Sleep
“The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling healthcare systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.”
- Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
In the last few months, our Coffee Talks have often fallen on the topic of sleep. Matthew Walker’s book has had a life-changing effect on us. In fact, it’s had an effect on our Coffee Talks themselves—if we want to have a coffee talk, it has to be before 12:00 because that is our caffeine cut-off time, to ensure coffee doesn’t affect our sleep. After that, it has to be a “Tea Talk,” and that just doesn’t sound as cool—plus we would have to build a whole other website.
There are hundreds of mind-blowing quotes from this book—but that lead-off one really says it all: If you want to live as long as possible, with the best quality of life possible—sleep should be your priority.
We have been talking about writing an article on sleep for a while, but recently have been called to action by getting some real shitty sleep. Some good old-fashioned overeating, and a general holiday slacking on some sleep rules that we’ve established for ourselves, have left us sleep-deprived and not feeling our best. We need more sleep.
How much sleep?
Ahh. The big question. In his extensively researched book, Walker insists that seven to eight hours of sleep is what everyone needs. We have often talked about how we routinely got five or six hours of sleep for decades—shaking off the need for sleep with macho bravado in our youth, and then missing lots of sleep as fathers of three kids, and everything that goes with that. It was a real gut-punch to learn in Why We Sleep, that just ten days of six-hour sleep per night impairs you as much as going a full 24 hours without sleep. Ugh. When you factor in the amount we were training as CrossFit cuckoo-heads—you have a real recipe for burn-out, injury, and illness.
What about quality of sleep?
As we have discussed in other articles, we are both fans of the WHOOP band, a wearable device that, amongst other things, monitors your sleep. There are other devices, like the Oura ring, and others—but our experience is with the WHOOP band. Since being able to gather some concrete data on our sleep, we have made good sleep a project of ours, We had similar experiences that it was not just the quantity of sleep that was the problem, but also the quality. The balance of light sleep, REM sleep, and deep sleep were not ideal, and we had a high incidence of sleep disturbances—sometimes as many as 10 per night. Since applying a list of sleep rules, we have really improved the different phases of our sleep, and have brought sleep disturbances down to one or two per night. The effect has been life-changing.
A toolkit for better sleep
We conducted a kind of sleep inventory, based on suggestions in Matthew Walker’s book, and made some big changes based on that and our own experimentations. This is our Coffee Talkers Guide to Improving Your Sleep;
Not so much coffee. Yeah, it hurts—but we try to limit it to three cups, and stop drinking the last one at 12 noon.
Set the stage for eight hours of sleep. That means if we need to wake up at 6:00, we have to be lying down, in bed, trying to sleep by 10:00.
In between the time that we put our kids to sleep, and when we fall asleep ourselves, we don’t use our smartphones (this can be one-two hours before our own sleep)
Set our smartphones to automatically switch off blue light at 8:00 pm, and use the warmer light.
An hour before our kids’ bedtimes, we dim the lights and use mostly candlelight to signal that sleep time is coming (for our own benefit as much as theirs)
Stick to a sleep schedule—the same bedtime and waking time, even on the weekends.
Do not eat past 7:00 pm, and do not overeat—especially that last meal.
Avoid the urge to use alcohol and other drugs as a sleep aid—these and many pharmaceutical drugs can greatly affect the healthy phases of sleep.
Make sure the room used for sleep is completely dark, and at a cool temperature, if possible.
Don’t do work or watch TV/computer/smartphone in bed—keep the bedroom designated for sleep (with the exception of more intimate encounters).
Don’t exercise before sleep—any last training of the day we do before dinner.
Create a pre-sleep ritual (reading a book, or listening to an audiobook or meditation)
The final frontier
It seems like actually working on our sleep has kind of been the final frontier in our health and fitness journeys. Having experienced better sleep, and how much it improves our mood and efficacy during the day, we feel a bit dumb having not gotten around to this sooner. But, it’s never too late. Taking steps to improve sleep is a life changer.
We wish you long and healthy nights of sleep in 2021.
—Scott and Lennart