2.2 - Sleep Archives - Happy Healthy Wealthy Productive Sustainable

Schalk November 4, 2020

Are You a Skilled Sleeper?

Take this test to discover how good you are at this critical life skill.

When I say “healthy lifestyle,” what pops into your mind? A kale smoothie? Sweaty people in a gym? A Buddhist monk in the lotus position?

These things are all good, but science is discovering that sleep also belongs right at the top of the healthy lifestyle hierarchy. Chronic sleep deprivation is shortening and diluting our lives as much as smoking and obesity.

Indeed, sleep is one of the most important skills to master for anyone who desires a long and prosperous life. Let’s see how skilled you are.

The Chronic Sleep Deprivation Test

We’ll start with two simple questions to determine whether you’re handicapping yourself with chronic sleep deprivation. Each question counts for 7 sleep deprivation points.

How many days in an average week do you wake up to the sound of an alarm?

The purpose of an alarm clock is to yank you out of sleep before your mind is rested and ready to awaken. Thus, every time you wake up with an alarm, you’re depriving yourself of the sleep you naturally require.

How many days in an average week do you feel sleepy before lunch or feel like you need caffeine to get through the day?

There’s nothing wrong with the occasional cup of coffee. It might even have some benefits. However, if you’re using coffee to mask your chronic sleep deprivation, it’s having a seriously detrimental effect on your health.

For those who don’t drink coffee, you can easily identify chronic sleep deprivation by frequent bouts of sleepiness before lunch. If you’re well-rested, you won’t be able to fall asleep before noon, even if you tried.

The verdict

So, what is your score? If you totaled more than 9 out of the possible 14 sleep deprivation points, urgent action is required. On the other hand, if you scored less than 4 out of 14, you’re probably enjoying a well-rested life. Those falling in the 4–9 range still have some work to do.

The next test will help you direct this work to all the right places.

The Sleep Opportunity Test

Sleep opportunity consists of two main factors: time in bed and sleep hygiene. A skilled sleeper focuses on both factors to give their mind and body every opportunity for sound sleep.

The seven questions below are designed to help you identify the areas where you can gain the most sleep opportunity. We’ll be working with bigger numbers here, so please keep a calculator close by.

Do you go to bed early enough?

The number of hours you spend in bed is the most important element of sleep opportunity. But we need to draw an important distinction here: weekend binge sleeping until noon is not a sign of good sleep opportunity. In fact, it indicates a serious lack of sleep opportunity during the week.

So, let’s formalize things:

Start by defining your desired rise time. This is the time in the morning by which you must be out of bed to complete your morning routine in a stress-free manner. We’ll use 6:30 as an example.
Now, estimate your average bedtime (accounting for both the week and the weekend). If you do some reading before dozing off, your bedtime starts when you switch off your light. For example, it might be 23:30.
Now calculate the number of hours between your average bedtime and your desired rise time. If you take regular naps, you can add your average nap time to this total. In this example, it’s 7 hours.
Multiply by 4 to calculate your points for this question. For example, 7 hours times 4 gives 28 points.

Does your bedroom create the perfect sleep environment?

There are four main elements to the perfect sleep environment. Let’s give each of them some points:

Sound. If your bedroom is completely quiet or filled only with sounds of your choosing (e.g., some white noise), give yourself 2 points. The occasional disturbance from neighbors or your partner scores 1 point, and constant distracting noise gives zero points.
Comfort. If you deeply enjoy the comfort of your bed, go ahead and award yourself 2 points. Comfort that is OK but not perfect earns you 1 point. If you frequently wake up with aches and pains, give yourself a zero.
Light. Perfect darkness earns you 2 points. If you’re sometimes aware of some faint light, give yourself a 1. Clearly distracting light earns a zero.
Temperature. If you sleep comfortably under your sheets for the whole night, give yourself a 2. Any mild discomfort downgrades this to a 1. You get a zero if you frequently wake up from being too hot or cold.

Now, add up these four categories to get your score out of 8. When you have that number, multiply it by 2 to calculate your sleep opportunity points. For example, if you scored 5 out of 8, you would earn 5 x 2 = 10 points.

What about your sleep consistency?

Consistency is often the first thing you read in sleep hygiene articles. We’ll quantify consistency as the number of days in the average week you get out of bed within 30 minutes of your desired rise time defined earlier.

So, think back over your previous week. Start with 7 points and subtract one point for every day that you got up more than 30 minutes before or after your targeted rise time.

Now take the resulting number and multiply it by 2. For example, if you got up within 30 minutes of your desired rise time 4 times in the past week, your score would be 4 x 2 = 8 points.

Do you practice healthy eating for healthy sleep?

Poor eating habits, both in terms of quality and quantity, can negatively affect your sleep, both in terms of quality and quantity. In my case, this factor was significantly more important than sleep consistency.

So, think back over your previous week. How many days could you genuinely feel proud of your healthy eating habits? Give yourself a point for each of those days. Then multiply the number by 2 to get your score.

Is your sleep compromised by coffee or alcohol?

Drinking coffee and alcohol in the afternoon or evening can seriously disrupt your sleep. Coffee will make it difficult to fall asleep and alcohol will result in poor sleep quality.

