Need for Speed Sleep

I know, I know, a little silly of me to call a post like this. But I’ve did it on purpose as I wonder what kind of thoughts and images would your mind produce when reading the title. Might it be a speed in terms of productivity and a suggestion of sleep as the more important out of those two? Or, for some of us, a trip down the memory lane to times when we played the game called Need for Speed, but then, why the connection to sleep. 

How important is the sleep to you? I often talk about how I need at least 8 hours of sleep to get recharged and be of any use the next day and yet, when I look on the results of my sleep monitoring device, I’ve got barely 6 and half hours of sleep in average in April. More striking is the amount of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, in average only 51 minutes, and sleep score of 70 from 100. You see, I am a prime example of a person who knows a bit how our brains work, has a good enough understanding of what we need to perform at our best and still manages to get it spectacularly wrong. Couple of days ago I’ve read a post on LinkedIn from Chris Knight where he formulated two options, loosely said you either punish yourself or get curious and ask questions. 

What stands between you and the good enough sleep? I know not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to freely change our habits, especially those working as shift workers. What scares me a bit is, it takes only 1 night in a week over a couple of weeks where you deviate from your regular sleep pattern, going to sleep few hours later than usual, to disrupt our circadian system in a way that is very close to shift work limiting our chances to get a truly restorative sleep. If I take myself as an example, I do have a long term goal of getting asleep between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. and waking up at 5:30 to 6 a.m. without an alarm. Looking at my behaviour over couple of weeks, I can see a pattern, where any kind of an evening activity, be it a dance class or a theatre play, challenges an ability to hold myself accountable to that goal. Even though I get home in time, often my first action is to take a bath and start playing chess, watching videos or reading a book. When I eventually find my way to bed, phone on a table next to it shows values north of 11 p.m.. I tend to wake up consistently a little bit ahead of my alarm even in times when I go to sleep later then I should. You might say, oh great, that means you don’t really need that much of sleep and your body wants to start moving. Eeeeh, well, not really, I can’t get myself from the bed and I start the day asking why the hell I can’t do the things properly. 

Out of curiosity, how many questionable behaviours and habits you see in the short text above? To list but a few:

• Bright blue light exposure close to the sleep (it is recommended to avoid it 1-2 hours before bed time, and even avoid bright light between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., you can find more in this article )

• Punishing myself in the morning and starting the day on a back foot.

• Setting a goal for certain amount of hours in bed instead of working on sleep effectivity

• Coming home in late hours and taking a bath that takes at least half an hour and in case of chess, might also induce negative thoughts when I loose.

Dig deeper, most likely those are just symptoms, what is the driving force behind them? There we go, step, bend your knees, straighten your hands over the head and jump in a nice arc diving right into the slightly scary place of our mind. It took me some deliberation to find mine. Often, there might very well be many forces pulling you in various directions and in that case, you might want to pick one and start untangling. Pulling one of the threads, an old companion of mine jumps right in-front of me, the Monkey. She loves me feeding her with all the videos, games, sweet food, those little pleasures for which she trades small amounts of dopamine. The question is, how strong is she/he/it in your own mind? Powerful enough to make you doubt the effort you need to put into pursuing the goals that might and might not get fulfilled and might and might not give you the envisioned reward?  

What can I change to remove the blocker? Now that you have done your research and have a better understanding of what stands in a way, it is a time embark on a journey to fix it. My Monkey is a really strong one, I am quite adept in feeding her and I’ve done so for a very long time. I am not suggesting to eliminate play and little pleasures from our lives, not at all, rather we should build a cosy space for the Monkey to live in, effectively making sure boundaries exist. In my case, it is creation of an environment in which I can train my mind to deal with the Monkey overtime. Environment making it much harder to take a bath, play chess or watch videos after certain hour, limiting the options the Monkey has and increasing our chances to keep up with the goal.  

What in practice can you do now? To illustrate the extent to which those like me have to go, I’ve listed bellow my actions and considerations:

• Luckily there is a lot we can do with our phones, for example iPhone has a  Screen Time feature where you can schedule a time in which only certain apps will be available to use. For me, I’ve set it to disable all but essentials from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Only allowed apps are Waking Up app and Audible (with commitment to listen only to books that entertain me, not any educational stuff). This effectively blocks all the Social Media, YouTube, Streaming platforms and games.

• I have also moved the phone charger from my bed side table to a location further from my bed, making it harder for me to reach out for it when lying down.

• To make it harder to get a bath instead of a shower, I’ve hidden the bath plug :)

• Additionally, based on the recommendations of both Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Matthew Walker, I’ve started doing NSDR practices to get my brain and body into a state of deep relaxation.

• In the morning, I try to get sun light into my eyes as soon as I can, not behind a window, outside. There is a comprehensive article on that by Dr. Huberman

When you implement your own practices, please also monitor their impact on your sleep. Either with fancy wearable devices, or just with a pen and paper noting every morning how refreshed you feel on a scale from 1 to 7. No need to get obsessive about the duration of your sleep, at the end, the more important is how do you feel.