Sleep: Why is it so important and how can you improve yours?
The following is an edited excerpt from the best-selling book 'The Habit Mechanic - Fine-Tune Your Brain and Supercharge How You Live, Work, and Lead' by Dr. Jon Finn. Get your copy here and learn how to quickly build better sleep, diet and exercise habits.
Our Diet, Exercise, and Sleep (DES) habits are crucial for wellbeing and success. Diet, exercise, and sleep help maintain the hippocampus (or hippocampi—as there is one in each brain hemisphere), which is the main part of the human brain that produces new brain cells. These new cells are very important for helping us manage stress, perform well, and learn new things. Poor diet, exercise, and sleep can lead to the hippocampus becoming damaged. That makes managing stress and consistent high performance more difficult.
Good exercise and diet also help the brain release a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This helps brain cells grow and flourish, so we can manage stress and learn more with less effort. Diet, exercise, and sleep are the foundation for:
- better stress management;
- spending less time thinking unhelpful thoughts;
- being focused to drive productivity, creativity, and problem-solving;
- building and maintaining robust levels of confidence;
- performing well under pressure; and
- better leadership for improved individual and team performance.
Good DES habits are the foundation for work-life balance.
Now that we have a general understanding about the importance of DES for good brain function—the foundation of health, happiness, and performance—we can explore each area in greater depth. This week, we are going to focus on: sleep.
The Impact of Poor Sleep
If you want to improve mental health, wellbeing, performance, and leadership in work and life, start by improving your sleep.
Think of your sleep like a bank balance. If you don’t put enough in at the end of each day or week, you’ll end up bankrupt. A lack of sleep has serious consequences for everyone, especially people focused on performing to their potential and people on whom others depend.
Dr. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, says: “We are socially, organizationally, economically, physically, behaviorally, nutritionally, linguistically, cognitively, and emotionally dependent upon sleep.”
Scientists think sleep has two core functions. It removes toxins that build up in the brain during the day and it consolidates memories and learning. Sleep deprivation has some obvious and surprising consequences:
Lack of sleep makes it more difficult to learn and develop. It makes us more forgetful because it disrupts memory storage. And it has a negative impact on our ability to generate new brain cells. In the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, where learning fast is a fundamental competitive advantage, doing anything that makes it more difficult to learn and solve problems is not a good use of time.
Poor sleep habits lead to higher stress levels. Sleep deprivation appears to impair the HAC (Helpful Attention Control) Brain, the part of our brain that helps us regulate our emotions so we can be calm, reasoned, and rational. This makes it more difficult to suppress our primal instincts, so we are more prone to do things we regret and say negative things to ourselves when we are sleep deprived.
Inadequate sleep compromises our judgments and decision-making. This includes judgments about the importance of sleep itself. A 2015 McKinsey report, The organizational cost of insufficient sleep, highlighted that 46 percent of business leaders believed lack of sleep had little impact on their leadership performance. At the same time, 83 percent of these leaders thought their organizations did not spend enough time educating those in high-profile, demanding positions about the importance of sleep. These confused insights suggest these leaders had not been getting enough sleep to make sensible judgments.
Poor sleep habits are thought to increase the onset of prefrontal cortex diseases like Alzheimer’s. A recent edition of New Scientist ran a front cover that read: “Why lack of sleep is killing your brain.” The research it was referring to shows how poor sleep habits have a long-term negative impact on brain health.
18 Ways to Improve Your Sleep
I have tried all these ideas, and many have become part of my sleep routine. As ever, nothing here is prescriptive, but I do encourage you to try things out to see what works best for you.
1. Develop Consistent Sleep Patterns
The time you get up has an impact on the time you can go to sleep. If you oversleep one morning (e.g., Sunday morning), it might be difficult to fall asleep early that night (e.g., Sunday night). Keeping regular sleeping habits is important for good, consistent sleep. As flexible work becomes the norm, this can be more challenging. I know that consistency is not always possible, and sometimes it is helpful to sleep in (to recharge your brain batteries). But aiming to be consistent will give you a better chance of being consistent, and improving your sleep.
2. Exercise
Doing enough exercise during the day can help you sleep better at night.
3. Take Care with Caffeine
Data shows that consuming caffeine six hours before going to bed has a negative impact on sleep, making it more difficult to get down to Level 1.
4. Reduce Your Alcohol Intake
Although alcohol can sometimes make you fall asleep quickly, be aware that it reduces sleep quality. This will potentially lead to poorer brain function, higher stress levels, and lower productivity levels the following day.