So, let’s put some numbers on it:

If you never drink coffee after lunch and only have an occasional light drink at special events, you can award yourself a perfect 10.
A habitual glass of wine with dinner or coffee after lunch scores a 5.
Signs of addiction to either alcohol or coffee score a zero.

Feel free to interpolate if you fall somewhere between these three points. This time there’s no added math. Just add your score to the previous ones.

Can you go to bed with a good conscience?

What we’re looking for here is that tired-but-satisfied feeling you get after a day of doing all the good you can reasonably expect of yourself. This mental state is great for high-quality sleep.

So, how many days in the past week have given you this special feeling? Give yourself a point for each of those days and tally up your score for this category.

Do you practice a wind-down ritual?

Taking 30–60 minutes at the end of the day to decouple from all your screens and just wind down can increase your sleep quality. It helps to have a fixed ritual containing typical things like yoga, journaling, and reading.

Do you practice such a ritual? If so, how many days in the past week did you complete your wind-down routine. Each day earns you a point.

Let’s do the math

If you add up all these numbers, you’ll get your score out of 100. Here are the results achieved by our fictitious example character:

Sleep duration: 7 hours times 4 = 28 points.
Bedroom score: 5 points times 2 = 10 points.
Eating habits: 4 good days per week times 2 = 8 points.
Sleep consistency: 4 consistent days times 2 = 8 points.
Coffee and alcohol: a habitual cup of coffee after lunch = 5 points.
Good conscience: 5 good days per week = 5 points.
Evening ritual: no ritual yet = 0 points.

After all this math, this person scores 64 out of 100 (64%).

What does your score mean?

Here are three categories for interpreting your score:

Over 90%. Your mind and body certainly can’t complain that they don’t get enough sleep opportunity. If you’re a 90% sleeper, but still scored high in the earlier Chronic Sleep Deprivation Test, please consult a sleep specialist to see if there is a medical reason for your poor sleep.
70–90%. This is OK, but you can do better. Go back over your scores for each question, see where you lost the most points, and take action.
Below 70%. If you’re in this category (like our example above), you’re handing yourself a serious handicap in life. Make improved sleep opportunity a priority and see what happens.

Sleep well!

Compared to nutrition, exercise, and stress, excellent sleep opportunity is a relatively simple health habit to implement. Not only that; it’s also vitally important for your long-term health and performance! Thus, better sleep is an excellent 80/20 lifestyle hack.

So, let’s all stop handicapping ourselves with chronic sleep deprivation and give ourselves the opportunity to make the world a better place 🙂

Schalk October 28, 2020

2.2 - Sleep health, lifestyle, productivity, sleep

A 5-Part Blueprint for Sound Sleep

Let’s build the foundation of human health and performance.

What is the most foundational piece of advice you can think of? The single element that augments all other aspects of personal growth?

To me, it’s straightforward: get enough sleep.

It took more than a decade of active personal development before I finally understood this, and another couple of years to implement it properly. Today’s article will share the sleep blueprint that emerged after all this time:

Build a deeply internalized understanding of the vital role of sleep in human health and performance.
Construct an environment where you have no choice other than to wake up at a consistent hour (weekends included).
Learn to thrive in that environment by designing your rhythm for natural awakening without an alarm clock.
Accept that you cannot force your mind to sleep, but you can give it the perfect sleep opportunity.
If at all possible, earn the freedom to take an afternoon nap whenever your body and mind desire it.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these five steps.

Understand the Importance of Sleep

As recently as 2014, I was still confidently heading in the wrong direction, experimenting with complex polyphasic sleep patterns designed to severely restrict my sleep duration in the name of increased productivity.

I kept this up for almost a year before finally caving to everyone telling me how tired I looked. Knowing what I now know, that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.

Since then, I’ve learned much more about sleep. As my understanding grew, so did my respect. Initially, sleep was a waste of time that should be minimized by, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, sleeping faster. Then, it became a moderately important health priority after diet and exercise. Today, I view it as the very foundation of human health and performance.

Giving sleep the priority it deserves is tough in today’s world with all its early morning demands and late-night digital temptations. You’ll need plenty of motivation to master this challenge. And this motivation can only come from a deep intrinsic understanding of the importance of sleep.

There’s no better path to this understanding than Matthew Walker’s book pictured below. As stated on the cover, it’s “startling, vital, a life raft.”

For the short version, see my summary of all the serious problems caused by our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

Build an Environment for Sleep Consistency

Consistency is the number one recommendation for healthy sleep. But it’s also the hardest, particularly when it comes to weekends.

In today’s world, the norm is alarm-induced sleep deprivation in the week, followed by binge-sleeping to lunch over the weekend. This inconsistency is not only bad for sleep efficiency; it’s very unhealthy too. As the scientific studies in Prof. Walker’s book repeatedly found, catch-up sleep cannot repair the damage done by prior sleep deprivation.

Breaking this pattern requires a strong environmental trigger. And the best trigger I know is an accountability buddy — someone you care about who will be waiting for your call every day shortly after your chosen wake-up time.

