🛏️Sleep
Best Practices for optimising sleep
Sleep pressure
Sleep pressure is built in cells during waking hours. The act of sleeping resets this. However sleep pressure can also be reset partly before sleeping, e.g. with a short nap. This is not ideal as it makes it harder to fall asleep when you really want to sleep and it promotes having breaks during the sleep at night.
Reset instructions
In order to reset ones sleeping behaviour the following steps are helpful:
Go to bed late and wake up early. This helps to increase sleeping pressure and compresses the nightly sleep. It helps you sleep fully throughout the night. Once your sleep is compressed you can increase the sleep window by 15min every day until you've reached your ideal sleep time. If you have trouble falling asleep or sleeping fully through the night you can reduce this window again by 15min.
No reading/phone/tv in bed. Only sleep. Do all other activities elsewhere.
Turn off devices with screen 2h before bed. (Obviously impossible - I won't do this 🙃)
Keep the same sleeping schedule during weekdays and weekends
Sleep by lower temperatures (18°C)
Stop enforcing productivity 2h before sleeping. If you have a lot of things on your mind, write them down on a todo list and put it away for the next day.
Coffee and alcohol disturb sleep. Skip or limit to use before early afternoon.
Sleep length
Only for a small percentage of people is 6h enough sleep. Ideally you should have 7h or more sleep for cognitive top performance.
Time to fall asleep
For a healthy human it should take 12min to fall asleep.
Pillow
Notes
7 sleep myths that are making you tired (YouTube: Ali Abdaal)
Cycadian rythem -> being awake when there is light, some receptors in the eye are specifically used only to measure light
Chronotype -> see test, morning vs. intermediate vs. evening person
Do you need 8h sleep? -> No it depends on the person, a healthy amount of sleep can range from 6 - 11h per day
Blue light before sleep? -> doesn't seriously affect sleep
Chronotype self test: Used to determine the chronotype of a person, e.g. morning person, evening etc.
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