You Should Go To Bed Early

Listen to your mother.

I have a reputation among my friends and family for being a sleepy boy. I’m the guy that leaves parties early, and says no to the club. I honk-shoo when I nap. I even wear one of those old timey hats that droop to the side of my head, and yell “who goes there?!” when I walk down the hallways by candlelight. It’s a simple life.

I wasn’t always this way, in fact I used to get barely any sleep. I’ve not made it a secret that I’m sober, and before I made that choice I didn’t really rest much. I’d go to bed late, and not so much sleep but pass out. Unsurprisingly, it impacted the rest of my life quite considerably.

Being sober is good for you for many reasons, but the transformation it had on my sleep has been nothing short of a miracle. Save for maybe resistance training, it’s the closest thing we have to a silver bullet for improving our lives - and yet, it’s woefully neglected. Three quarters of British people get less than 8 hours of sleep a night, with roughly 40% getting less than six. It’s only after you look into the research that you realise how disastrous this. The harms of sleep deprivation go way deeper than feeling a bit grumpy in the morning, or having heavy eyelids during a Zoom call.

Brain Maintenance

We don’t understand an enormous amount about sleep. On the face of it, it’s kind of weird that after 15 hours we feel the urge to just shut the whole thing down. However, it’s clear that sleep plays some role in maintaining our brains. We know, for example, that during sleep we consolidate and organize our memories. Discarding irrelevant information, and moving important events to long term storage.

So, it’s not an enormous surprise that disrupting our sleep can be deleterious to our mental well being. When we’re not getting enough sleep, our brain is literally unable to function properly. Staying awake for too long is like not regularly changing the oil in your car (Not that I change the oil in my car. I just give it to my mum each year when she says it’s time for a service. Sadly, I can’t do that for my brain though).

People with insomnia are far more likely to be depressed and anxious. It can also worsen symptoms of OCD and Schizophrenia. Now, this is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Are insomniacs more likely to be mentally unwell or are mentally unwell people just more likely to be insomniacs - however, the general consensus is that it goes both ways. I certainly notice than when I’m tired, my OCD goes into hyperdrive, and I find myself thinking I’m evil because I didn’t hold the door open for someone 3 weeks ago (sorry huge tank top man from the gym! I thought you were too far for it to be appropriate, but I misjudged! I misjudged the distance! God have mercy on my soul).

So, if your mental health is in the shitter, it really won’t hurt you to start setting a stricter bed time. It’s not like it’s going to solve all your problems, but you want to give your brain the best chance it can have to look after itself.

Being Your Best you

Whatever work you find yourself doing, it’s unlikely it won’t be improved by taking your sleep seriously. Being tired prevents us from regulating our emotions properly, and makes us less resilient. I see this with my niece all the time. She starts whining, and all the adults say “Hmm, I think someone needs a nap”. Turns out, we all still need that! You may think you’re yelling at the intern because they didn’t finish that deck you asked for, but really it was you that didn’t finish your REM. Shame on you.

It takes me back to doing my dissertation at university. I’d pulled an all nighter, and sat in the computer lab with a fresh coffee sat beside me, regretting that I couldn’t just ingest it with an IV drip. My work wasn’t going well, and I hit the wall. “Will I finish on time? Will I even pass? What will my parents think? Oh god, I’m going to have to join the traveling circus”. My head dropped, and the tears started streaming down my face. I felt hopeless. I packed it in for the day, and slunk back home, defeated. After I crashed out for 8 hours, I woke up and looked at my laptop again. Suddenly, that wall was gone and I knew exactly what to do next. Funny that.

You’ve probably experienced something like this before. Some cognitive task seems impossible, only for the way to become clear after a night’s rest. There’s a reason people say you should “sleep on it” when making big decisions. In this study, people who were sleep deprived were far less successful at a problem solving video game. Well rested people also make better decisions. When we’re sleep deprived we’re more likely to take reckless risks, and feel numb to negative consequences.

