How to Optimize Your Sleep: The Ten Most Important Strategies and a Five-Step Method
How to Flourish newsletter #6 | drjonbeale.com
Highlights:
The ten most important strategies for optimizing your sleep.
Why each strategy is so important.
A five-step method for sleep optimization.
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Sleep is vital for all areas of our mental and physical health, well-being and performance. It’s been described as the ‘foundation’ of health and performance, because it impacts every single area of them.
Discussing the relation between sleep, diet and exercise in his 2017 book Why We Sleep, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, Matthew Walker, writes,
Sleep is … the foundation on which the other two health bastions [diet and exercise] sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective.
Andrew Huberman goes further:
Sleep is the foundation of our mental and physical health and performance in all endeavors.
Sleep is a skill, and like all skills, we can be good or bad at it, but it’s also trainable. Given its importance, we should all prioritize building this skill.
Here, I describe the ten most important strategies for optimizing sleep we can extract from current sleep research. These aren’t ranked in order of importance, except for the first two, which research suggests are the most important.
Sleep is a vital skill we can all build (credit: UC Davis Health)
1. Consistency
Arguably the most important sleep habit is to keep your sleep times consistent. Go to bed and wake up as close as possible to the same times every day.
I’ve ranked this as more important than the next strategy, which concerns how much sleep we get, because recent research has found that sleep regularity is more important for health outcomes than sleep duration. The study showed that irregular sleep more strongly predicts our mortality risk than how much sleep we get.
At the end of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker describes twelve strategies for improving sleep. He writes that if we can only do one, focus on consistency.
If, however, you’re sleep deprived from the working week, allow yourself to sleep in over the weekend. A recent study of over 90,000 adults over 14 years showed that catching up on sleep over the weekend is beneficial for our health even if it means sleeping later than usual.
To figure out what time is best for you to go to bed, find out your chronotype: the time of day you naturally feel tired. To get an accurate estimate, do the following:
a. Take the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ).
It takes five minutes. It asks you questions that identify when your melatonin onset is likely to be – the time of night when your brain releases melatonin, the hormone that signals to the body to prepare for sleep.
b. Track your sleep.
A good sleep tracker (such as an Oura Ring or Whoop) will record what your sleep times were. Look for trends, over periods of at least two weeks.
c. Reflect on your own experience.
When do you tend to feel tired and, if you weren’t to set an alarm, when would you tend to wake up? You have a ton of data to draw upon.
On the third, I recommend running an experiment on yourself: if your schedule allows it, for a period of at least two weeks try not setting an alarm and seeing what time you naturally wake up (while keeping your bedtime consistent). Then compare the data with what you gathered from a, b and c.
2. Time
Set your schedule so it’s possible to get at least seven hours of sleep.
Much research has shown that at least seven hours is required by the vast majority of people to maintain good health (see for example this study). Many studies have shown that regularly getting less than seven hours can negatively impact our nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems.
There’s a tiny minority of people with a gene mutation that enables them to fully function on four to six hours of sleep. For everyone else, research recommends at least seven.
Take into account how long it usually takes you to fall asleep. A good sleep tracker will tell you this, under ‘sleep latency’, which is how long it takes you to fall asleep after the lights go out. So, if it usually takes you 15-30 mins to fall asleep and you set an alarm for 7am, go to bed by the latest 11.30pm.
Set your schedule so it’s possible to get at least seven hours of sleep (credit: Sleep Foundation)
3. Light
Get natural light in your eyes as soon as possible after waking. This sets your circadian rhythm for the day. On a sunny day, get 5-10 minutes; on a cloudy day, 15-20.
You want natural light, so either go outside or open a window and look outside (looking through a window will limit the power of natural light). Don’t look directly at the sun. Just being outside will provide far more light than artificial light.
If you wake up before the sun rises, get an artificial light that generates at least 10,000 lux and use for 5-10 minutes (‘lux’ is the term used to measure the amount of light produced by something).
Getting natural light first thing in the morning improves sleep (credit: Alfcermed)
4. Separation
Do very little else in your bedroom other than sleep. Most importantly, don’t use your bedroom as an office.
When we spend a lot of time doing things in our bedroom other than sleep, such as working or watching films, our brains associate our bedroom with other activities, which can make it more difficult to sleep. This can cause sleep issues, and to solve them we then need to break the psychological association we form between our bedrooms and activities other than sleep.
