Episode 3: All the Good Nights' Sleep

There may be few things more important to a person than a good night's sleep.
Well, that's probably not true.
Not a good night's sleep.
Consistent, consistent good nights of sleep.
Consistently good nights sleep.
Consistently, consistently good nights sleeps.
Whatever.
Sleep is really important.
There is a ton of research out there.
Even if you don't believe your own experience, there's a ton of research out there.
Particularly around sleep deprivation and the effects thereof.
It impacts decision making.
It impacts your health.
It impacts your emotional regulation.
It obviously, you know, anyone who's had a bad night's sleep, which I assume is pretty much everyone on the planet, can tell you that that next day, they're dragging.
And even if it's not that next day, it might be the day after that.
But in my undergraduate work, one of the things that I learned along the way was that the whole idea of catching up on sleep was largely a debunked thing in the psychological world.
If you get two or three or whatever short or bad nights of sleep, you can't just sleep extra on the weekend to make up for that.
It's not how it works.
Sleep, on a daily basis, it is, if you exercise regularly, it is a time when your body is repairing.
If you are a very creative person, or if you have learned, if you're learning new things, sleep is a time when a lot of that consolidates within your brain.
If you are learning, for instance, one of the tricks to, if you're studying for exams or something, they say, and I've done this and it really does work, you want to review whatever it is you're studying right before you sleep, pick it back up right when you wake up, more or less.
And by bookending your sleep in that way, you know, reviewing it before you go to bed kind of keeps you fresh in your mind, your mind gets a chance to consolidate that, make sense of it, digest it.
And then when you wake up, by reviewing it one more time, you're able to kind of refresh that in a way that it calls it to the surface.
Sleep is just exceptionally important.
You know, and that's not to say anything of some of the more, you know, hard and fast sort of research they've done where they've correlated things with sleep and various diseases, both chronic sorts of things and sort of short-term things.
Um, you know, I'm sure most people can agree that if you are not sleeping very well, it's much easier to get a flu or a cold or whatever, if those sorts of things are going around.
Um, my, well, I was going to say my relationship with sleep, but I, uh, I heard, uh, someone say once they were talking about food.
They were saying, uh, we don't have relationship with food.
We have, we relationship with people.
Uh, food is just a thing that you eat and sleep by suppose is similar.
Um, but I'll say it anyway, uh, my experience with sleep, my sleeping over the course of my life has been something of a challenge for me.
Um, I tend to sleep pretty well.
Once I'm asleep, my problem tends to be getting to sleep to begin with.
That has always been a challenge for me in my entire life.
I remember as a child, I, I tended to always be, and I still often am once I'm asleep, I'm pretty good.
It's that getting to sleep, which is a real challenge for me.
Um, I don't know exactly why that is.
Um, I never have.
It seems to me in my very informal discussions with people over the course of my life,
people tend to fall into one of a couple of different camps.
Um, it tends to be the case that people either are able to just sleep on demand whenever they want.
Uh, I've always envied these people because I'm in the other camp where, uh, you need to be very tired and ready to sleep.
Your body essentially tell, I always felt like my body told me when to sleep as opposed to me telling my body when to sleep.
And I, I've seen the tricks and tried the tricks where it's, oh, you go to bed at the same time every day.
You make up at the same time every day.
They just don't tend to work for me.
They, they, I will lay in bed if I am not tired for sometimes hours, unable to fall asleep.
Now, sometimes that's because my head is spinning on some topic of the day or whatever, and I just got too much on my mind.
But other times I'm, I, I will just lay there and just not be tired enough to drift off.
Um, the other thing that I've seen that is, or the other things that I've experienced that is counter to a lot of the things that I've seen, um, is that, uh, it's often recommended, uh, for mental acuity and sharpness to take a small nap.
It's a short one, uh, 10 to 30 minutes at the most.
Um, I've always enjoyed taking a nap.
That sounds great.
The problem is if I take even sometimes a two minute nap, I find that even if I drift off, uh, maybe if I'm sitting, you know, with the kids watching a show and it's a little dull or whatever.
And I drift for a minute or two that might keep me awake as long as an extra hour or two at the end of the night, because I, I just, I wake up and then I'm very alert and I tend to catch a second wind as the night gets a little bit later.
And then I'm just awake, uh, and I really can't get to sleep in those cases.
So I, I tend to avoid naps even though I love them, uh, except in cases, very rare cases, um, cases where I'm so exhausted, I can't not nap or where it doesn't really matter if I'm going to bed super late.
The other thing I've noticed over the course of my life is that, um, and I've heard, I heard early on some research that indicates this and I can't remember all the sources and I can't remember all the ins and outs.
But as I recall, the experiment went something like this, they took a somebody and they locked them in a cave where there was no indication of what time of day it was.
And they studied their sleeping patterns.
And what they found was that over the course of time, they drifted, right?
That the human body, at least as far, as far as this study was concerned, the human body seemed to drift, um, where it was not on a 24 hour cycle.
It was more like a 24 and a half hour cycle, um, which means that, you know, maybe either you get to sleep a little bit later, maybe you, let's just take simple math, right?