My parents are my accountability buddies. For the past three years, we’ve talked for 15 minutes at 6:30 every morning. We’re yet to miss a single session! And best of all, our relationship has never been better, despite the 11000 km physical divide.

If you have someone in your life who you know you should be spending more time with (but never seem to get to), this is your chance.

Ditch That Alarm Clock

The purpose of an alarm clock is to yank your mind out of sleep before it is ready to wake up naturally. It’s the blaring symbol of our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

The path to an alarm-free life is paved with sleep opportunity. And sleep opportunity consists of sufficient time in bed and excellent sleep hygiene.

In my experience, the most important components of sleep opportunity are the following (in order of priority):

Sufficient time in bed. This is the foundation.
A dark, quiet, comfortable, and cool sleeping environment.
Healthy eating habits.
That tired-but-satisfied feeling after a productive day.
Consistent sleep duration (weekends included).

In addition, you must condition your mind to wake up naturally at the right time. This requires a dedicated wake-up ritual for getting your circadian rhythm back in sync. For me, a funky dance routine stimulating all five senses does the trick 🙂

Learn to Fall Asleep Gracefully

Without the massive sleep pressure created by serious sleep deprivation, falling asleep can be difficult. If we’re not careful, this can turn into a major obstacle on the path to healthy sleep.

It sure is frustrating when you’ve given your mind every opportunity to sleep and it simply refuses to take it. For those times, you need a plan. Mine covers the following contingencies:

A running mind full of unorganized thoughts. In this case, a journaling session is needed to unload and organize things before sleep can come.
An inspired mind chasing a creative idea. I tend to let my mind run in these cases because it often comes up with something genuinely valuable. The aim is to condense the idea into a single phrase that can be written down so that my mind can relax in the knowledge that the idea is safe.
A mind that is simply not ready to sleep. In this case, I just add some relaxing elements to my evening routine, most often a session in my massage chair or reading some silly comic books.

Whatever you do, don’t actively try falling asleep. Instead, create sleep opportunity, stick to your plan, and let sleep come on its own accord.

Also, if you consistently do everything right and still cannot get enough sleep, please consult a sleep specialist. Sleep disorders are all too common and need to be treated carefully.

Bring Back the Siesta

If you want to put the cherry on top of your sleep mastery, earn the freedom to nap during your natural afternoon energy dip. As described earlier, this is the way human biology wants to sleep. But sadly, our 9–5 work culture is totally incompatible with this natural sleep rhythm.

Enter asynchronous remote work. Asynchronous communication combined with remote work can restore this napping freedom to millions of office workers. If this opportunity pops up anywhere in your vicinity, grab it with both hands.

For those lucky enough to enjoy this freedom already, here’s the napping strategy that works for me:

Only attempt the nap if you really feel that afternoon energy dip.
Start with something ultra-relaxing like a massage or a warm shower.
Find your natural nap length through open experimentation.
If sleep doesn’t come, just enjoy this time of complete relaxation. If relaxation doesn’t come, get up to work on whatever kept it away.

The afternoon energy dip is not useful for much other than a natural siesta. Honor your biology. Use the dip as nature intended.

Build Your Foundation

To master sleep is to construct your foundation for long-term health and productivity. Our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic is the cause of far too many shaky foundations in our complex, modern world.

Please invest the time to build your foundation. You might be surprised at all the wonderful things you can construct on such a solid base 🙂

Images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

Schalk October 21, 2020

2.2 - Sleep diet, health, productivity, sleep

My Data-Driven Review of Classic Sleep Advice

The causes and effects of a good night’s sleep

Sleep is the foundation of human health and performance. It keeps us healthy, emotionally stable, intelligent, creative, attractive, and accident-free.

As the world slowly catches on to this foundational truth, the internet is filling up with sleep advice. But there’s a problem: very little of this advice is backed by any quantified proof.

That’s why I decided to quantify the effects of various lifestyle choices on my sleep quality. My daily choices are recorded on my Graph of Life, and my sleep quality is quantified via Sleep Cycle.

Let’s see what the data has to say.

The Results

I performed an analysis of the statistical correlations between the wide range of lifestyle metrics I collect on a daily basis and my sleep quality. The five most important correlations are given below, together with two obvious requirements for high sleep quality: duration and consistency.

The correlation of sleep quality with different lifestyle metrics from the day before (causes) and the day after (effects), compared with the impact of sleep duration and consistency (dashed lines).

Let’s take a look at each of the factors in turn.

Time in bed

The dashed green line shows the high correlation of sleep quality with the amount of time spent in bed. This one is obvious: I only sleep when in bed, so enough time in bed is a prerequisite for high sleep quality.

Consistency

One of the first things you’ll see in any sleep hygiene article is the need to maintain a consistent sleep schedule (even on weekends). I quantified this metric by comparing the standard deviation of my sleep duration to my average sleep quality over each week.

As shown by the orange line, sleep consistency is about half as important as sleep duration. Interestingly, the correlation of sleep duration (0.40) with consistency is even higher than sleep quality (0.33). This means that poor consistency strongly reduces the time I spend in bed.

It makes good sense: With all the demands of modern life, consistency is the only way to make enough time for good quality sleep.

