Way back in high school, I was a great sleeper.
No matter what time I went to bed, I would fall asleep with relative ease and sleep soundly through the night.
In college, despite being in great physical shape, I noticed that this wonderful gift was slowly slipping away from me. And by the time I reached my late 20s, my erratic sleep was a serious problem.
I’ve recently made some changes that have been an enormous help, but I want to wait to write about them until I see how long-lasting the effect ends up being.
Why Sleep Got Harder
Sleep, as you probably know, is not something to take lightly. It plays a vital role in core systems throughout your body—everything from hormone regulation to immune health, heart health, and memory function is deeply tied back to the quality and duration of your sleep.It wasn’t until the past few years when periods of bad sleep resulted in my walking around for days at a time in a thick brain fog that I began to take it more seriously in my own life.
For the fortunate, sleep is something their bodies can manage perfectly well on their own under the right conditions. It’s only in this crazy modern world, when we’ve drastically altered our environments, that problems start arising for most.
That means that better sleep is likely far simpler than you realize. It’s just about removing the obstacles that you’ve put in the way of your body’s doing what it already knows how to do.
Not Winding Down at the End of the Day
I’m an easily excitable person, and so it’s not hard for me to get amped up by some project or idea I’m working on. This is a gift during the daytime but a curse if it happens right before bed.You know how a child feels the night before Christmas, and they can’t fall asleep? This is kind of the way I get when I’m really excited to keep working on something the next day. Although it’s nearly impossible to rein in these emotions once they get going, I’ve found that I can refuse to open that box in my mind when it’s past a certain hour.
Bringing the Phone to Bed
I feel silly even writing this one. By now, it’s probably obvious to anyone with an internet connection that taking your phone into bed with you is a recipe for bad sleep. Not only does the blue light from your device mess with your circadian rhythm, but also, mindlessly scrolling on your phone is like pulling a slot machine—it’s so hard to stop when you’re enjoying those easy hits of dopamine.Not Getting Enough Sunlight
Like many of you, my job requires me to be at a computer all day. And let’s face it, taking your laptop outside to work, even for us work-from-homers, isn’t ideal except for maybe a handful of days each year.If you work the standard 9 to 5 and sleep eight hours a night, that means you aren’t getting much sunlight unless you are very intentional about the other hours of your day. This winter, for example, I had multiple stretches during which I wasn’t outside in the direct sun for days at a time. I would exercise indoors, eat indoors, and walk to my car and drive to another indoor location, but I never stopped and bask in those glorious rays.
Being Stressed and Preoccupied
If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that I rarely deal with stress. By most standards, my life is relatively free of external sources of stress, and I didn’t “feel” stressed, and so I figured by simple math that I wasn’t stressed.I don’t remember the exact moment, but I do remember a few times when I had been stuck inside my head thinking about some problem I was trying to solve and noticed that my body was displaying all the symptoms of being stressed: shallow breathing, elevated heart rate, insomnia, and irritability.
A Lack of Physical and Mental Effort That Day
On days when I really exert myself physically, or when I’m really focused at work for a vast majority of the day, I know I sleep better. A 2017 meta-analysis of the research seems to back up my experience—sedentary behavior is really bad for sleep.One hard truth I’ve had to address in my life is that I can sometimes fall into patterns of laziness. Instead of rising to occasions and approaching life proactively, I’ll find myself doing the minimum to get by without too much hassle. I think this is a pattern I learned back in school because good grades came so easily to me, but it’s one I’m actively working to improve about myself.
Like most of the items on this list, not only does the behavior lead to bad sleep, but also, bad sleep seems to reinforce these unhelpful habits in my life.
Prioritizing good sleep really is one of the best investments you can make in your entire life. I hope you’ll join me in fighting against these common enemies of good sleep and turning over a new leaf today.
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