Sleep guide and daily details

When it comes to longevity and overall health, there is NOTHING more important than good sleep. Only diet comes close, and exercise after that.

Of course, your health will be ruined if you do not exercise at all, or eat extremely poorly, even if you sleep well. What is meant is that, given a baseline for the other two, sleep is the variable that will prove the most beneficial to maximize in quantity and quality.

And yet, most people struggle with it!

When it comes to supplements, there is hardly anything more useful than caffeine (in whatever form), and yet most do it wrong!

When it comes to timing their eating and light exposure, most are not even aware of what is meant!

Whereas in previous posts the main focus was laid on training and performance, today we’ll talk about recovery/sleep, how to use caffeine as a net positive (and not merely a way to stay awake all night), and how to improve your sleep, mood, and focus through meal and light-exposure scheduling.

Sleep

Should this even be pointed out at this point? Sleep is the number one variable to optimize if you want long-term health, energy, good mood, and mental and physical performance.

No magic diet, or exercise plan, or energy drink will fix a bad night’s sleep.

It is necessary for the body to recover, regenerate, and refill its energy stores.

It is necessary for the mind to stay functional, focused, for learning, and for a proper neurochemistry and emotional state.

But how could one make sure to get enough, and of enough quality? There are four main factors that affect this:

• Light: our biological rythm is set by the rising and setting of the sun. By making sure that your room is dark while you sleep, and that no bright lights are present a while before bed, we cement our sleep schedule and make it automatic.

• Temperature: the body needs to cool down to fall asleep; make sure that your room is a bit colder than usual and don’t get too covered in blankets and clothes.

• Diet: Eating too much close to bed can make falling and staying asleep difficult, due to the discomfort and metabolic stress from digesting so much food.

• Timing: If you go to bed on a very irregular shcedule, your body will not be able to adapt to a definite pattern, and thus both falling and staying unconscious will be massively more difficult. Try to go to bed within the same 30 min, window every day, and wake up in the same manner.

Now, there is one more point to be made about this: supplements, Caffeine, mainly, since it is one of the main durgs of common use with this ability.

Natural sleep-affecting factors being taken care of, we’ll now talk about the not-so-natural factrors.

Caffeine

Most drugs have always noticeable downsides and side-effects, even if done “correctly“. In my opinion, caffeine is the one exception.

Increased focus, wakefulness, improved mood and higher energy levels.

However, even though it may have hardly any downside when done correctly, almost everybody does it incorrectly!

Caffeine is an extremely effective sleep-disruptor, and most underestimate the duration of its effects. While the peak stimulation sensation may not last more than a couple of hours, the more subtle physiological effects (like sleep disruption) can last up to 10 hours!

Our system processes half of the caffeine we’ve consumed in about 5 hours, on average. So, if you drink a cup at 5pm, when you go to bed at 10pm, it is like drinking half a cup right before.

Sounds insane, right?

And we know how important sleep is at this point, so ruining it is not an option. You want to have as little caffeine in your system as possible at bedtime, so, you should not be ingesting any at least 8 hours before (you do the maths for your bedtime).

You also don’t want to be taking it right after waking, since it disrupts natural waking-up mechanisms and thus will prove detrimental to biological rythms; in other words, it will ruin sleep from the other side. Therefore, I’d recommend you wait at least one hour after waking to take it, too.

If you do this, you should be getting all the benefits and no downside. This way, you get the energy, focus and mood boosts without having to pay any consequences for it.

I personally apply this very much like stated, and the results are amazing. I drink Yerba Mate, though coffee or tea would do it too. However, I personally find coffee to be more short-lived in the positive effects.

Bright lights

This point is almost entirely neglected by most people: humans are extremely sensitive to lights, their brightness and colour. This, after all, sets our biological rythms and they are what wake us up or make us feel sleepy.

That is why blue lights from electronics at night are bad for you: blue light is naturally only originated from the sun, so this artificial exposure delays all sleep-mechanisms. Also, not only have the light to be bluish, but any bright sources will have the same effect. If your house is very powerfully illuminated, for example.

And the converse also applies: if you remain in darkess/dimness in the mornings, your body’s cycles will be delayed, too.

So the right approach is this: expose yourself to brightness in the morning (preferentially sunlight), and dim all the lights about 2 hours before bed, mostly electronics. Also, try to keep your bedroom as dark as possible during the night, so, no night-lights or open windows.

If possible, wake youself up with lights in the morning, by looking at a lamp or going outside.

And finally, to avoid ruining all this care, avoid turning on the lights of the bathroom if you wake up in the middle of the night (or using your phone). This will destroy your sleep since it will initiate your wake-up mechanisms and will thus make falling back asleep extremely difficult.

As with caffeination, I’m extremely careful in this regard and make sure to get it right.

Apply this, and watch an immediate benefit and increase i sleep quality and depth.

You could already have a great existence nailing the aspects mentioned above. Those, coupled with training, and there is not one chance that you life will not be great.

However, if you want it to be even better, there is still one more thing to apply: intermittent fasting.

If you are eating all the time, you’re not letting your body run through the full cycle of stress, nourishment, and recovery; you’re short-circuiting it by re-feeding all the time.

The ideal thing is to spend at least 12 hours without eating, maybe up to 16. The easiest way to do this is to skip either breakfast or dinner, thus leveraging the empty sleep-hours, where you’re not going to eat anything regardless.

I personally skip breakfast since I don’t like sleeping feeling hungry; I wake up at around 7 am and don’t anything until lunch (1pm).

The benefits? As I said above, this lets your metabolism run a full cycle before eating again, thus improving your longevity, reducing the risk of diabetes, and making fat easier to burn.

Finally, I find it better for training, since the core-bracing seems more natural and comfortable with an empty, non-bloated stomach. Plus you don’t have any risk of carb-crashes or the like during your workout.

Therefore, wrapping things up, after sleep, the main details to take into account for a healthy daily schedule are: food inatke timing, bright light exposure, fasting, and Caffeine intake amounts and distributions.

When one thinks of life-hacks what comes to mind is usually some BS nuance that seems fruitless at first sight. However, the ones presented today are actual hacks, actual tweaks to apply to your life that will have massive positive returns.

Hope you enjoyed this post! Stay tuned for more every Sunday, and make sure to share and subscribe!