Eating habits

I’ve previously established that eating habits are the single biggest factor in the quality of my day. For this reason, I was not overly surprised when it again emerged as the winner in this case.

The graph shows that good eating habits are even more important than consistency when it comes to sleep quality. Delving a little deeper, I saw that this effect was split equally between two factors:

Time in bed (correlation = 0.28). My eating habits are a good indication of my general level of discipline on any given day. Poorer discipline often means that I get in bed too late, giving me fewer hours to sleep.
Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.26). The ratio of sleep quality to time in bed also reduces substantially with poor eating habits, resulting in less restoration for every hour spent in bed.

We can also see that a good night’s sleep causes better eating habits the following day. It’s well-known that an underslept mind leads to more food cravings as well as cravings for the wrong kinds of food (see the “obesity and diabetes” section in this article).

Checklist

My checklist is a direct indication of the number of things I did right on a particular day. Many of my checklist items are recurring productive and healthy actions, keeping me firmly on the straight and narrow.

The graph shows that ticking many items off my checklist is both a cause and an effect of high sleep quality. It’s easy to imagine how a good night’s sleep would improve my ability to get things done the next day, but I was a little surprised that this was also such a significant cause of good sleep.

But there is a logical explanation, and it looks quite similar to the one given above for the effect of eating habits:

Time in bed (correlation = 0.23). Like eating habits, my checklist is a good indicator of discipline, which affects my sleep duration.
Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.23). A productive day seems to make each hour of sleep more restorative. This must be related to that tired-but-satisfied feeling typical at the end of a successful day. It’s easy to imagine this pleasant feeling leading to better sleep.

Work

The effects of work on sleep can be interpreted similarly to the effects of my checklist discussed above. However, the correlations are considerably smaller. This is because my checklist is a more holistic indicator of whether I did the right things during the day than my work performance.

Even though the correlations are smaller, they clearly show that prioritizing sleep is good for productivity. This confirms that sleeping less in pursuit of greater productivity is a terrible idea.

Excercise

Regular exercise is sometimes recommended as a sleep aid, but the graph shows that this was not the case for me. In fact, this is the only statistically insignificant (p > 0.05) correlation in this analysis, implying that the little blue bar in the graph could just be random.

However, a good night’s sleep helps me exercise the following day. This is also no surprise given that physical performance improves significantly with sleep (see the “motor memory” section in the aforementioned article).

Energy

The relationships between my energy levels and sleep quality look similar to the correlations with exercise: High energy levels are an effect of good sleep quality rather than a cause.

It makes sense that a well-rested body and mind will feel more energetic. The correlations are stronger than those of exercise because my subjective energy score includes both mental and physical aspects.

Other important factors

Sleep quality also depends on several other factors that I could not quantify due to a lack of data. Let’s take a quick run-through:

Wind-down routine. This is something I’ve only started doing recently and I don’t yet have data for it. My feeling is that this does help a bit, but it doesn’t perform miracles. Next year, I’ll have the data to confirm.
Smoking and alcohol. Both of these are said to be bad for sleep. I don’t smoke and very rarely drink, so I lack the data to quantify this.
Coffee. No coffee after lunch is another commonly listed sleep hygiene guideline. I’m a (caffeine-free) tea-person, so no data here either.
Bed and pillow. Another obvious bit of advice is to maximize the comfort of your bed. Some years ago, I often woke too early with neck pain. Luckily, this was quickly fixed with a fancy memory foam pillow.
Light and temperature. A cool and dark room is another common piece of sleep advice. Over here in Norway, both light and temperature vary greatly over the seasons, but I see no clear drop in my sleep quality during summer months. I do use a sleep mask in summer, but I make no attempt to control the temperature in my room.
Noise. Sleeping in a noisy environment is tough. Luckily, I live in a quiet neighborhood with few disturbances. There is a bit of noise from neighbors on rare occasions, so I can still collect some data next year.
Scents. I have some lavender pillow mist I remember to use every once in a while, but I don’t collect data for it. I doubt that the effect is significant, but I still plan to investigate this properly next year.

The Takeaway

Start with the big two: duration and consistency. After that, my experience shows that good eating habits and a productive day are the next two best inducers of a good night’s sleep.

Otherwise, there is a range of additional factors whose influence I’m yet to calculate. Most of these are obvious, such as a cool, dark, and quiet room with a comfortable bed. Others, like a wind-down routine and aromatherapy, will be interesting to investigate further in the future.

Sweet dreams!

Schalk October 14, 2020

2.2 - Sleep health, napping, productivity, remote work, siesta, sleep

Return of the Siesta: My Surprisingly Successful Afternoon Napping Experiment

How asynchronous remote work can revive the most natural of human sleep patterns

Do you often feel groggy in the early afternoon? Me too. In fact, this afternoon energy dip is clear evidence that we’re both human.

It’s true. And what’s more, your human biology would love for you to honor that dip with a nice afternoon nap. But how can you when our modern lives are so deeply incompatible with these siesta dreams?

Luckily, a new solution to this vexing problem recently emerged. It goes by the name of asynchronous remote work, and, to those who embrace it, it offers something remarkable: life through a well-rested body and mind.

