I recently read Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker. This book provided an in-depth and easy to understand explanation of everything we currently know about sleep including why we need it, why some can’t get it, and how we can improve it. 

Walker explains that sleep is beneficial for almost every aspect of our lives including how much we remember, how quickly we think, how well we solve problems, how our body recovers from damage, how much anxiety we experience, how good our mood is and much more. 

He also tells the negative consequences we suffer from missing too much sleep including increased risk of heart failure, diminished mental performance, and an increase in all cause mortality. There is even a measurable spike in the number of heart failure cases here in the US on the day after daylight savings begins due to the loss of an hour of sleep.

In addition to explaining why we need sleep, Walker also tells us how we can improve our sleep to gain the most we can from this necessary part of life. Here’s four ways that you can get better sleep for a better life:

• Determine your sleep chronotype

• Make your bed the place to sleep

• Create the right environment to get tired

• Consume alcohol and caffeine as long before sleep as possible

I will explain each of these in detail in the following paragraphs. With these tips, Walker has given us a guide to improving not only our sleep, but to getting healthier, smarter, and happier.

Determine Your Sleep Chronotype

We’re all familiar with someone being an early riser or a night owl. The idea being that someone either feels at their best sleeping and rising early in the day or staying up all night and sleeping into the morning.

It turns out that there are actual genetic causes for this phenomenon. Research has correlated the shifts in people’s natural sleeping hours to specific DNA markers so some people do inherently want to sleep earlier than others outside of behavioral habits.

This is important to your sleep health not only because aligning with your chronotype will help you fall and stay asleep but because of the different stages of sleep: REM and NREM.

REM or rapid eye movement sleep is a lighter stage of sleep that we experience later in our sleep cycles. It is important for increasing creativity as well as improving mood and mental health. Conversely, NREM or Non-REM sleep is deep sleep that we have in the earlier hours of sleep. While REM sleep helps our mental facilities, NREM sleep is a restorative sleep that is important for our bodies to rest and recover as well as cementing motor memory. 

If we align well with our sleep chronotype then we experience appropriate levels of NREM early in the evening followed by REM later towards the morning. The more we drift away from our natural rhythms, however, the more this balance becomes skewed. If we sleep earlier than optimal, then we will be lacking in REM sleep. If we sleep later, then we will have a shortage of NREM sleep.

It is important to find our natural sleeping rhythm so that we can feel our best every day. There exist tests known as MEQ quizzes that help to determine which sleeping hours are best for you. Here is one that you can try out to start.

Make Your Bed The Place To Sleep

Do you ever sit in bed and look at your phone at the end of the day? Or maybe you like to sit in your bed to relax and watch tv in the afternoon. It is easy to find ourselves wanting to do things in our bedroom besides sleeping but there is evidence that this may make it more difficult for some people to fall asleep at night. 

Our brain builds associations with the objects around us, particularly in our homes. We go through daily patterns that are embedded into our subconscious. This makes our brain expect certain things to happen depending on our environment. Our bedrooms are no exception. 

The more things you do in your bed besides sleep, the more possible it is that your brain will become accustomed to these other activities. If you are used to watching TV in your bed then when you go to sleep your mind may start to anticipate the heightened brain activity needed to watch something and you will not feel sleepy. 

This can extend to other objects in your bedroom as well. If you have a writing desk that you use to do work, some dumbbells in the corner, and your video game consoles set up by the tv, then some part of your brain will be making the associations with these objects and it may be more difficult to fall asleep. By making your bedroom a relaxing space that you only use to sleep, your body will learn that when you are in this space it is time to be sleepy.

Along these lines, Walker’s book also says that we can build bad associations with our bed when we lie awake at night unable to sleep. If you cannot fall asleep, by staying in bed you are teaching your body that something you do is stay awake in bed. This can become a habit and you will start to be able to sleep less and less.

It is better when you cannot sleep to get out of bed and do a low level activity like reading a book in dim light until you are sleepy. When you feel tired again, you can return to bed. It may seem counterintuitive to get out of bed and possibly get less sleep that night, but it is a preventative measure to stop many future nights of poor sleep.

