HIA Series | Sleep to Improve Your Life
Action 3: Plan for 7-8 hours of sleep every night (then adjust)
Today our focus, for Rest and Stress Management, will be on planning for 7-8 hours of sleep, adjusting based on how you feel, while also exploring how to improve upon the quality of those hours of sleep.
Circumstances…
Now I realize depending on your circumstances, 7-8 hours of sleep might sound easy to accomplish or impossible. You may also think to yourself “I don’t need 7 hours of sleep” or “I need more than 8 hours of sleep.”
7-8 is just a good starting point or goal to shoot for if you haven’t directly focused on dialing in your sleep before.
Some of the best ways to tell if you are getting enough sleep is by checking yourself on the following:
Do I wake up naturally? (or does an alarm clock do the job?)
How awake do I feel throughout my day?
How ready do I feel to take on physically or mentally demanding work today?
How did I perform today?
You can also get further insight by wearing a tracking ring, watch, or using a mattress that tracks your sleep.
Once you have slept in this 7-8 hour range (ideally for at least a week or two) and got a better gauge on how you normally feel, you can then start to trial more sleep or less sleep depending on what you think will best suit you. 30 minute additions or subtractions to your sleep goal work well to provide incremental adjustments without over doing it and feeling lousy as a result.
Then it’s important that you compare the differences in your responses to the questions above and amongst your sleep metrics if you are tracking them.
A couple IFs:
IF you struggle to have the time available to sleep for at least 7 hours, then just do your best to get as close to that number as you can. Furthermore, don’t stress out about not being able to get 7 hours of sleep.
IF you are unable to sleep for 7 hours (consecutively or broken up over the night) then, once again, just do your best and don’t stress.
With both of these IFs in mind, when you have less control over the quantity of your sleep try and improve upon the quality of the sleep that you are able to get.
[1] It’s also worth noting that, in general, when we are younger (from birth to graduating school) we do better with more sleep (think like 9, 10, or more hours) and then as we age we tend to get less naturally. So don’t get caught up with 7-8 hours, it's just a nice starting point to gauge from.
I’m going to help you “do your best” by approaching sleep with you through the following framework:
Why sleep is super helpful (we improve or we decline)
How we can best set our body clocks
Determining a realistic amount of sleep and then setting our wind down time
Ways we can improve our sleep environment (and thus our sleep quality)
Helping you piece together what your winding down routine will consist of
Self-monitoring to gauge our progress and course correct if needed
1. Why sleep is super helpful (we improve or we decline)
You probably already believe you would benefit from getting better sleep…so my goal here is just to refresh you on some key ways sleep impacts our lives to hopefully spark some motivation in you to do something about it!
[1] Good sleep helps us feel and function better by:
Regulating our blood sugar and blood lipids better - allowing us more natural energy
Helping us think, learn, and remember better
Regulating our hormones better to encourage happier, calmer, more emotionally stable versions of ourselves
Regulating hormones to help us lose fat and gain muscle easier (if we encourage that as a necessary adaptation based on our lifestyle)
Regulating our process and feelings of hunger, appetite, and fullness to help us tune into our bodies actual needs easier
Helping us recover, repair, and clean out waste products - making us less prone to injury and illness, and also able to recover faster when we are injured or sick
Allow us to think more clearly and quickly increasing our ability to perform better
With my athletes, I like to think of sleep as their best legal performance enhancer…with everyone else I like to think of sleep as their best legal performance enhancer.
Whatever your physical or mental demands, whoever you have to show up for on a regular basis, good sleep will help improve your ability to show up at your best.
The other kicker of sleep is that when we are getting insufficient sleep all of those positives get flipped on their head and start impacting us inversely. This is why I say we either improve or decline based on how we sleep, there isn’t a neutral response from our body.
2. How we can best set our body clocks
When we think about our body clocks, we can think about circadian rhythms. Just like pretty much every living thing in our world, we as humans have a 24 hour cycle our bodies go through, largely based on the light and darkness we are exposed to among other variables we will touch on.
This directly impacts our ability to sleep because how we choose to operate through our day can align our body clocks in favor of falling asleep when we want to and getting the rest we need, or hinder our ability to do so.
[1] We have a central clock in our brain, and also peripheral clocks in our cells and many tissues and organs. These clocks affect how we express our various genes (speeding up some processes and slowing down others) over a 24 hour period.
Our clocks organize and regulate our:
Body temperature
Heart rate and rhythms
Digestion of food and absorption of nutrients
Immunity and tissue repair
Appetite and hunger
Mood and emotions
Energy and alertness
Growth, development, and aging
Cognition and memory
[2] One of the most powerful actions we can take to help set our body clocks is to view bright sunlight within 30-60 minutes of waking up.
