Hacking your success through sleep
Hello gurus!
With midterms multiplying by the minute, I hope you took some time to catch up on your sleep.
If not, I hope this month’s issue will make you reconsider the importance of sleep as a foundation for building your healthy habits.
Last month, we set our intentions for ourselves and our well-being. This month we are following through on that commitment by enacting a routine sleep schedule.
We are starting with sleep because it will be the base on which you can implement further healthy habits along your health journey. As such, in setting up a routine sleep schedule you establish consistency throughout your daily start times and end times, which enables you to feel centered in your body and purpose.
To further provide insight on the importance of sleep and this habit, I spoke with Dr. Jason Murdoch who has worked as a general practitioner since 2003. In discussing the importance of sleep with him, he noted the rarity of basic conversations between patients and medical professionals concerning general questions about sleep.
“Nobody comes to me and wants to know how the circadian rhythm is related to sleep, or what the stages of sleep are… They come here and say, ‘I can’t sleep,’ or ‘I wake up early and I can’t fall back to sleep’… Medical approach is not even to talk about sleep really, it’s just about the diagnosis of insomnia or other sleep conditions,” said Murdoch.
When diagnosing sleep conditions he advocates against taking medications for sleep, saying that “it is important at times, but it’s not very effective in the long term” since many sleeping medications are addictive and most people are highly susceptible to becoming dependent on them.
Thus, we are going to tackle sleep the natural way–through consistency and trial and error.
The most frequent issues people have surrounding sleep, according to Murdoch, involve getting to sleep, staying asleep, and having unrefreshing sleep. Murdoch noted that some potential issues relating to unsatisfactory sleep that the medical approach likes to rule out when diagnosing sleep conditions are anxiety, stress, and low mood. Consequently, through a medical lens, all of these issues are related. Thereby, in adjusting our sleep schedules we can subsequently hack our anxiety, stress, and low mood – all of which, I’d like to point out, are perfectly natural when it comes to the human experience.
This is why I love holistic wellness, since everything is connected and all the baby steps we take to better ourselves contribute to our overall growth and health as a person.
Okay, so let’s break sleep down starting off with the first question – why is sleep important?
“Sleep is a determinant of your health… There is plenty of epidemiological research that supports the claim that sleep affects physical health,” said xMurdoch. So, both physical and mental health are equally important in the embodiment of wellness.
How much sleep should we be getting? According to Murdoch, most people need between seven to nine hours of sleep every night, but the most important indicator that you have slept enough is as simple as waking up feeling refreshed. He even encouraged the use of “n=1 trials” for sleep as a way of listening to your body to cultivate the most ideal sleep schedule that’s unique to you.
An n=1 trial, as Murdoch put it, is self-experimentation–a trial of one. It’s a way of listening to your body and seeing how it responds to different amounts of sleep. Basically, it is testing things out for yourself.
Additionally, Murdoch encouraged the establishment of a regular sleep routine, explaining that going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, even if it feels like you didn’t sleep enough during the night, is one way to consolidate a routine. Another way to accomplish this is by doing the same thing every night to prepare for sleep, like reading, taking a warm bath, or partaking in any activity you find relaxing.
“It’s normal to have some stress that degrades your quality of sleep. It’s normal to decide to be up all night, and then the next night, when you want to go to bed earlier, you can’t. And then it’s just as natural sometimes to wake up early,” said Murdoch.
In terms of the importance of sleep, he compared the brain to a busy factory that focuses on productivity at the expense of housekeeping. Sleep, Murdoch said “is needed to clean up after a hard day’s work. A messy work environment isn’t ideal for productivity.”
Sleep is important to everyday life because the brain requires sleep both to consolidate memory and to clean itself. Murdoch explained that “autophagy is the cellular process the brain cells take part in to clean up debris,” through which “the glymphatic system transports the waste from the brain to the body.” As such, you essentially sleep the brain clean.
In regards to sleep in relation to productivity and daily effectiveness, Murdoch observed that “nobody functions at their best when sleep deprived–mentally or physically.”
If you are having trouble falling asleep, Murdoch suggested regular exercise. He also encouraged journaling and setting aside time to worry about things before you fall asleep rather than letting things bubble up during your sleep. He prescribed spending 30 minutes after dinner writing down what’s worrying you and what you can do about it.
He also noted that most people shouldn’t nap, because the time you spend napping in the day usually translates to the time you spend awake in the middle of the night.
Murdoch listed the common sleep disruptors as “caffeine, tobacco, cannabis, alcohol, noisy roommates, and late-night poutine.
With this in mind, he stated that the “highest yield changes in sleep, health, and almost everything in modern life are accomplished by subtraction – not addition.” Thus, limiting disruptors limits the difficulties associated with sleep.
If you feel that you need some sort of natural remedy to help you fall asleep, Murdoch suggested that magnesium can play a large role in relaxing the body before bed. Magnesium helps your body make melatonin which indicates to your body that it’s bedtime. He also noted that many people can be deficient in magnesium since it is supposed to be in water; however, municipally treated water is low in magnesium as a byproduct of the essential treatment process. So, that’s something to consider.
Lastly, Murdoch encouraged the use of a sleep diary to track your sleep schedule and stick to a routine.
“People don’t need to go down the rabbit hole and understand everything about sleep, that’s for a PhD to do, they just need to solve their own sleep issues,” said Murdoch.
And when it comes to the execution of habits, there’s an engineering saying that is useful to remember. “What gets measured, gets done,” or in other words, focus is maintained through consistent measurement and reporting.
As such, when it comes to sleep, we require routine and regularity. So, choose how you want your nights to look because they will subsequently impact how your days look.
Then, get out your planner and start tracking!
See you next time 🙂
Lots of Love
– Jorja