Sleep Process and Policies

Regularly getting good sleep is the single most important physiological factor for keeping my energy levels high. Extremely good sleep is the best stimulant.

While I have some tricks for maintaining high focus and momentum even when sleep deprived , those are stopgaps for when something has already gone wrong. With intentional effort, and by riding the wave of my circadian rhythms, I can maintain pretty high efficacy for about 3 days of insufficient sleep, but after that things start to fall apart.

Schedule

I’ve lived on a number of different sleep schedules, depending on the circumstances, and the people that I’m working with, including waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning, waking up at 10 or 11 in the morning, and waking up at 4:00 in the afternoon and mostly being awake during the night, and even a 26 hour schedule in which my sleep periods are not synced up with the days of the week.

Since 2021, I’ve kept to a biphasic sleep schedule: Sleeping for 6 to 9 hours at night, and about an hour in the mid to late afternoon.

At the time of this writing, I wake up at 9:45 AM, and go to sleep at about 12:00 AM, with a nap from about 3:30 to 5:00 in the afternoon (though the timing of the nap varies some). When I’m on an earlier or a later schedule, all the times in this document are adjusted up or down by a constant additive factor.

Some sleep setup and practices

I don’t eat for about 3 hours before bed. Ideally, I eat one meal a day, in the early afternoon, and so don't eat for many hours before bed. If I’m tempted to eat, I’ll chew gum, or make myself tea.
- I will sometimes drink liquid meal replacement (Soylent or huel) in the hours before bed. I haven't observed this impacting my sleep metrics.
I’ve set an alarm that rings at (current, not to go to sleep, but to brush my teeth and take a melatonin. That way, I’ll tend to become tired and ready to sleep automatically, about a half hour to an hour later.
I sleep with an air conditioner (in my personal room) or a fan (in my office-sleep space) pointed directly at my face. Being in a cold room, or having cool air blown over me, helps me fall asleep.
I use mouthtape while I sleep, to induce me to breath through my nose instead of my mouth. I don’t know if this improves my sleep, but I buy that it is good for my overall health, and possibly improves my allergies. ¹ ²
In my personal room, I sleep with a weighted blanket.
I block out all the light in my room, covering the windows with cardboard panels, and filling the gaps with aluminum foil secured with painters tape. I additionally hang blackout curtains over the windows. (I crack the window to allow for circulation, even when the air conditioner is off, attach a strip tinfoil or blackout cloth to the top of the window, covering the gap.)
- Just using blackout curtains is insufficient if I'm on a late or nocturnal schedule in which my sleep period overlaps with the sun. I find that if I sleep in a room that has some light leakage, I feel subtly off all day long. If I’m asleep during a period that overlaps substantially with when the sun is up, I need to sleep in a very dark space, or I’ll feel groggy all day/night long. I want my room to be dark enough that I can't see the objects and furniture in it, even in the middle of the day. This is seem to be adequate enough for me to be sharp on a late schedule.
  - If blocking all the light in a room isn't easy, I've sometimes slept in a closet, or with a four-panel shelter of balsa wood long enough to enclose the top half of my body, in a merely-normally dark room, instead of a pitch black room. This seems to work adequately as well.
I making it easy to get up to pee in the middle of the night.
- This sounds kind of silly, but I have sometimes find that I sleep badly because I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a full bladder. I should get up and pee, but because there are a number of steps between me and the bathroom (maybe I need to put on a robe, or navigate around a desk that I can’t see well in the dark), I have an aversion to getting up, and I just stay there in bed and then fall back into an uncomfortable, restless sleep.
- I can circumvent this via future-pacing and rehearsal. I’ll practice, when I’m awake, the steps that I need to take to go pee. Then when I wake up in the middle of the night, that’s the default action.
- When I have been on a schedule where my sleep window overlaps with the sun substantially and I've gone to lengths to block out all the light entering my room, but the nearest bathroom is not similarly shielded, I've kept a two gallon jug partially filled with water in my bedroom. If I get up in the middle of my sleep period to pee, I can pee in the jug and then dump it out the toilet after I get up for the day.

Sleep supplements

Every night, around a half hour before I go to sleep (usually just before I leave the office), I take

0.3 mg of melatonin ³
50 mg of apigenin
200 mg of L-Theanine
144 mg of Magnesium L-theronate

I often take my daily dose of creatine at this time as well.

During the day

The clearest impact on my nighttime HRV is doing intense exercise during the day, which I aim to do most days.

Occasionally, especially if I’m taking a rest day in preparation for a sprint, I’ll go to a sauna a few hours before I go to bed. This has a notable impact on my subjective tiredness, and improves my sleep efficiency.

If I’m restless

Mostly, I don’t have any difficulty falling asleep these days. In the past, I would sometimes lie down to go to sleep and my mind would be churning or my physiology activated, or otherwise not be able to fall asleep. That doesn’t really happen any more, and I’m not sure why. Presumably one or several of the interventions above resolved it.

