Tuesday Tidbits: Secrets to Great Sleep
Cori's little helpers
Credit: Unless otherwise noted, all visual materials in this post are from MS image generator.
I had a special request from some of my readers to occasionally write about tips for making life easier. So, in the future and when the mood and need strike, I will share small helpers in a Tuesday Tidbits post. Today’s topic was impossible to make as short as I would have liked. Let’s get some great sleep!
That elusive monster that so few world-citizens have tamed. There is an entire ‘community of practice’ around getting better sleep with sleep experts, sleep doctors, and all. I am NOT an expert, but I’ve spent decades of my adult life at a loss for quality z’s and here are a few things I’ve learned along the way.
First and foremost, sleep hygiene is all there is to it. 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 mostly, consistently been wonderful since. My family knows I’m a sleep zealot and it’s non-negotiable most of the time.
Here is my routine (synonymous with hygiene):
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 9-9:30 p.m. If I’m tired earlier, unless I’m sick, I make myself stay up until at least 9 p.m.
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.
Change out ALL lightbulbs in wind-down and sleep rooms (living room, bedroom) to soft white. 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.
Prepare for sleep the same way EVERY night.
We have dinner the same time every night.
Between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. I take a hot shower (after which my body naturally begins a cool-down process).
I put on comfy clothes
I turn on my bedroom air conditioner to 62 degrees. Science has proven that 60-65 is the ideal temperature range in which to sleep well, so we DO NOT fuck around with this. 365 days a year, the temperature is perfect. It’s costly, but worth it for my sanity.
Regarding the environment in the room:
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.
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.
I use breathable percale (cotton poly blend) sheets at 300 thread count or LESS. (I buy these 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 purchase 2 pair so I’m not waiting for laundry when I change them regularly.
The room is DARK. It’s so dark you can barely see your hand in front of your 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 covers every square inch of the glass inside the frame.
We block noise. I hated this at first because I grew up rural and there was no background noise. Now I love it because I have 2 adult sons who never sleep when we do. So we have 2 super 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?
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.
I make a cup of Nightly Calm tea (same EVERY night) and sit down with Substack or a show or some textile work.
I start nodding off at 9 or 9:30
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 asleep, here are few tips:
DON’T have a TV in your room. Get rid of it. 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.
Use lavender essential oil - roll it on behind your ears - the massage of the roll-on plus the lavender relaxes you.
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. I never make it past 4.
Some people use melatonin. I HATE drugs. All drugs. I recommend using lavender chamomile tea or something else that is relaxing instead of a heavier medication, but your local farm market herbalist could help here.
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 stuff that enters your head if you wake in the middle of the night. No light, just blindly write in the book.
Remove or block devices while you sleep. Many of us have loved ones that might need help while we sleep. Alas we come to the specific help this reader asked for - how to manage your sleep features on your mobile device. For Apple phones it will be some version of the below. If you have Android or another platform, google this and you can figure it out. I’m not putting print screens in here, but you need to understand 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 my iPhone 8+ (no, I don’t waste money on the latest gadgets):
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 - you literally see all your apps and 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.
On that note, I’m getting ready for sleep. Nighty night.
We might have been separated at birth. Lol
Those are EXCELLENT tips