Create The Right Circumstances To Get Tired

In addition to making our bedroom a relaxing place, there are other steps that you can take to let your body know when it's time to go to bed. There are environmental cues that you can give your body to regulate your circadian rhythm and encourage you to get sleepy when the time comes to rest. Two of these are light and temperature.

It is commonly known that light helps to manage our circadian rhythm. This makes sense as humans evolved to be outside and prior to the advent of artificial light, we were at the mercy of the light from the sun. Because of this, a decrease in light exposure throughout the day can promote tiredness. 

In modern times, we are constantly exposed to light until the moment we go to bed. There are steps we can take to curb this effect however. We can taper off our use of electronic screens as it gets late in the evening. If you have smart lights in your home, you can schedule them to dim as the night goes on and turn off most of them in the hours before you sleep. This will simulate the effect of the sun setting and encourage your sleep pressure to increase so you feel tired when you go to bed.

In addition to light level, temperature can play a role in how easy it is for you to fall asleep in the evening. As our body releases melatonin in the evening, our body temperature starts to drop a few degrees. Evidence suggests that this is to conserve energy and direct it to other parts of the body for restoration during sleep. 

Knowing this, we can adjust the temperature in our home to help encourage us to sleep more easily. If you keep your bedroom hot at night, it may prevent your body temperature from dropping easily and keep you awake. Try lowering the temperature of your bedroom and see if it helps you sleep better at night.

Consume Alcohol And Caffeine As Long Before Sleep As Possible

The last tip I have to improve sleep is to limit the times you consume caffeine and alcohol. 

It is well known that caffeine prevents sleepiness. This is one of the main reasons that coffee is a common beverage first thing in the morning. Caffeine helps block our adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a chemical that builds up in our body throughout the day and helps to promote tiredness. Caffeine stops our body from recognizing this chemical which is what makes us feel more alert when we have a cup of coffee.

What you may not know is how long caffeine stays in your system. Caffeine has a half life of about 6 hours. This means that the amount in your body after you consume it is halved every six hours. So if you have two cups of coffee at 10 in the morning and you go to bed at 10 at night you will still have the equivalent of half a cup of coffee in your body when you are trying to sleep. This can make it very difficult to fall asleep for some people.

Some people however, have no issue with going to sleep even if they drink coffee into the evening. It may seem that their sleep is unaffected by caffeine but preventing sleepiness is not the only issue that the chemical can cause. Caffeine has been observed to block slow wave sleep which is the deepest stage of NREM sleep. This stage is associated with memory consolidation and body repair of muscle and tissue. So even if you are able to sleep with caffeine in your system, it is not a good idea.

Similarly, alcohol can cause issues with sleep. It is not typically socially acceptable in most cases to consume alcohol in the early hours of the day but evidence shows that this may be the best way to minimize the impact on our sleep. 

Alcohol is in the sedative class of drugs. This can appear to help you fall asleep easier than normal but this sleep is anything but normal. Brain waves observed in patients who have consumed alcohol prior to sleep shows that brain activity is severely decreased. This is very different from normal brain waves observed during sleep. Even during deep phases of NREM sleep, the brain is highly active. This is how we are able to reinforce our memories and the things we learn during the day. By suppressing our brain activity, alcohol removes many of the positive benefits we gain from sleep. It is obviously impossible to avoid drinking in the evening in most cases but it is wise to limit it as often as possible or do it as early as you can to get the rest you need.

I hope these tips are useful to help you get better sleep and feel well rested every day. One thing that Walker states is that despite the increased risks from less sleep, having a bad night or two of sleep is not something to be worried about. There will always be occurrences in our lives that prevent us from having optimal sleep and the most important thing is to live your life the way that makes you feel most fulfilled. 

It is merely useful to keep in mind the positive benefits from a proper night's rest and to fit these practices into your life the best way you see fit. 

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