It’s fine to spend a little time doing other things in your bedroom, like reading a novel in bed as you’re going to sleep. And of course it’s fine to have sex in your bedroom! But avoid spending a lot of time doing other things you don’t associate with relaxing, like doing a day’s work, which will happen if your bedroom is also your office.
Several friends of mine have experienced chronic sleep issues and seen sleep coaches. They’ve told me that the first two strategies their coach recommended was this, separation, and the previous strategy, light. (The recommendation they received for this strategy was “do nothing in your bedroom except sleep and have sex”.)
5. Temperature
As we fall asleep, our body temperature falls, and as we wake up, it rises. We sleep better in a moderately cold temperature, because it keeps our body in the cooler state it naturally goes into when we sleep. Optimal temperature is 16-18℃ / 60-65℉.
If you’re not able to set the exact temperature for your room, a decent way of assessing whether your room is cool enough is that you should need the duvet over you to keep you from being cold.
Open the window, turn on the air con, or, best of all, get an Eight Sleep, which will regulate the temperature of your mattress in relation to your body temperature to ensure optimal temperature.
Optimal temperature for sleep is 16-18℃ / 60-65℉ (credit: Southern Seasons)
6. Exercise
Finish your workout at least an hour before you go to bed.
Recent studies have shown that exercising less than an hour before bed negatively impacts sleep. Exercise is great for sleep, as long as we don’t do it too close before bedtime.
It shouldn’t be difficult to implement this – just allow at least an hour before the end of your workout and going to bed.
Exercise is great for sleep, as long as you do it at least an hour before bed (credit: Jacob Lund)
7. Silence
Make your bedroom silent – unless you need white noise to sleep.
Even low-level noise disrupts sleep. Studies have shown that noise as low as 33 decibels can affect sleep quality (for reference, 20-30 DB is about as loud as a whisper, and 40 DB would be a quiet library).
Wear ear plugs if necessary. I take ear plugs whenever I travel, because of the risk of getting to accommodation where there might be noise during the night. I recommend silicone ear plugs, which you can mould to the shape of your ear. If you want to go further, see an audiologist to create moulded ear plugs for you.
8. Substances
I’m going to cover the two most common substances people consume which disrupt sleep: caffeine and alcohol.
If you consume either, the general rule is: the earlier in the day you stop consuming them, the less they’ll impact your sleep. Both disrupt sleep, and caffeine prevents us falling asleep.
Caffeine has an average half life of 5-6 hours. Half life is the time required by our bodies to eliminate half the amount of a substance we’ve consumed. This means that after you consume caffeine, it’ll likely take 10-12 hours for it to leave your body. For some people it can take much longer – research has found it can take up to 19 hours.
So, to increase the likelihood that caffeine has left your body by the time you go to sleep, finish your last caffeinated drink at least 12 hours before you go to bed. If you go to bed at 11pm, finish your last caffeinated drink by 11am.
If that’s too difficult, start with 10 hours. Consuming substances with small amounts of caffeine after this aren’t problematic for sleep: decaf coffee or tea, dark chocolate and so on.
If you drink alcohol, finish drinking as long as possible before going to bed, so your body has more time to metabolize and eliminate it from your system.
Alcohol is a sedative, meaning it makes us feel tired, but it disrupts and impairs sleep quality. The less you drink alcohol, the better, but if you do drink, stop as long as possible before bed. A boozy brunch will negatively impact your sleep less than a boozy dinner.
Finish drinking your final coffee 12 hours before bed (credit: International Comunicaffe)
9. Fluids
Waking up in the night occasionally to use the toilet is fine. But if you wake up several times a night to do this, stop consuming fluids 10 hours after waking and at least 90 minutes before bed.
If you need to drink water beyond those periods, just sip, rather than drink. That’ll quench your thirst while reducing the need to use the toilet.
10. Darkness
Three key points here:
Keep lights as low as possible at least an hour before bed.
Don’t look at any screens at least an hour before bed.
Make your bedroom as dark as possible.
We become more awake in response to light. That’s one of the reasons why strategy 3, light, is important. Light can keep us awake and prevent us falling or staying asleep.
Get blackout curtains and/or an eye mask if you need to make your room darker. Try using extremely dim light or candlelight in the hour before bed.
Take steps to make your room completely dark at night, such as wearing a sleep mask (credit: AleksandarGeorgiev/Getty Images, The Guardian)
How to improve your skills in the ten strategies
To improve your sleep, use the following five-step method.