This signals to our body that it's time to be awake and starts our timer for getting tired later in the evening.
The best way to achieve this is to get outside in the sunshine for at least 5 minutes in the morning. If it's a cloudy day then you’ll want to be outside for 10-20 minutes.
If you are unable to get outside first thing in the morning, you can open all the windows that let natural light in and try to make your morning space as bright as you can.
I personally enjoy opening all my windows to let the natural light in as I cook breakfast first thing in the morning. I then have been trying to do a better job of going outside on my back porch with a cup of coffee after breakfast (typically to read, listen to a podcast, or just sit and think).
I will go further into detail with strategies on ways you could improve your light exposure once we get into the Highly Impactful Action of getting sunlight first thing in the morning and getting outside for 10-15 minutes in the afternoon. Morning sunlight just plays such a big impact on our sleep that I felt I needed to bring it up briefly now.
[2] Another great way we can set our body clocks in to get some activity in during our morning hours.
When we move we increase our core body temperature, which is another factor that tells our body to wake up.
This could be combined with your sunshine time by going on a walk or doing anything active outside.
You can follow up your morning sunlight with your training for the day or any easy activity, if you’re not a morning training person.
For myself, I stay moving as I cook and make coffee in the morning. I can personally attest that it does help me wake up the more I’m moving around. Sometimes my wife and I will also go on a walk in the morning with our dog (which I really enjoy doing for a lot of reasons).
I have also recently changed my schedule to start knocking out my training around 9:30 am because I wanted to feel fresher going into my training (I was often pretty worn out by the late afternoon and found myself pushing back my start times).
I realize not everyone has so much control over their schedule and works through the evenings like I do. However, whatever time you do have control over just keep these ideas above in mind to help you make the most of that time.
3. Determining a realistic amount of sleep and then setting our wind down time.
To start this process it’s easiest to work backwards. Start with “when do I need to wake up?”
I will work through these ideas for myself to offer you a real example. So for me, I need to wake up at 7am.
If I want to get 7-8 hours of sleep I then need to fall asleep around 11pm-midnight. My personal goal is to get 8 hours of sleep each night so I use the 11pm as my goal bed time.
Winding down can be as little as 30 minutes or more than 2 hours. The important idea is that this time is dedicated to you setting yourself up to be as relaxed as possible before trying to fall asleep.
I generally can dedicate an hour to winding down, so my wind down time starts at 10pm. Within that wind down time I’m trying to actually lay down and fall asleep usually by 10:30 or 10:45 at the latest.
After discussing more about how we can improve our sleep environment, we will dive into ideas of what we can do in this wind down time we have established for ourselves.
It is important, though, that you establish when your wind down time will start; otherwise it's easy to forget about it and fill with other things leading all the way up to laying down to fall asleep.
4. Ways we can improve our sleep environment (and thus our sleep quality)
There are some key factors that impact how easy it is for us to fall asleep and for how deep or restful of sleep we are able to get. I will list out the factors and include some actionable ways to move the factor into your favor of getting better sleep.
I’m going to go outside the lines a little in regards to our sleep environment by including the timing of lifestyle choices along with how we can set up our environment. The reason being that they both have a big role in the quality of our sleep.
[2], [3]
Light
Dim the lights (or use less lighting) 2-3 hours before you plan to lay down to fall asleep. Lower the brightness of screen lights or turn them to night mode if available.
Minimize the amount of light exposed in your room while you are sleeping. You could also use a sleep mask.
Temperature
Cool your sleep environment by setting the room temperature lower, using a fan, and/or using a cooling mattress.
Wear minimal and loose, comfortable clothing to bed
Sound
IF you struggle to sleep with silence, use a fan, HEPA filter, or anything with a calming consistent sound.
Space
Minimize the amount of clutter to create a more open, less busy, and less stressful feel to your room.
Caffeine and Alcohol
Reduce or eliminate caffeine intake after 2pm or at least 8 hours before you go to bed.
Reduce or eliminate regular alcohol intake in the evenings or at least 4 hours before going to bed (and really the further away from going to bed the better).
Food / Digestion
Depending on your digestive system, don’t over eat or drink: consume a small to moderate size meal or snack 1-3 hours before you lay down so your body has plenty of time to digest.
a trick I like to use is to brush my teeth after eating my final thing for the day so that it signals to my brain that I’m done eating and there is less appeal for snacking further
By setting up your sleep environment to promote better sleep, you will make life easier on yourself. These factors will help you naturally want to fall asleep and stay asleep. Once you set any of them up (or make them routine) they will continue to serve you well night after night.
