For the last few years, sleep has been a real problem for me. And when sleep goes bad, lots of other things follow. No one is immune; we all need deep, restorative sleep. Poor sleep messes with our hormones, our ability to recover from exercise, our mental clarity, and more. This year, I’m finally taking meaningful steps to improve my sleep. I’m finally listening to the conventional advice of the many experts who have studied sleep scientifically.
Expert advice includes things like consistent times for going to bed and getting up again. And I try to be consistent, but my overnight work schedule makes it difficult. If I have a medical appointment or shopping or automobile service or any number of other commitments that must be done during normal business hours, then my bedtime can deviate wildly from the norm. It doesn’t help that the norm is something like 9 o’clock in the morning. At any time of year, the sun’s already up and my exposure to it has suppressed my body’s production of melatonin. So, the hormone responsible for sleepiness is getting shut down just when I need it most.
There’s no practical way for me to eliminate all morning sunlight from my home, but I can block it from my bedroom. The sleep experts commonly recommend a completely dark bedroom, and I should have tried this long ago! In early June, I used construction paper and electrical tape to black out my bedroom windows. As you can see from the photo above, this is somewhat unsightly–I’m not the only unattractive thing in that shot–but with the horizontal blinds lowered into place the room looks like its old self.
The difference in the sleep environment is massive! With the door closed, my bedroom is now pitch black.
My Garmin watch reports sleep statistics to Garmin Connect. Like many health stats, these sleep stats are not strictly accurate. I have a very low resting heart rate, so Garmin sometimes credits me for falling asleep sooner than I really did. But if the watch isn’t strictly accurate, then at least we can hope it’s wrong in a consistent, predictable way. It’s the trend that counts. And the trend is good. Garmin tells me that over the last 12 months, my average sleep duration was 5 hours, 23 minutes. That’s obviously not enough, but here’s the important thing: during the last 4 weeks, average duration was 6 hours, 12 minutes. The only real change was the window blackout project. For the price of a few sheets of construction paper and a few feet of electrical tape, I have purchased almost an hour of extra sleep each day.
I don’t want 6:12 to become the new standard. It’s still not enough. So, is magnesium supplementation my next step? There is some evidence that magnesium promotes higher quality sleep. It’s cheap and readily available without a prescription. How about a new comforter, sheets, and pillows? Those are remarkably expensive! But I could be convinced to treat myself. Any investment in better, longer sleep will almost certainly repay me with interest.
I purchased black-out curtains on Amazon a while back and they do a very good job of blocking light for a very reasonable price and they look nice. I made sure they were much taller than the windows to reduce light leak. My bedroom windows happen to have blinds as well, thus two devices to block light.
ReplyDeleteI've been wearing an Oura ring for years and I have yet to find anything that drastically improves my sleep. I take magnesium before bed, I stop eating around 5 PM, my room is very dark, and I even have a mattress cooler. The one thing I do that is probably not a good idea is staying on the computer right until I go to bed. It's recommended to have a "wind-down habit" where one doesn't use any screens for at least a 1/2 hour before bed... Someday I'll get into that habit!
Wearing eyeglasses that block blue light seems to help some people who can't avoid screens right before bedtime. Using the night light mode built into Windows 10/11 is supposed to help, too. Of course, I haven't tried either!
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