If you would assume that you sleep eight hours and you're awake 16, well, actually you might sleep eight hours and your body might want to be awake 16 and a half.
And what that means is that your bedtime would just slowly drift by half an hour each day.
And I've definitely found this in my own experience where, um, if I'm, you know, used to waking up and just to be clear, I'm a normal functioning adult, right?
So I get up generally in the morning, uh, I go to work, I work my day, I go to bed, you know, at a reason, uh, what I'd consider a reasonable hour and I do it all again next day.
I try to shoot for somewhere between, uh, six and eight, or if I'm very lucky, nine hours of sleep, um, on any given day, do my best to hit that.
Usually, usually sit weighing in around seven often, right?
But I definitely find that if I then go on vacation where it doesn't matter when I'm getting up or if I'm just off from work for a long time or whatever, for a couple of weeks, I just drift slowly every day, half hour, 45 minutes, maybe only 15 minutes, but I just drift and drift and drift and left to my own devices.
I just sort of become nocturnal. Like I go from going to bed normally around 11 or 12, then it's 12 or one, one or two, two or three. And before I know it, I'm until five o'clock in the morning on a regular basis and sleeping until noon. Um, it's just what my body seems to want to do.
And so things like a regular schedule work, alarm clocks, kids, those kinds of things actually help keep me on sort of a regular schedule because just to be clear, the irony to all of this is that in the mornings,
is my most productive time. Um, if I'm able to get myself out of bed, uh, on say a day where I'm not doing, I don't have like work or something particular to do. And I have that time to myself, those hours between when I wake up and say 11 or 12 are the best, most productive hours of my day.
And so I like to be on a schedule where it's easy for me to get up in those morning hours or at least easier. Um, but then if you put me on vacation, I just sort of drift in the other direction.
Um, it's always been an interesting thing for me. Um, and so I do a number of things. Uh, and so I don't know if any of this sounds, sounds familiar to anybody.
Um, here's some of the things that have helped me over the course of my life with sleep. The biggest one, which I don't really engage in very often these days is just for, because of my, my life and status and whatever.
Um, when I was younger, uh, you know, college years, um, I worked a lot of manual labor jobs, um, a certain amount of stone masonry and laboring. And I was a diesel mechanic for a while. And I worked some house renovations and things like that.
Um, when I did that, usually in the summers between semesters, um, my body was tired and I slept well and I slept early and I got up early and I, that was a good routine.
So the biggest thing is if you are in a position to do extra physical activity and make yourself super tired, that it would work for me.
I do limit screen time or at least try before bed. Um, I do find certain things that, and I, I do these sometimes and it's not a good idea. I'm not much of a doom scroller. I don't really do social media very much.
Um, so I'm not a doom scroller so much as like, I'll sometimes sit down right before bed and I'll watch like a couple of YouTube videos.
And even that I find can be, can have an impact on how quick I get to sleep. So staying away from screens is a good idea.
Um, I'm not sure to what extent watching TV does or doesn't, doesn't impact things. I'm not a huge TV watcher, but at the end of the night, I do like to sit down with my wife while show.
Uh, it's kind of a nice way to wrap the day up. Sometimes I need a little bit of time between finishing that show and, um, uh, you know, trying to get to get it to bed.
Um, and then finally, yeah, I mean, um, you know, dark room, blackout curtains, uh, a little bit of white noise in the background.
Although I do phase between, I go through phases where like for a couple of years, a white noise will really help me.
Then I'll find it distracting for a while and I'll go with dead silence and I'll go back.
Um, so I kind of flip around on that sometimes.
Uh, and recently I have found, uh, at least since I'm not sure I was helping at this point, but in the beginning it did help for a while was, uh, there's an app calm that kind of reads stories.
I kind of like listening to things like Sherlock Holmes or whatever. I feel like a two-year-old listening to, you know, stories going to bed.
But when I was having a really hard time sleeping for a little while, um, several months ago, that was helping just kind of helped me drift off a little bit.
So, um, I don't know anything.
Uh, if any of that sounds familiar, maybe there's some tricks you can try again.
Um, get some blackout curtains, try to make yourself as tired as possible.
Um, uh, you know, it does help.
I find it more helpful to aim to get up at a stable time each day.
I find that more important than making sure I go to bed at a stable time each day.
I don't always find I can go to bed at a stable time, even when I'm waking up at the same time every day.
So trying to wake up and wake up a reasonable hour is a good idea.
You just have more awake hours.
Skip the naps.
Um, as much as they're great, they do tend to impact me at least.
Stay away from screens.
Um, I don't know.
And, and, and I do find that if I have weeks where, um, I'm sleeping very well, those weeks tend to be more productive.
I feel better.
My exercise is better.
Um, everything is better.
My decision-making feels better.
I'm clear of mind as opposed to those weeks when I'm not.
Um, I'll probably do some future stuff on this too, uh, because there's a couple other items that I didn't really get to on the topic of sleep.
Um, but, um, I suppose, uh, at least covers my experience throughout my life and maybe gives a couple tips, um, to anyone who's, you know, gone through similar things.
Um, and, and, and, and, and, and and I, and, and, and, and, and, and so.
Um, and, and, and, but, and, and, and, and, and so on like, I throw in.