Secrets to Great Sleep

They'll knock the 'cranky-ass' right outta ya

Do you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up, feeling alert, feeling alive? Are you even functioning right now bro?! I can’t fix that. I’m not an expert. Do NOT lean into me about your shitty sleep. Sorry, I digress.

I can’t “fix” you, but I’ve been staggering around busting shit up trying to fix my own sleep for years and maybe, just possibly I’ve learned a thing or two that would, at least, help you.

Before you start, ya gotta…

1. Sitting all the time - get off your chair/couch/beanbag and move, meathead. Hunter gatherers walked ~17,000 steps a day to gather what they needed to survive. The LATEST conventional wisdom indicates everything over 4,000 per day could reduce your all cause death rate by 20-30%. Yes, as a matter of fact, using the restroom on the second floor of your house when you’re home office is on the first floor counts as steps.

2. Avoiding sun like a 1,000-year-old vampire - get 20 minutes outside before 10 a.m. your time, no exceptions rain, sleet, ice, snow, or shine. No fire extinguisher necessary.

3. Wearing sunglasses and/or sunscreen - don’t be stupid, I mean in the hours before 11 a.m. your time. Both of these ‘recommended aids’ block our natural Vitamin D controls, programming of which is included in our onboard computers from birth and helps with great sleep.

4. Waking up at different times every day - do you really need any explanation? Monotonous, relentless, 365-366 (for the leap year freaks) days a year, EVERY year of your life. Stay up as late as you want, but drag your sorry ass out of your sleeping hovel AT THE SAME TIME every morning.

5. Stimulants - coffee, tea, soft drinks, energy drinks, pills - ALL OF THEM - after 11 a.m. your time

6. Overnight work - shift workers get 1-4 hours less quality sleep, have worse overall health, and have higher death rates than their day shift counterparts. Find a day job if you want great-grandkids.

7. Looking at television, laptops, or tablets in your bedroom - don’t care what you think it does, the blue light and the sound and the flickering - all of it - garbage for sleep. Get rid of it.

8. Fucking around with your sleep hygiene - if this phrase is foreign to you, you have an amazing opportunity today. For $0.00 you can learn how to save your own life.

The above is the compilation of prehistoric and modern wisdom in an easy-to-memorize-list. Stop doing these things and your life changes. If you wanna shirk your duties as a reader, possibly missing a health tip that makes a difference, you can bail here. If you want the rest of the story, comprised of sleep hygiene and what works for me and possibly you, take just 6 more minutes and get the rest of the story.

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Sleep hygiene is where it’s at. It’s a radical, religious cult-like dedication to a routine you develop that works once and then you repeat it for the rest of the days of your life. You NEVER vary it. Once I established this, my sleep has consistently been wonderful since. My family knows I’m a sleep zealot and it’s non-negotiable most of the time.

Here’s my routine (synonymous with hygiene):

1. Wake up the same time EVERY day, including non-work days. The secret to falling asleep at a consistent time is to get up at a consistent time. In this case, the egg is before the chicken. What works for me is up at 5-5:30 a.m. (I don’t use an alarm) and then I am dead tired around 8:30 - 9:00 p.m. If I’m tired earlier, unless I’m sick, I make myself stay up until at least 8:30 p.m.

2. Get 20 minutes of sunlight in your eyes between 8 and 10 a.m. local time EVERY day. The infrared light from the sun controls your sleep clock - circadian rhythms.

3. Change out ALL lightbulbs in wind-down and sleep rooms (living room, bedroom) to soft white, low wattage (9 watts). NO led blue lights (sunlight = 5,000k and it’s blue light spectrum). Soft white is 1,000 lumens max and is closer to legacy light such as firelight.

4. Prepare for sleep the same way EVERY night.

   1. We have dinner the same time every night.

   2. Following dinner I take a hot shower (after which my body naturally begins a cool-down process).

   3. I put on comfy clothes - breathable athletic top and leggings so nothing tangles around me during sleep.

   4. I turn on my bedroom air conditioner to 63 degrees. Science has proven that 60-65 is the ideal temperature range in which to sleep well, so we DO NOT mess around with this. 365 days a year, the temperature is perfect. Our home has central air, but we still have a window air conditioner in our bedroom for complete climate control without cooling the whole house. It’s costly, but worth it for my sanity.

   5. Regarding the environment in the room:

      1. We purchased a hybrid Stearns and Foster mattress several years ago. It is, bar none, the best thing I’ve slept on in my life. If you don’t have a great mattress and a great pillow, don’t bother reading this post because you are not serious about good sleep.