The Natural Human Sleep Pattern

Chapter four in Matthew Walker’s vital book on the science of sleep explores the wide range of sleep patterns observed within the animal kingdom. One of the animals investigated is a hairless ape called Homo sapiens.

Walker notes that a biphasic pattern containing an afternoon nap is the natural way for humans to sleep. It’s not a cultural thing. In fact, it’s deeply biological. Societies untouched by technology still sleep this way.

He also cites a Harvard study of 23,000 Greek adults around the time when the modern 9–5 grind was displacing siesta culture. Results showed a 37% increase in death from heart disease over the next six years for those who abandoned their siesta, 60% for working men. Another striking statistic he cites is that men in isolated Greek communities where the siesta remains intact are 4x more likely to live to 90 than the average American.

Indeed, our genes miss their afternoon nap.

Home Offices and Siestas

The humble siesta was no match for the irrepressible spread of the 9–5 workday across the Western world. It got swept aside and forgotten, leaving many office workers about as useful around 3 p.m. as if they were taking the nap their biology requires.

Decades passed. And then, a virus rose from the East to upend the world and force billions of minds to think differently.

Remote work was one of the biggest winners in this new world. For me, this development was so deeply beneficial that I feel downright guilty about it. As a simulation scientist, I’ve been pushing for the right to work more from home for years. Covid-19 fulfilled this wish in its entirety.

Part of my positive lockdown experience was the opportunity to try out the regular afternoon naps I had read about in Matthew Walker’s book. Initially, I napped on days without afternoon virtual meetings. Naturally, this random schedule was not ideal, but it was enough to draw me in.

After a couple of months of erratic napping, I finally came out of the siesta closet, asking my closest colleagues not to book meetings after 2 p.m. I write this after only three months of more regular napping, but I’ve already accepted this as my natural way of life going forward.

Yes, I’m a believer. This is the way the human body is supposed to work.

Asynchronous Communication

I recently learned this fancy term from an excellent article on remote work. Teams that master the art of asynchronous communication can do something that almost seems impossible: work together seamlessly while almost never bothering each other.

Email is the classic form of asynchronous communication. Your colleague sends a message, and you respond when you’re good and ready. Unless, of course, you allow email notifications to dictate your life (if this is you, do yourself a big favor and turn them off now).

Aside from vastly improving your ability to focus, the combination of remote work and asynchronous communication (or asynchronous remote work) can give you complete napping freedom.

So, if you have a computer job and want to experience the way the human body and mind are supposed to function, convince your boss to let you try this out. There has never been a better opportunity to make this sale.

Two Days in One

My habit of tracking my daily performance revealed a pleasant surprise about napping: As shown in the graph below, days with a nap yield more than two extra productive hours relative to days without one.

The effect of napping on the average number of productive hours I got out of my days over the last three months. The data were automatically gathered using RescueTime.

From what I now know about sleep, my theory for explaining my brain’s natural willingness to do more work on nap days goes like this:

The human mind has temporary and permanent storage, and sleep frees up temporary storage by moving memories to permanent storage.
In addition, sleep offers a form of therapy to naturally reduce stress and anxiety via dreaming in a state free of noradrenaline.
Hence, an afternoon nap restores both our capacity to learn and our capacity to tackle emotionally challenging work.

The best way I can describe the siesta experience is that it almost feels like two days in one. After waking up from a siesta, there is a short period of sleep inertia, but soon, it feels like the start of a brand new day with a fully recharged brain.

Some Napping Pointers

Although I’m no siesta master yet, I can share five simple pointers that worked for me over the past 3 months:

Nap only when you feel that afternoon energy dip. Sometimes, especially when working on something interesting, it never arrives. In those cases, it’s best to skip the nap and go to bed an hour earlier that night.
Make sure there are at least six (preferably seven) hours between the end of your nap and your evening bedtime. You’ll have trouble falling asleep at night if you nap too late.
Try to do something relaxing for 10-15 minutes before your nap. In my case, it’s a session in my massage chair. A warm shower also helps.
Let your body decide how long it wants to nap (within reason). I set a timer for 90 minutes as insurance, but I almost always wake up naturally before it goes off.
If sleep plays hard-to-get, focus instead on enjoying this time of complete relaxation during an otherwise unproductive part of your day. Often, letting go like this allows sleep to come. If you find yourself unable to relax completely, get up to work on whatever kept relaxation away.

Give It a Try (If Your Lifestyle Allows)

The afternoon energy dip is not much good for anything other than a nice nap. To be honest, I’m not only less productive during those hours but also more strongly drawn to unhealthy indulgences. That’s no good.

So, if asynchronous remote work is at all a possibility for you, why not honor your biology and earn the right to your siesta? This vital shift can allow us to get more life out of each day and more days out of each life.

If the Norwegian weather allowed, this would be my usual siesta spot (maybe adding a pillow or two and a sombrero over my face 🙂)

Images for this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

Schalk October 7, 2020

2.2 - Sleep alarm clock, health, productivity, sleep

It’s Time to Ditch Your Alarm Clock

And rediscover the world through a well-rested body and mind

Amazing breakthrough! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested? — Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep, Chapter 6.

