted from what I was meant to be doing. I'll update on my progress soon!
Working on 🏃🏻♂️ - My physical health - I'm running and training more than ever and I feel the most fit I've ever felt (and lots of room to improve)
Looking forward to 🎉 - Field Day festival this weekend - fingers crossed for no rain!
This Week’s Quote 💬
Six months from now, what you will you wish you had spent time on today? — James Clear
This Week’s Video 📺
The man himself giving a simple 3 minute explanation of the importance of sleep.
There we have it!
Looking forward to catching up next week.