5. Piecing together your wind down routine
Now that we have determined when we will wind down and set up our environment to support better sleep, we can dive into the details of what we want to do in order to wind down to relax and fall asleep.
Time is a big factor in what all you can or should include. If you have 30 minutes you may just have 1-2 ways in which to start to wind down. If you have 2 hours you may want to have more than a few ways to wind down or you may still just want to have 1-2 ways that you spend more time doing.
Again, what will make this time effective is your ability to calm your mind and body to find as peaceful and happy a state of being as you can before trying to fall asleep.
[3] Here are some ideas you could include (but your not bound to this list, you can explore anything that is healthy and helpful for you):
Reducing Stimulation
Plan what all you want to realistically accomplish the next day either before or at the beginning of your wind down time.
Use a Brain dump to write down ideas that try to keep popping up in your mind (so you can allow yourself to let them go and address them tomorrow).
Minimize electronics, dim screens, and disengage with stimulating entertainment (this varies a lot person to person).
Take a hot shower or bath (after it warms and relaxes you, your body will start to naturally cool and move toward favoring a lower body temperature - just don’t lay down immediately following or you may still feel hot)
Do some very easy movement (like a walk or bike ride), yoga, foam rolling, and/or stretching - all in the name of relaxing
Do some deep breathing or meditation
Read a book; listen to music, audio book, podcast; watch a show
IMPORTANT to note that any of these items should be relaxing. If it's overly exciting, thought provoking, or uses a lot of cliffhangers; you may find yourself more amped up afterwards.
Pain Management
If you are dealing with any pain, take whatever healthy actions are needed to lower it before laying down to sleep.
If you are stiff in certain areas, it can be very helpful to foam roll or message that area(s) and then follow that up with stretching the area(s) during your wind down time.
Alcohol
I do not recommend including alcohol in your wind down time. Alcohol is deceiving because it might make you feel sleepy, BUT once you fall asleep you will tend to get less deep sleep - negatively impacting how restful your sleep actually was for your body and mind.
These are just ideas you can test out for yourself. You should not try to include all of these because you will probably get overwhelmed. Over time, find what works best for you.
Here is how I typically approach my wind down routine (starting by 10pm or earlier):
[Step 1] (if not done beforehand) look at my calendar for tomorrow and the rest of the week, then add my tasks to complete tomorrow to my Google Tasks. I also set my alarms for the next day.
[Step 2] turn off my laptop and generally be done with communication with anyone outside of my house (as long as it can wait till tomorrow morning).
[Step 3] Read or watch an episode of a good show and foam roll and stretch if I’m feeling tight
[Step 4] Brush my teeth (if I haven’t already)
[Step 5] Turn on what I call a “sleep show” and set a 30 minute sleep timer on the TV (I also dim the TV quite a bit).
My sleep show is something I’ve seen many times before (so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything) and is nostalgic for me (I really enjoy cartoons or old movies). While I allow myself to watch it if I want to, I typically close my eyes and just listen to it. I sometimes do this with music as well.
K.O. between 10:35 and 11 most nights
Reality Check.
When doing these things above I’m not stressing that I do them on a strict scheduled time. Around 10pm or earlier I start to flow through these actions and, more nights than not, by 11pm I’m sound asleep. Also, this isn’t perfectly executed every single night. This is just what I have found works pretty well for me right now, so I try and do it more nights than not.
I recommend listing out the actions that best suit you in sequential order and then making changes to that overtime as needed. You don’t need to be overly strict with the timing. You just want to reduce the amount of time or actions if you find yourself laying down to fall asleep after your goal bed time.
6. Self-monitoring to gauge our progress and course correct if needed.
With our plan in place for how much sleep we want to aim for, when we will wind down, and how we can set ourselves up to get better sleep; I want to quickly revisit the idea of self-monitoring, or self-reflecting to see what sort of progress we are making.
Here is a recap of some of the best ways to tell if you are getting enough sleep and ways my Fit for Life training system offers regular check-ins to help you follow through with this idea:
Do I wake up naturally? (or does an alarm clock do the job?)
In an ideal world you would set your alarm clock for whatever time you need to wake up, but you are allowing yourself enough sleep that you naturally wake up within 1-60 minutes before your alarm and feel ready to get up and start your day.
While this can be a great gauge it is also pretty rare for most people I know. Personally, I’d say about ⅓ of my days I will wake up feeling rested shortly before my alarm goes off. I’m still a work in progress.