So, are you? Well, all you need to do to access this miracle cure-all is return to a natural sleep pattern.

I say “return to” because Americans have lost more than one hour of daily sleep since 1942, possibly more. If you understand all the serious problems created by chronic sleep deprivation, this is a terrifying statistic.

The ability to wake up naturally without an alarm clock every morning is the best and simplest indicator of natural sleep habits. It sounds simple, but sadly, most people need two whacks at the snooze button and a 24-minute battle of will to get out of bed in the morning.

Let’s see what we can do about that.

Acceptance

The first step to fixing any problem is to accept that it exists.

Most people are still yanked out of sleep by the wail of an alarm on a daily basis simply because that’s the norm. As was the case with cigarettes in the late 20th century, the public is only now starting to realize the dangers of chronic sleep deprivation. Luckily, the internet allows us to spread the word much more efficiently nowadays.

Many others consciously sleep too little in pursuit of higher productivity. But it’s now well known that this tactic has precisely the opposite effect. My main reference for all scientific evidence related to sleep is Matthew Walker’s book quoted earlier, but here’s another convenient read.

Indeed, the argument for chronically depriving your brain and body of sleep is about as sound as it is for chainsmoking. It needs to stop.

Awareness

Sleep health still ranks low on the average person’s list of priorities. This ignorance is costing developed nations about 2% of GDP. In other words, if we all just gave sleep the priority it deserves, we could literally double our growth rate.

Want to help curb this terrible waste? Start using a sleep tracker. These days, there are many smartwatches on the market offering this functionality, but I recommend a little mobile app called Sleep Cycle.

The benefit of Sleep Cycle is that you have to start it at night and stop it in the morning. Yes, this is a benefit — even in today’s automated world. Take away this manual touch, and you take away a sleep tracker’s most vital function: raising awareness. Sleep trackers that automatically track your sleep in the background are all too easy to ignore.

Download this app and start using it tonight. You won’t regret it.

Sleep Opportunity

Acceptance and awareness will bless you with a good dose of motivation to improve your sleep habits. And the best thing you can do with this newfound motivation is to give yourself more time to sleep.

But, like most things in life, it’s not as simple as it sounds. For most people, getting more sleep time means an earlier bedtime. And many who try this will struggle to fall asleep without the total exhaustion caused by chronic sleep deprivation. This leads to frustration. And enough frustration leads to relapse into the clutches of late-night digital temptations.

Getting past this obstacle requires a clear shift in mindset. You must accept that you only have direct control over the sleep opportunity you give your body and mind, not whether they will actually take it.

Note that sleep opportunity includes not only a healthy number of hours in bed but also good sleep hygiene. The three most important elements are:

Keeping a consistent routine, even on the weekend.
Ensuring you have an ultra-comfy bed in a dark, quiet, and cool room.
Maintaining a relaxing wind-down routine that involves dimming the lights and avoiding screens for an hour before bedtime.

In summary, good sleep opportunity means at least 8 hours in bed every day, coupled with excellent sleep hygiene.

This much is under your direct control.

When Sleep Plays Hard-to-Get

Sometimes you give your mind every opportunity to sleep it could possibly desire, and it simply refuses to take it. This can be very frustrating, but frustration will only chase sleep further away.

To keep this sleep-disturbing frustration at bay, you need a solid plan. In my experience, there are three main circumstances this plan must cover:

A running mind filled with chaotic, often stressful thoughts. When this happens, the best solution is to unload these thoughts into a journal you keep next to your bed. This is a very effective way to get your mind relaxed and ready for sleep.
An inspired mind shaping a potentially valuable idea. Here, I prefer to go with it. In fact, some of my best energy technology ideas came to me while lying in bed. However, it’s important to maintain discipline and avoid getting stuck in thought loops. Try to condense the idea into a few words you can write down to securely store your newly formed concept. Once that’s done, your mind should be happy to let go.
Nothing special, just not quite ready for sleep. In this case, you just need something relaxing to do. My preferences are reading some silly comic books or enjoying a session in the massage chair next to my bed.

Whatever you do, don’t lie there actively trying to fall sleep. Sleep is one of those things where the harder you try, the harder you fail.

The Reward

If you consistently give your mind every opportunity to sleep and stick to a good plan when sleep plays hard-to-get, it won’t be long before you get your just reward: waking up naturally before your alarm.

At first, it will only happen once every couple of days. Then, every other day. Then, one fine morning, you’ll wake up with a smile and realize you can’t remember what your alarm sounds like.

Once you reach this point, the experience of life changes. It’s unlikely that life will get any easier (you’ll simply level-up your challenges), but it will surely get more vibrant. And that’s awesome 🙂

Schalk September 25, 2020

2.2 - Sleep health, personality, productivity, sleep

Let Me Scare You to Sleep

The science behind the toxic effects of chronic sleep deprivation

Our modern world is laced with slow poisons — things like tobacco, empty-calorie foods, and binge-watching platforms — that patiently shorten and dilute our lives over years of habitual indulgence.