Being effective in the world is the sort of thing that compounds over time. There’s really no telling how much sleep deprivation can derail your life over the course of a decade or more. Sure, if you have one bad night’s sleep and make some dumb choice on an off day - it’s probably not going to make a big difference in the wide scheme of things. However, if you’re like that every day? What gains are we leaving on the table by sacrificing resilience and emotional regulation over the long term? How many gym days have been skipped, or job interviews failed? How many relationships have ended due to impulsivity? How many people have died in avoidable accidents? In the long run, lack of sleep probably has enormous ripple effects on everything else we hold dear.

Sleeping Your Way to Gains

If you’re into lifting, you’re probably aware that some lifts just like to fuck you over some days. Bench, in particular, has a way of playing with my feelings. One week you’re crushing PR’s, the next you’re being crushed by the bar (yes, that rhyme was intentional). This can be caused by many things, but if you’re been in the lifting game long enough, you know it’s time to assess how you’re rest is going.

When we sleep, we release human growth hormone. That’s the stuff that gym bros inject in their butt cheeks (among other things). We sometimes imagine we’re building muscle in the gym, but that’s not quite right. Really, you’re just stressing your muscles when you lift. You’re sending a stimulus that tells your brain “Hey, we using these lateral delts a lot, so send reinforcements.”. It’s only when you’re asleep that your body starts to build itself up. Rest is where the gains really are.

Poor sleep is also associated with diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Some people would say that those are actually more important that looking jacked. Those people are stupid nerds. However, it is still good to have a healthy ticker (you need one to go gym and look jacked, after all).

What should we do then?

This is all well and good, but what can we do to improve our sleep, Connor? Teach us, oh wise one on the hill - he who is the king of the snooze, and god of all dozing. Show us the way!

Well, there are a few things one can do, but obviously they’re not going to be applicable to everyone. My brother and his partner just had a kid, and I can tell you right now there’s no hope in hell they’re going to get an uninterrupted 8 hours any time soon. Babies. They’re the price we pay for the sins of the flesh.

So, I’m going to include everything I can think of in the list, but of course it’s not like if you don’t implement them all you’re totally fucked. You just have to take and apply what works best for you and your situation.

1. Sleep longer. This is the obvious one, but worth including anyway. If you’re only getting in 5 hours, you’re just not sleeping long enough.

2. Set a regular bed time. The regularity with which we set our bed time and awake time is also important. By routinely setting the same bed time, you train your circadian rhythm to expect sleep when you’re going to bed. This means you spend less time tossing and turning, and it also makes it easier to wake up on time. I set an alarm every day, but often wake up on time naturally.

3. No screens before bed. This is common advice because of fears of blue light. The idea is that because we see blue light during the day, your brain is tricked into thinking it’s earlier than it actually is. This might be true, but I also think it’s a good idea to abandon screens because they simply engage you too much. They’re novelty machines. It’s quite hard to transition from looking at something literally designed to be the most interesting thing over to sleep effectively. So, reading a book, meditating, etc. is usually a pretty good idea.

4. Exercise. Exercising during the day also improves sleep. This is why when you rot in bed depressed all day it’s hard to doze off. It’s like there’s nothing to recover from, and it throws the whole system out of whack.

5. Don’t eat late. When you eat before bed, your stomach is still putting a shift in, so your body doesn’t really want to power down just yet. It can also cause nighttime heart burn and gastrointestinal discomfort, which will probably wake you up.

6. Don’t drink coffee too late. The half life of caffeine is about 4-6 hours. So, if you drink a coffee at 4, and go to bed at 10, there might be half of the caffeine still floating around your system. I drink one in the morning, one at 11, then switch to decaf.

7. Use a sleep mask. I got a cheap reusable sleep mask online and it’s very handy. Something about being in total darkness that just knocks you out. Ear plugs have a similar effect (although I find them a bit too intrusive)

8. Keep your room cool. Your body cools down when you sleep, so by having a cooler room you’re working with it instead of against it. You can even get fancy mattresses that cool you when you sleep, and warm up in the morning. I would probably get one of those if I was the monopoly man.

Pretty common sense stuff, but when it’s implemented you just find your life takes on a new colour. Small things don’t upset you, and you feel on the ball. Most importantly, you just feel happier. Seems like the sort of thing that’s worth putting some effort to, even though it does force me to turn my computer off a little early.