1. Give yourself a score out of 10 for how well you’re implementing each of the strategies.
10 would be perfect – there’s no room for improvement. For example, for strategy 7, a score of 10 would mean your home is absolutely silent when you sleep such that noise disturbances never happen.
A score of 0 would be terrible, meaning it’d be difficult for it to be worse. For example, for strategy 2, you never make enough time for it to even be possible to get seven hours of sleep – you never go to bed before midnight and set your alarm for 6am every day.
2. Ask yourself, ‘What’s one step I can take to improve my score by one point for that strategy?’.
Think about small, incremental steps, rather than massive improvements. These should be improvements you could make today. For example, if your room isn’t pitch black at night, you could start wearing an eye mask. Or if you tend to have a warm bedroom at night, you could turn the heating off or open the window.
If you haven’t scored 10 for any of the strategies (which is fine – don’t worry), you’ll have 10 steps you now need to take. That’s a lot to try to do at once. The next stage resolves this.
3. Pick at least one and at most three steps to implement today.
Start by prioritizing the first and second strategies, consistency and time, because these are the most important. Then prioritize those where you scored lowest.
I recommend picking a maximum of three steps to implement today because this is going to take work: you’re trying to improve a skill you’ve been building since the day you were born, and you might have entrenched bad habits you need to unlearn.
You want to master each small step before moving onto the next. That’s been shown to be a highly effective strategy for improving learning and skill development.
4. Once you’ve mastered a step, add a new one.
This ensures you’re always working on improving at least one and at most three steps to optimize your sleep. If you’ve chosen three, once you’ve mastered one of those consistently, replace that with a new one you’re going to master.
The measure of ‘mastering’ a step would be doing so consistently over a long period of time – at least a month – with decreasing effort, to the point where it becomes a habit. Once it’s a habit, it’ll be something you do unconsciously, without effort.
But you needn’t reach full mastery before adding a new step – just demonstrating solid, consistent improvement is sufficient for adding a new step. Once you’ve consistently implemented a new step for at least a week, add a new step to those you’re working towards mastering.
5. Track your progress.
Create a method of tracking. This involves two stages. First, track your sleep using a good wearable tracker. I use and recommend the Oura Ring. Whoop is also good. While you could track with an Apple Watch, I don’t recommend getting one because they’re extremely distracting.
Keep a record of important data in your tracker. The wearable will automatically pick up when you’ve exercised, but manually enter other data that’ll impact your sleep, such as if you’re stressed, anxious, jet lagged, or you’ve meditated, had a massage and so on. You can tag all these and other important areas in the tracker, and create your own tags.
Second, keep a record of which good sleep habits and new steps you successfully implemented each day, and how this impacted your sleep. You could do all this in the tracking device, using tags – e.g. ‘didn’t work in bedroom’, if you’re trying to improve your skills in strategy 4, separation. Or you could track elsewhere, such as in a sleep journal, a spreadsheet, the notes app in your phone, your calendar or whichever app or platform you like using.
Two important notes about sleep tracking using technology. First, when going through your data, just look for trends, not one-off scores. It doesn’t matter if you occasionally have nights of sub-optimal sleep – this will happen, especially with factors outside your control such as jet lag and illness. What matters is that your sleep is generally good and improving, moving towards consistently being optimal. (Andrew Huberman recommends aiming for excellent sleep for 80% of the nights of our lives.)
Look for trends over periods of at least two weeks and note what you can improve on from those trends. Oura Ring creates seasonal reports and can send you PDFs of your sleep data. I don’t recommend analysing the data more frequently than every two weeks. Looking for trends over those periods.
Second important note about tracking: if you feel like you sleep well, don’t look at your sleep score until your working day is done. Knowing your sleep score can negatively impact your performance.
For example, you might wake up feeling good, but check your sleep score and it was bad, which can have a negative psychological impact on your performance – you’re now concerned that you’re not sufficiently rested to be able to perform at your best, which now prevents you from doing so. You might now get stressed ahead of the presentation you’re giving this afternoon, concerned that you’ve not had enough sleep and consequently won’t be able to answer difficult questions to the capacity you usually can.
Of course, knowing your sleep score could also have the inverse effect: you wake up feeling groggy, but check your score and see it was actually good, and now feel a bit better. That can benefit your performance. So, only apply this rule when you feel like you’ve slept well.
If you feel like you haven’t slept well, then check your sleep score whenever. That’ll be particularly important if you’re planning to do an intense workout that day, because you’ll be more injury-prone if you haven’t slept well.
The obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep driven by sleep tracking data is called orthosomnia. Beware of this. Use tracking to improve your sleep and learn more about what impacts your sleep. But no piece of technology, no matter how advanced, should tell us how we should feel. If you wake up feeling good, make the most of it – don’t risk harming your performance by checking your sleep score.
Track your sleep, but not obsessively (credit: The Independent)
The takeaway
Sleep is a skill. The ten strategies above are the most important to focus on to optimize your sleep, based on current sleep research. The first two are the most important. Try the five-step strategy for building your skills in mastering each of those strategies.
What steps have you found most effective for optimizing your sleep or any of the ten strategies above?
I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about optimizing sleep!
drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale
Recommended resources
Books:
Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
Peer-reviewed articles:
Daniel Windred et al., ‘Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration: A prospective cohort study’ (Sleep, 2024)
Alexandra Shriane et al., ‘Healthy sleep practices for shift workers: consensus sleep hygiene guidelines using a Delphi methodology’ (Sleep, 2023)
Christopher Barnes & Nathaniel Watson, ‘Why healthy sleep is good for business’ (Sleep Med Rev., 2019)
Connor Sheehan et al., ‘Quantity, timing, and type of childhood adversity and sleep quality in adulthood’ (Sleep Health, 2020)
Marco Hafner et al., ‘Why Sleep Matters—The Economic Costs of Insufficient Sleep’ (Rand Health Q, 2017)
Michael Hamlin et al., ‘The Effect of Sleep Quality and Quantity on Athlete's Health and Perceived Training Quality’ (Front. Sports Act. Living, 2021)
Katarína Evansová et al., ‘The effect of chronotype and time of assessment on cognitive performance’ (Biological Rhythm Research, 2022)
Jacques Taillard et al., ‘Sleep timing, chronotype and social jetlag: Impact on cognitive abilities and psychiatric disorders’ (Biochemical Pharmacology, 2021)
Samuel Jones et al., ‘Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms’ (Nature Communications, 2019)
Jodi Mindell & Ariel Williamson, ‘Benefits of a bedtime routine in young children: Sleep, development, and beyond’ (Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2018)
Nathaniel Watson et al., ‘Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: A Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society’ (Sleep, 2015)
Stijn Massar et al., ‘Working-from-home persistently influences sleep and physical activity 2 years after the Covid-19 pandemic onset: a longitudinal sleep tracker and electronic diary-based study’ (Front. Psychol., 2023)
Anna Nagele et al., ‘The Subjectivities of Wearable Sleep-Trackers - A Discourse Analysis’ (Association for Computing Machinery. 2022)
K. G. Baron et al., ‘How are consumer sleep technology data being used to deliver behavioral sleep medicine interventions? A systematic review’ (Behav Sleep Med, 2021)
Hadi Nobari et al., ‘Overview of the impact of sleep monitoring on optimal performance, immune system function and injury risk reduction in athletes: A narrative review’ (Sci Prog, 2023)
Survey:
M. Terman et al., ‘AutoMEQ - Your circadian rhythm type’ (New York Psychiatric Institute, 2001)
Peer-reviewed web articles:
‘Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency: Diagnosis’ (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 2022)
‘About Sleep’ (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024)
‘How Sleep Works: How Much Sleep Is Enough?’ (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 2022)
Eric Suni & Abhinav Singh, ‘How Much Sleep Do You Need?’ (Sleep Foundation, 2024)
Jen Fisher et al., ‘You snooze, you win: Why organizations should prioritize having a well-rested workforce’ (Deloitte Insights, 2019)
Media articles:
Jeff Haden, ‘Use the Military Method to Fall Asleep Within 2 Minutes, Starting Tonight’ (Inc., 2022)
Tracey Ramsden, ‘The best sleep aids recommended by experts’ (The Guardian, 22 Oct 2024)
Matthew Reid, ‘Are sleep trackers accurate? Here’s what researchers currently know’ (The Conversation, 2021)
Podcasts:
‘Andrew Huberman’s Toolkit for Sleep’, Huberman Lab, 2021
The Matthew Walker Podcast
‘Guest Series: Dr. Matt Walker: The Biology of Sleep & Your Unique Sleep Needs’, Huberman Lab, 2024
‘Sleep and Exercise Pt. 4’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023
‘Dr Matthew Walker on sleep for parents of young children’, CognitaSchools, 2019
‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 1’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023
‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 2’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023
‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 3’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023