How awake do I feel throughout my day?
Ideally, you would like to feel a gradual rise in alertness as your morning progresses into your early afternoon. You may feel your energy drop a little in the late afternoon but with a good lunch and refocus on what needs to be done the rest of the day, you are able to bounce back with some energy that takes you into your evening.
This will also be largely impacted by light exposure, what types of food you eat, and whether you use caffeine (and how much).
How ready do I feel to take on physically or mentally demanding work today?
Most days, we would like to feel ready, capable, and even excited to take on the physical and mental challenges/tasks we have throughout our day.
In Fit for Life, we answer a “Wellness Rating” using a scale of 0-100% to gauge how well we are feeling before we start training. We also have the option to log our “HRV” (heart rate variability) which can be a helpful indicator of our recovery. This response data is collected before all the training sessions and can be reviewed to see trends and any patterns to give us a better idea of our energy and recovery over time.
How did I perform today?
Most days, we would like to feel good about the effort we put forth and the accomplished work we were able to do. This isn’t to say we are expecting to have our best day ever every day, but that we can consistently show up and do a good job (whatever it is that we are doing).
In Fit for Life, we have a “Workout Reflection” at the end of the sessions, where we rate how we felt about the session, on a scale of 1-5, and how long the session took to complete. This provides further insight into our energy and overall recovery by reflecting on how we felt and the quality of effort we were able to give. Also, reflecting on how long it took us to work through the session can indicate how focused we were, which can be greatly impacted by our energy that day.
In Fit for Life our goal is to not only continue to make progress in our training, but to also feel good doing it. We want it to feel confident in our ability to give a sustainable effort to these training sessions over the long haul, because putting the work in consistently is crucial to the progress we want to make and the lifestyle we want to have. Without consistency in some way, shape, or form you (unfortunately) won’t see or feel the progress you desire.
By checking in with how we feel day to day and gauging the quality of our effort, we get regular, valuable insight into how well our rest and recovery is going. This then allows us to make further decisions such as
“I need to prioritize more time for sleep if I want to feel and perform better.”
“It's been a stressful week…I may need to back off the training intensity for today, or the rest of this week, to allow myself a little more opportunity to recover properly. I want to set myself up for better sessions in the future, not for burn out or injury.”
“I’m feeling a bit run down, I need to prioritize some more relaxing time to look forward to throughout my week. Maybe get outside a little more.”
“It’s been really great feeling so good lately, I need to keep doing the things I’ve been doing well, so that I can keep this momentum going!”
To have these reflection metrics already integrated into your training and many other helpful designs to improve the quality of your effort each week, you can check out my Fit for Life program by Clicking Here.
Conclusion
When we are able to find the ideal range of sleep for ourselves we unlock a powerful tool in our lives to help us feel our best and be at our best more consistently.
7-8 hours of sleep is a great starting point to gauge how it affects you. I then encourage you to try and experiment on either a little more or less (think in terms of 30 minute additions or subtractions) all depending on how you feel and perform as a result.
It is very important that you check in with yourself using some of the gaging questions already discussed, and that you are honest with yourself when answering.
I’m also not so naive to assume that carving out 7-8 hours of sleep is an easy goal for everyone. I know there are a lot of potential challenges that push sleep to a secondary focus (such as deadlines, kids, work load, etc.). However, just realize that the more you are able to get a good amount, and better quality sleep, the better your ability to handle stress and responsibilities during your waking hours.
I encourage you to reframe your mindset to aspire for more productivity in less time, instead of needing more time to be productive. Plan ahead, make things as easy as they can be, focus when you need to, and prioritize sleep as best you can.
“Do your best” Sleep Framework Recap:
Remind yourself that sleep is super helpful and worth prioritizing
Set your body clock for the day with morning light and activity
Determine how much sleep you want and set a wind down time
Take actions to improve your sleep environment
Figure out what a good wind down routine is for you
Ongoing self-reflection to gauge your progress
My goal with this framework is to help you plan for ideal sleep, utilize strategies to relax so that you can fall asleep when you want to, and improve your ability to get more quality sleep from whatever hours you are able to get.
Sweet dreams!
My Direct Sources:
[1] Precision Nutrition Textbook: The Essentials of Nutrition and Coaching for health, fitness, and sport (4th edition) - Unit 2: The Science of Nutrition - Chapter 14 - Section on Sleep: pages 242-250
[2] Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing | Huberman Lab Podcast #84
[3] Precision Nutrition Web Article: https://www.precisionnutrition.com/hacking-sleep