Essays, Health

Essay – Sleep, the Final Frontier

Though I am continually making tweaks to either help my health or improve it, I feel like that “country” has been better explored than the vast continent of sleep.

However, I also believe that for the first time I’m making good headway, and am finally getting better sleep. It’s been a really long journey, though.

I’ve been dividing my sleep into four categories:

  • Bad sleep
  • Adequate sleep
  • Good sleep
  • Great sleep

If you think about these as kind of a continuum, I’ve been at the low end of the spectrum for most of my life, particularly these last few years. I’ve had weeks where I’ve had bad sleep every other night and merely adequate sleep the other nights, with the rare night of good sleep thrown in there once or twice a month. Great sleep was practically unheard of.

Currently, I’ve finally shifted into the middle of the scale. Most nights I have either adequate or good sleep, with the occasional bad sleep—maybe once a week—and great sleep now once or twice a month.

Obviously I still have some work to do. I’d like to shift my sleep higher on this scale, so that most nights I’m getting good or great sleep. However, for the first time, I’ve made significant progress.

For me, one of the biggest changes has been my attitude. I’ve been looking for “the secret handshake” of sleep. I’ve finally realized that a single lifestyle change or habit or supplement isn’t enough. There’s a combination of things that all have to be there for me to get better sleep.

At this time, I’ve pinpointed the following things:

  • Environment
  • Supplements
  • Light consumption
  • Resting before sleep

For my environment, I need cold, dark, and quiet. The heat is turned off in my bedroom in TH2. I have blackout curtains on the window. And I live in the middle of nowhere, so it’s quiet. During the summer (in TH2) I need to sleep with a fan blowing on me. That does make noise, which means worse sleep, but I won’t sleep at all if I’m too hot.

Before I go to bed, I take 3000 mg of taurine and 2400 mg of a high quality fish oil. Again, just by themselves, these supplements help with sleep but they weren’t enough to turn my bad sleep around. The taurine lowers my blood pressure and ensures that my heart rate stays low. The fish oil lowers my cortisol response. This means that most nights I’m not waking up over heated and sweating. Still happens some nights, but the length of time that I’m too hot is diminished. Plus, I’m able generally able to go back to sleep.

Light consumption really turned out to make a massive difference. I turn my lights down at night. No overhead lights, just dim lamps, after 7 PM.

When I started this, that was all I was doing, and I wasn’t that impressed with the change. It seemed to be helping a little, but not a lot.

Then I started getting a lot more light first thing in the morning. Within a week I noticed a difference.

Now, people talk about how the change in light consumption will reset your circadian clock. However, that term “reset” is misleading. It isn’t a one-time thing or adjustment you need to make. I can go one or two nights without both ends of the light consumption change. If I don’t get back on the plan after that, my sleep suffers. It’s an ongoing thing, not a one-time reset.

I’ve known for a while that if I’m actually resting before I go to sleep that it makes a difference in the quality of my sleep. I track my heart rate on my Fitbit. I need to bring it down to, or even below, my resting heart rate, and hold it there for a while before I go to bed, if I’m going to sleep well.

That means reading and knitting, or doing water color painting, just before I go to bed. I had stopped doing a lot of reading at night due to my eyes. However, now that I have permanent plugs in my eye ducts, I can see at night again! Which means reading and resting, and much better sleep.

One of the other things I’ve had to learn is to not trust my Fitbit and its calculation of my sleep. My Fitbit will often times tell me that I had great sleep when I didn’t. That’s because it is only looking at number of hours of sleep, not the quality of the sleep. Plus, it frequently thinks that I’m asleep when I’m not, and credits me with many more hours of sleep than I actually am getting.

For example, if I supposedly get eight hours of sleep, but my heart rate has been high the entire time, that isn’t good sleep. It might not even be adequate sleep. Other nights, I get maybe six hours of sleep, but I’ve spent two hours in the deep sleep zone and my heart rate is low the entire time. I might feel as though I’ve had good sleep despite what my Fitbit says.

I haven’t figured out how to have great sleep every night. However, the fact that I’m having great sleep much more frequently tells me that it might be possible.

I might never get there, to that promised country of great sleep every night, but I’m willing to keep tweaking things and trying new avenues in the meanwhile.

What about you? How’s your sleep? What have you done to improve it?