      2. I had an Infinite Moon customizable pillow, but they appear to be out of business. I recently bought the Coop pillow on Amazon and I like it just as well. It has a hybrid fill that is also customizable meaning you can add more or less filling based on whether you are a front, back, or side sleeper.

      3. I use breathable percale (cotton poly blend) sheets at 300 thread count or LESS. (I buy Jungalow brand at Target) Thread counts higher than this represent a tighter weave. The tighter the weave the less the air flow - especially important to ladies of a certain age. I purchased two sets so I’m not waiting for laundry when I change them.

      4. We use three thin, 100% cotton quilts. This is the new standard for proper cooling rhythms throughout the night. If you still feel cold when you lie down to sleep, wear VERY THIN socks. They are natural temperature regulators. There are NO comforters and certainly no down bedding at all.

      5. The room is DARK. It’s so dark I can barely see my hand in front of my face. I buy ALL my curtains at Home Goods, which is super inexpensive, and I layer a black or navy set under a decorative set using a tension style rod inside the window frame so the inner pair literally cover every square inch of the glass inside the frame.

      6. We block noise. I hated this at first because I grew up rural and there was no background noise except weather and crickets. Now I love it because I have 2 adult sons who never sleep when we do. So we have 2 loud floor fans inside our room and another outside our door to deflect hallway noise. We are also running an air conditioner on the cycle that never stops the fan. This might seem excessive, but how much is great sleep worth to you?

      7. There are NO clocks in our room. I learned the hard way that even if I’m having a great sleep if I wake up and look at a clock my brain turns on and it takes forever to get back to sleep. We have a clock in our bathroom which requires us to push a button to light up the face in the dark. I NEVER push that button. I use the bathroom, climb back in bed and go right back to sleep.

   6. If my day was stressful, I meditate and/or make a cup of lavender chamomile or Nightly Calm tea and sit down with a show or some craft work.

   7. If I start nodding off, I GO UP TO BED immediately. I do NOT fall asleep on the couch. This affects overall sleep quality for the night.

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If you have tried all of this, try it again and again and again with minor adjustments until you get it right. It took me several years. If you have trouble falling off to asleep, here are few tips:

1. Use lavender essential oil - roll it on behind your ears - the massage of the roll-on plus the lavender relaxes you.

2. Tell yourself a tale - My husband has a western story he visualizes in his mind every night. While the precise point of the story at which he falls asleep varies, it never fails to take him to dream land quickly. He is normally asleep before I finish brushing my teeth. I memorized a dozen or so Bible verses a few years ago and I start through those. It never fails.

3. If you have worries or ideas or cannot turn your brain off when you lie down, keep a journal next to your bed and fill a page with the brain vomit, then lie down and go to sleep. Likewise use this to jot down the junk that enters your head if you wake in the middle of the night. No light, just blindly write in the book.

4. Meditation right before sleep has also saved me a time or two.

Block devices while you sleep. Many of us have loved ones that might need help while we sleep. I use sleep focus for my iPhone. If you have Android or another platform, geekle this and you can figure it out. I didn’t include print screens in here, but Apple, who I at first thought went way the hell overboard with it, has a layered process that ends up being genius. I mean you can customize this feature right down to ‘the cat can wake me but NOT the parakeet’. Joking aside, it’s easy once you understand the layers.

On iPhone 16+

Settings, Focus

Inside this Focus choice you have Do Not Disturb, Sleep, and Work. I use Sleep for sleep and Do Not Disturb for later morning things like meditation time. For this article we are focusing on the Sleep feature.

People - you literally tell Apple which people (and ONLY these people) can break through the sleep block. And, in this section you allow people NOT on your breakthrough list to come through if they call twice within 3 minutes - which is clearly urgent. I LOVE this because (sorry fam) sometimes my siblings are texting at all hours of the night so they are NOT on the sleep breakthrough list, but if they call twice in 3 minutes it will ring through.

Apps - using your list of apps you tell Apple (with a +/-) which apps can/cannot break through the sleep block. I choose those that cannot with only Phone and SMS that can, which is secondarily governed by the people settings above.

So, there you have it. A long-winded tribute to amazing sleep which I now get ~28 out of every 30 days. This is a TOTAL TOTAL gamechanger for your life, relationships, and overall wellness. Good luck, sleep hunters. Let me know how it goes.

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Who else do you know whose ass is dragging from shitty sleep? More free health tips coming soon in Bren’s Buzz.

All this great sleep gives you more energy to chat with me in the comments.