A couple of weeks ago, I laid out several advanced and admittedly expensive “hacks” to use a bit of better living through science to upgrade your naps, meditation, and sleep. Yet this may have seemed like paradoxical advice for any of you who also saw my recently published, stripped-down, minimalist approach to eschewing excessive reliance upon science and self-quantification and instead learning how to intuitively listen to one’s body.
So I thought I’d use today’s Sabbath Ramblings to revisit the concept of optimizing your sleep and rest, and to specifically highlight that fact that I do not think you necessarily need to stick laser lights up your nose, swallow a cattle trough’s worth of supplement capsules, and sleep on a special mat you had to mortgage your house to afford in order to wake up refreshed the next morning.
As a matter of fact, the foundational principles of getting a good night’s sleep—no matter your “biohacking budget”—are largely based upon five key spiritual and psychological principles that anyone can implement. Basic concepts of sleep hygiene set aside (specifically the cold, silence, and light concepts I discuss in detail here), those five principles to get better sleep naturally are as follows:
1) Relax
You must activate your parasympathetic, rest-and-digest nervous system prior to rest. Even seemingly “restful” activities, such as ensuring you have a full stomach and/or drinking a few relaxing glasses of wine, will temporarily make you sleepy; but once those wear off (typically around 1 or 2 am), your body is flooded with a rebound rush of hypoglycemia and excitatory neurotransmitters. Even ancient writers of Scriptures knew this. Consider verses such as:
Ecclesiastes 5:12: “Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.”
1 Thessalonians 5:7: “For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night.”
So, relax your body. Supplements and biohacks aside (as will be the theme of this short article), you can try a series of simple yoga moves like this that you can perform by your bedside, accompanied by deep, nasal breathing. You can keep the lights dim, or even adopt the use of nighttime candles in your bedroom. You can finish any hard workouts 3 hours before bed (a concept I outline in detail here) or, as my friend Hylke Reitsma writes here, you can adopt a “10-3-2-1-0 sleep routine”:
- 10 – The number of hours before sleep in which you do not consume caffeine
- 3 – The number of hours before sleep in which you do not eat (or drink, but that is up for debate)
- 2 – The number of hours before sleep in which you do not work
- 1 – The number of hours before sleep in which you do not engage in screen time
- 0 – The number of times you hit the snooze button