That said, if I've been lying in bed for 40 minutes or more, and haven't fallen asleep yet, I'll get out of bed and do something else (as is the standard recommendation). However, when I get up like this, there are only three activities that I allow myself, so that I don't get hooked by something stimulating and stay up for an extra hour when I could have been asleep.

Journal

I have a I have a chromebook that is set up just for journaling. I've blocked that everything except roam, google docs (for my tracking spreadsheets and forms), and toggl.

This way, when I'm restless, I can get up and journal in Roam, typically outlining my thoughts about whatever I was thinking on, without the temptation of browsing the internet more generally (which is motivationally-sticky, and doesn’t help me get to sleep.

HRV breathing

Alternatively, I might get up and do a few minutes of HRV breathing (probably with biofeedback) to increase my sympathetic activation.

Drink Soylent/Huel

Eating actives the parasympathetic and enteric nervous system, and is one way to calm sympathetic activation. That's why stress eating is a thing.

However, eating in the hours before bed harms sleep quality. So it isn't a good idea to eat just before bed.

However-however, my initial experiments suggest that liquid food doesn't worsen my sleep, so I'll sometimes have a bottle of soylent or or huel non-dairy milk if I'm restless.

Waking up

One of the most important inputs to good sleep is waking up consistently at the same time every day. If I focus on making my morning wakeup good, falling asleep will follow, if not automatically, than more easily than otherwise.

External Systems

In my personal room, I have a 12000lux light panel, attached to the wall near my bed, set on a timer so that it turns on (gradually) just before my wakeup time.
My air conditioner is on a timer so that it turns off about an hour earlier than when I wake up. If it’s cold outside my bed at the time when I wake up, that creates a microhedonic gradient that incentivizes me to stay in bed, but I can circumvent that by
- During the winter, I’ll leave sweatpants and warm socks, right near or on my bed, to make it as easy and quick as possible as possible to get up and get warm, instead of being tempted to stay in my cozy bed.
- An even better idea to try: set up a heating pad on a timer right at the side of my bed, so that I can wake up and step onto that.
The main lights in my room are on a bluetooth controlled circuit. There's a switch for that circuit on my wall next to the door, for turning on the lights when I enter my room. My bed is right next to the door, such that I can reach this switch from my bed. But, I need to sit up to reach it, which is an additional bit of friction to going from asleep to awake. So I've also attached an identical switch to my air conditioner unit, that I can reach out to turn on without needing sit up.

Behavioral practices

I train myself to wake up, at the time I want, without an alarm.
- As I do it, this involves setting intention to wake up at my chosen time, when I lay down to go to sleep. I'll relax my body and then verbally (out loud) affirm that I'm going to wake up at my chosen time.
  
  It has at least sometimes taken a few days to calibrate, but after that I will wake up automatically, within about a minute of my chosen time.
  
  Calibrating: I wear a watch in bed so that when I wake up in the night / morning, I can check what time it is. Crucially, if it is within an hour of my chosen time, I'll get up, even if that is a bit early or a bit late. Over the course of a few days my mind and body will narrow the interval until I am waking up at my chosen time.
I’ve further trained myself so that when I wake up, I get up, and spring out of bed, immediately. Furthermore, this allows to to start the day with momentum, which can carry through for hours.
- I built this habit with offline habit training: practicing, (during the day, when you're fully awake), laying down in bed with my eyes closed, and then opening my eyes and jumping out of bed. I do 10 reps of this, being careful to reset after each one, so that not not practicing getting back into bed, each time.
- I've sometimes used a mantra in this moment as well, to remind me of my intention or why I care about getting up.
One of the first things that I do in the morning is brush my teeth, either outside or looking out of an open window. This is means that I get sunlight exposure to my eyes, first thing in the morning, which reinforces / resets my circadian rhythm, to make it easier to fall asleep at the time I want.3

See also:

Notes

1 - When I first decided that I wanted to start mouthtaping, it wasn’t feasible for me. I just couldn’t breath through my nose well enough, while lying down, to fall asleep. (For a while I had a bounty up, requesting a way to learn to breath through my nose.) I eventually solved this by taking a nasal decongestant that cleared up my nose enough that that I could fall asleep with mouthtape on, and after a few nights of that, my sinuses opened up enough that I was able to breath through my nose normally. I think that for the first 27 years of my life, my sinuses were chronically inflamed, but practice breathing through my nose started a positive feedback cycle.

2 - I used to get conjunctivitis, in the springtime, reliably, just about every year. I think this is because I would have seasonal allergies, which would cause me to rub my eyes, and then rubbing my eyes would cause them to get infected. I haven't had conjunctivitis since 2021, which is the year that I started mouth taping.

3 - For more on the impact of melatonin, Gwern’s page says it all.

4 - Early light exposure like this was recommended by Andrew Huberman here . He claims outdoor light exposure is --x more effective than sunlight through a window.