History shows that society’s interaction with these poisons follows a predictable 5-stage process: uninhibited indulgence, risk recognition, risk communication, public concern, and policy action. As the example of smoking shows, this process can take decades to play out despite overwhelming evidence that billions of healthy life years are being lost.

Chronic sleep deprivation is one of the most potent poisons ever to enter this frustratingly slow process. Currently, it’s transitioning between the risk recognition and risk communication stages. We need to speed things up.

Today’s article aims to do just that by summarizing the scary details about the effects of sleep deprivation contained in Matthew Walker’s landmark book pictured below.

This daunting collection of science-backed findings certainly scared me to sleep. I hope it does the same for you.

Denial and Diagnosis

Sleep deprivation has two particularly pernicious qualities that help it proliferate through society:

Sleeping less for the sake of cramming more into each day is still seen as a sign of productivity and ambition that is viewed in a positive light.
Chronically sleep-deprived individuals believe they are performing optimally, even though objective tests definitively prove otherwise.

Here is a simple test to help you determine whether you’re chronically sleep-deprived and at risk of all the scary things outlined in the remainder of this article. To be safe, you must be:

Able to function optimally without the need for stimulants (e.g., coffee)
Unable to fall asleep before lunch (even if you tried)

If you are dependent on stimulants to get you through the day or if you regularly feel drowsy before lunch, you’re likely severely handicapping yourself by willfully taking the slow poison of chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, know that binge-sleeping over the weekend after a sleep-deprived week is of little use. Most of the adverse effects of sleep-deprivation are locked in after one or two bad nights and cannot be reversed by catch-up sleep.

If any of this applies to you, I sincerely hope the serious issues discussed below will motivate you to give sleep the priority it deserves.

Degenerative Disease

Chronic sleep deprivation could be the most underrated driver behind the global non-communicable disease burden, with strong causal links to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

Heart Disease

Sleep deprivation traps our sympathetic nervous system in a constant fight-or-flight mode. More stress hormones are released, increasing blood pressure, and weakening our arteries over time. Simultaneously, growth hormone concentrations decrease, inhibiting the body’s ability to heal the damaged arteries.

These effects of sleep deprivation increase the risk of heart disease by 45%, jumping to 200% for middle-aged individuals. Given that heart disease is by far the biggest killer on the planet, these are truly terrifying numbers.

Immunity and Cancer

Lack of sleep also compromises the immune system, increasing our chances of catching a virus and lowering our chances of fighting off malignant tumors. In these Corona times, you should know that sleep deprivation increases rhinovirus (common cold) infection rates from 18% to 50%.

More worryingly, cancer rates increase by 40% in individuals sleeping 6 hours or less, mainly due to a large decline in the natural killer cells responsible for destroying malignant elements in the body. In fact, tumor growth is enhanced by sleep deprivation, strongly increasing cancer risk.

Obesity and Diabetes

Sleep deprivation disrupts the hormonal balance responsible for appetite control, leading to significant weight gain. Furthermore, these unnatural food cravings are strongly biased towards all the wrong kinds of foods, caused by suppression of the higher centers of the brain responsible for moderating primitive cravings. To make matters worse, if a sleep-deprived individual is put on a strict diet, weight loss occurs mainly from lean muscle mass.

In addition, sleep deprivation makes our cells unresponsive to the message of insulin to absorb dangerous levels of glucose, putting healthy individuals in a pre-diabetic state. All these effects increase the risk of diabetes and other serious illnesses associated with obesity.

Alzheimer’s Disease

The connection between sleep deprivation and dementia is particularly troubling. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by plaque build-up in the brain. Deep sleep can counteract this development, but the plaque inhibits our brain’s ability to generate deep sleep. This causes a vicious cycle where inadequate sleep causes plaque build-up, which again causes inadequate sleep.

Once this cycle is underway, complete mental invalidity is inevitable. On the flipside, preliminary results have shown that effective treatment of sleep disorders can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in high-risk patients by 5–10 years.

Genes and DNA

Sleep deprivation even distorts our genes. Researchers have identified 711 genes that are either abnormally revved up or suppressed by sleep deprivation. These effects are not yet well understood, but it is clear that chronic sleep deprivation is a potentially dangerous genetic engineering experiment being conducted on a global scale.

Furthermore, sleep deprivation causes telomere damage, resulting in faster aging and visibly older physical appearance.

Mental Health

As with physical health, the world’s major mental health problems are also closely linked with our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic.

Emotional Instability

In simple terms, a lack of sleep renders you bipolar. An underslept brain becomes emotionally unstable, swinging wildly between depression and euphoria. This effect is caused by a 60% amplification in the primitive fight-or-flight centers of the brain (amygdalae) combined with a suppression of the more evolved rational center (prefrontal cortex).

This causes all manner of problems, including violence, suicide, excessive risk-taking, and addiction. These emotionally unstable behaviors plague many sleep-deprived people in highly influential positions such as doctors, fund managers, politicians, and military personnel.

Sleep also enhances our ability to pick up on subtle emotional cues in waking life. Without it, we become unable to properly discern the emotional reactions of others, leading to serious miscommunication and conflict.