5. Drink Sour Cherry Juice
A research study in adults showed that people who drank two glasses of sour cherry juice per day achieved an extra 34 minutes of sleep per night. This study claimed sour cherries contain high levels of melatonin, a hormone responsible for sleepiness.
6. Eat for Sleep
Eating small carbohydrate and protein snacks before bed can help you have a good night’s sleep.
7. Take Power Naps
Using short power naps to top-up on sleep can be helpful. Do some personal research to find out what works best for you. I find about 15 to 20 minutes optimal. But do not use power naps to replace a good night’s sleep.
8. Avoid Social Media and Emails
Checking social media and emails before bed can make you feel anxious, thereby making it difficult to fall asleep and get good quality rest.
9. Monitor Your Tech Use
The light produced from smartphones, tablets, or laptops can make your brain think it is daytime and stop the release of melatonin, a hormone responsible for sleepiness. So I would recommend that you stop using these devices one hour before you go to bed and not using them in bed.
10. Dim Your Lights
Light is a signal to the brain that it is daytime, so take time to dim your lights one hour before you want to go to bed.
11. Stay Hydrated
Dehydration can make it more difficult to fall asleep and reduces sleep quality. On average, men are recommended to drink two liters of water a day. Women are urged to drink 1.6 liters of water a day. Be aware that caffeinated and sugary drinks (like sour cherry juice) will dehydrate you.
12. Control the Temperature
Sleep is triggered as body temperature reduces. If your bedroom is too hot, it will be difficult to fall asleep. Taking a warm bath or shower before bed is a way to deliberately increase your body temperature and subsequently induce a sense of sleepiness as your body temperature drops afterward.
13. Have a Getting-Back-to-Sleep Routine
Many people wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep. This can become an unhelpful and unwanted habit. To break this habit, you should build a “get back to sleep” routine. Do some research and develop a routine that works well for you.
14. Build the Right Environment
Humans are designed to sleep when it is dark and quiet and you feel calm. Make sure your bedroom and sleeping practices promote all three. For example, some people use eye masks to block out light and help them sleep.
15. Get the Right Bed, Pillow, and Mattress
What you sleep on will impact sleep quality. If you are sharing a bed with your partner, is it big enough? Is the mattress helping you secure a great night’s sleep? Take time to invest in the best possible solution.
16. Use Habit Mechanic Stress Management and Confidence-Building Tools
Sometimes sleeping is a problem because we have unhelpful and wanted thoughts in our minds. In later chapters (21, 22, 23), I’ll show you some specific Habit Mechanic Tools you can use to de-stress your brain at the end of each day, and improve your chances of sleeping well.
17. Use Sleep Tape
There is an increasing amount of research showing the benefits of mouth taping when you sleep. The main reason for doing this is to force you to breathe through your nose. The reported health and brain function benefits of breathing through your nose (inhaling and exhaling) are very interesting. This is something I am currently looking into.
18. Quit Smoking
Be aware of the negative impact smoking can have on your sleep. It is thought that nicotine’s psychoactive properties are particularly disruptive for good quality sleep.
Creating a Getting-to-Sleep Routine
Through personal research, these are the things I’ve found useful to give myself the best chance of getting a great night’s sleep:
- Go for a 25-minute run first thing in the morning—if I don’t want to run, I walk.
- Use walking breaks through the day to top-up my exercise and make me feel tired at the end of the day/bedtime.
- Drink two liters of water throughout the day.
- Only have three caffeine drinks per day and stop drinking caffeine at 4 p.m.
- Finish my working day with some reflective writing to help me focus on what went well and what I can improve tomorrow, and to reframe any difficulties I came up against (I will talk about these techniques in more detail later in the book).
- Don’t eat too much, or too heavy, close to bedtime.
- Stop using my phone, tablet, and laptop at least one hour before bedtime and don’t use these devices in bed.
- Dim the house lights about one hour before bedtime.
- Be in bed reading a fiction book about 20 minutes before I want to go to sleep.
Dr. Jon Finn founded the award-winning Tougher Minds consultancy and has three psychology-related degrees, including a PhD. He has worked in performance psychology, resilience, and leadership science for over 20 years.
Tougher Minds uses cutting-edge insights from psychology, behavioral science, neuroscience, and world champions to help organizations develop ‘Habit Mechanics’ and ‘Chief Habit Mechanics’ – Resilient people, outstanding Leaders, and World-Class teams.
Having trained and coached over 10,000 people, Dr. Finn and his colleagues work with global businesses, high-growth start-ups, individuals, elite athletes, coaches and teams, leading educational institutes, families, the UK government, and think tanks. For podcast episodes and free resources, visit: tougherminds.co.uk.
Originally Released On 14 June 2022