Better understanding your sleep

We all recognise the importance of sleep for both physical and mental health and well-being, and especially so for peak performance. 

However when life gets busy, sleep can be one of the first things we sacrifice. For many it's also one aspect of our lives we generally give less attention to optimising.

Like many of you I've consumed many books and podcasts from experts on sleep, and had a good understanding of why it is important and the mechanisms by which it works (so I am not outlining here as there is already a wealth online). However, time and again I still failed to prioritise it as much as I aspired to.

My sleep experiment

At the start of this year I decided to really prioritise sleep. I got a WHOOP fitness tracker which provides detailed data on sleep and physical performance metrics, and experimented with all the science-based healthy habits that are recommended for quality sleep. 

I found there was nothing more powerful when it comes to changing habits than waking up happy that I got a long nights sleep, only to see in the data that sleep quality was poor, and then identifying what the culprit was. 

Below I share the habits that I have incorporated into my day to improve both sleep length and sleep quality. I have greatly increased the proportion of my night's sleep which is restorative (Deep and REM stages), reduced the number of wake events (the number of times waking up for just a few minutes, of which we're not aware of, but is picked up by the tracker), reduced overall time awake (improving sleep efficiency), and vastly improved my overall feeling of well-being. 

My healthy habits for sleep

• No caffeine after 4pm

• Last meal at least 2 hours before sleeping

• Last significant fluids at least 1 hour before sleeping

• Keep alcohol consumption to an absolute minimum

• Night mode scheduled across all devices 2 hours before bed

• No screens 1 hour before bed

• Consistent bed and wake time every day of the week

• Bedroom as a dedicated sleep zone - I don't take any devices into the bedroom at any point in the day, and almost everything in my room is hidden away so when I get into bed there is nothing in my peripheral vision like a work laptop

• Only read fiction before bed

If you're interested in understanding the science behind any particular item, hit reply by email and I can link you to further resources. I'm also keen to hear about habits you have that are not on this list.

Implementation idea

Are you following healthy sleep habits? Experiment with implementing just one of those habits you know would improve your sleep, but that you struggle with incorporating regularly.

Having data to see the impact of a sleep experiment makes this much easier due to the difficulty of basing results off subjective feelings in the morning about how well we've slept the night before. 

This newsletter is all about improving decision-making and productivity, and sleep is one fundamental factor in this. Sleep well. 

Best, Alex Joshi.

On my bedside table:

• Podcast: The Tim Ferriss show - Dr Mathew Walker on all things sleep (link)

• Podcast: The High Performance Podcast - Toto Wolff on empathy over engineering (link)

And finally, if you're enjoying this content and know people that would get value from this newsletter, please forward it on, it would also support me massively. Thank you!