Stress and Anxiety

One of sleep’s most important functions in our highly-strung modern world is a soothing balm of free and effective overnight therapy. Specifically, sleep strips away the emotional edge from traumatic events, saving us tremendous amounts of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

This therapeutic effect originates from dreaming (REM) sleep where we process emotionally charged experiences in an environment devoid of noradrenaline (the brain’s version of adrenaline).

In fact, the potentially debilitating condition of PTSD is characterized by noradrenaline levels not receding during dream sleep, illustrating the terrible effects of forgoing this vital therapeutic benefit of sleep.

Cognitive Function

Scientific studies have proven that a lack of sleep degrades creativity, intelligence, motivation, effort, efficiency, effectiveness when working in groups, emotional stability, sociability, and honesty. It makes you wonder how many of society’s grave problems can be solved simply by all of us returning to natural sleeping patterns.

Memory

Sleep is essential for memory creation and retention. To use a computing analogy, it frees up the brain’s RAM by shifting memories to permanent storage so that there is space for new memories the next day. Thus, for effective memory function, we need good sleep the night before (to free up RAM) and after (to permanently store memories).

Sleep deprivation disrupts this memory processing, hampering our ability to recall distant memories and form new ones by 20–40%. After one night of insufficient sleep, the damage is done and that day’s memories are forever degraded. Students pulling all-nighters present a prominent example: Information is crammed into the brain’s RAM to pass the test, but the lack of sleep results in minimal longer-term retention, making the exam pointless.

Sleep also intelligently decides which memories to remember and which to forget. This avoids the buildup of useless memories that can interfere with the recall of useful memories. It also serves to soften painful memories.

Motor Memory

Memories related to physical coordination (e.g., playing a sport or musical instrument) are affected in a similar way. For example, musicians routinely report being able to play a piece much better after a good night of sleep.

Sports performance is also strongly improved by plentiful sleep. Most strikingly, the risk of sports injury declines from 73% to 18% when sleep is increased from 6 to 9 hours.

Creativity and Problem Solving

Sleep also plays an important role in the transition between learning and comprehension. It helps not only to store new information but also to connect it in novel ways (creativity). Dream sleep stimulates a kind of fuzzy-logic knowledge processing, leading to insights we could never achieve with wakeful rational thinking.

Experiments have shown a 15–35% increase in puzzle-solving ability after awakening from dream sleep. In addition, a set of strenuous tests with a hidden cheat code revealed that well-slept individuals found the cheat code 60% of the time versus only 20% of underslept individuals.

Creativity and problem solving are incredibly valuable in today’s world, making chronic sleep deprivation a severe handicap in the competitive job market. On a societal level, a universal lack of sleep significantly degrades our ability to solve our long list of global challenges.

Attractiveness and Reproduction

If you have dreams of attracting your soulmate and starting a family, you better make sure you get your beauty sleep.

Both sexes are clearly perceived as less attractive when in a sleep-deprived state. As mentioned earlier, a lack of sleep also promotes unhealthy eating habits that further detract from physical attractiveness. Furthermore, sleep deprivation dumbs you down and makes you emotionally volatile, clouding your personality. All these factors reduce your attractiveness as a mate.

For those planning to start a family, note that both men and women suffer lower fertility with sleep deprivation. If both partners are sleep-deprived, problems to conceive compound.

Accidents

Here’s something to think about: Driving your car after a night with only 4 hours of sleep is equally dangerous to driving when legally drunk, increasing your chances of causing an accident by 1150%.

Drowsy driving is therefore just as irresponsible as drunk driving. And the worst is that drowsy drivers believe they’re just fine.

There are two reasons why sleep deprivation makes us much more accident-prone: degraded cognitive performance and the occasional brief loss of consciousness, also known as a microsleep. It’s easy to imagine scenarios other than driving where reduced alertness or a brief bout of unconsciousness can endanger many lives.

Sleep Disorders

Even though the vast majority of sleep deprivation is the result of people simply giving themselves too little sleep opportunity, there can also be medical causes.

Insomnia is the most common of these. Often, people who think they have insomnia are just practicing poor sleep hygiene. However, if you are diligently following all the best sleep hygiene and sleep duration practices and still struggle to get enough sleep, insomnia may be the cause.

In these cases, it’s now well understood that sleeping pills should be the very last resort. They have a wide range of negative side effects and produce very poor quality sleep that fulfills little of sleep’s vital functionality. Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia is a much better method.

Other sleep disorders include sleepwalking, narcolepsy, and fatal insomnia. Sleepwalking is mostly harmless, narcolepsy is a serious condition that requires dedicated management, and fatal insomnia is incurable, resulting in certain death. Fortunately, such serious sleep disorders are very rare.

Sweet Dreams!

There you have it. Sleep deprivation is bad for you in almost every way imaginable. Continuing to take this slow poison day after day will both shorten and dilute your life.

As stated earlier, the vast majority of sleep deprivation in our modern world is caused by people simply giving themselves insufficient sleep opportunity or practicing poor sleep hygiene. And the good news is that both these problems need little more than the right motivation to cure.

So please, buy Prof. Walker’s book. Read it with care. Then proceed to make the world a better place by spreading this vital sleep motivation far and wide!

The images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

2.2 – Sleep