7 Ways You Might Be Inadvertently Sabotaging a Good Night’s Sleep
Sleep is the cousin of death, wise men have said. Strange thought it may seem, though, avoiding this sometimes annoyingly-insistent-that-you-hang-out cousin will actually bring you closer to an early death. It’s not a pleasant thing to consider, but it’s the truth; bad sleep is associated strongly with early mortality, being overweight, having metabolic syndrome, and getting cancer. I’ve said it, your doctor says it, and anyone who’s ever had a bad night’s sleep and felt like death the next day will say it: sleep is absolutely essential to happiness, health, and longevity. On the positive side, there’s nothing quite so pleasurable as a good night’s sleep, from the initial application of one’s head to the pillow, to the insanely vivid dream-visions that descend upon you in the midst of it, to the peerless happiness and boundless energy you feel upon waking. Sleep’s the best, so you want to get it, and get it good.
You know it, of course. I harp on it enough. And chances are, you’re doing your part to get good sleep. But what if you can’t? What if sleep is bad, or inadequate, or unfulfilling? What might be causing it? Let’s find out.
You’re not getting any light during the day.
If you’ve read what I’ve written about blue light and sleep, you’re likely a champ with regards to blue light avoidance after dark. You’ve got the orange goggles. You’ve installed F.lux on all your computers (and you even jailbroke your iPhone to make it work there, too). You’ve set up black-out shades in your bedroom, and you’ve ditched the alarm clock with its blinking disruptive lights in favor of a personal rooster. And yet you still can’t get to sleep… what gives? Well, just as avoiding blue light after dark is important for normalizing your circadian rhythms and getting to sleep, exposing yourself to light during the day is also essential. Light’s entrainment capabilities go both ways. The whole problem with light at night is that it’s tricking your body into thinking it’s daytime. When it’s actually daytime, however, you need light. The whole daylong circadian cycle is important for sleep – not just the small snapshot taken right before bed. Try to get some sunlight on your eyes throughout the day, beginning (ideally) with the early morning. Right after you wake, go outside and take in the sun. Drink your coffee outside, or at least at a window facing the sun. At work, go outdoors for your breaks. Don’t say shut-in if you can help it.
You’re eating too late.
Remember the “early bird gets the worm”? The bird doesn’t have an actual alarm clock (trees don’t have power sources, duh!). By eating early in the morning, it has entrained its circadian rhythm to trigger early waking so as to obtain said food. This doesn’t just happen in birds, either. Rodent and primate studies show that feeding time is a powerful entrainer of the circadian rhythm, probably across species lines. In humans, the presence of C-peptide, which shows up after food intake and helps insulin do its job, strongly correlates with lower levels of melatonin. This suggests that eating depresses melatonin, the sleep hormone necessary for getting us ready to sleep. Couple that potential mechanism with the epidemiology of nocturnal eating being associated with negative effects on sleep quality, and you get a sneaking suspicion that eating late at night might be affecting some people’s ability to get a good night’s sleep.
You’re hewing to the popular advice to “stop eating carbs after 6 PM!”
Anytime I find myself thumbing through a Men’s Health or Shape or any other bad mainstream health and fitness magazine, I seem to stumble across this rule: no carbs after 6 PM. They’re usually imploring you to take this step in order to facilitate fat loss (which is false in and of itself), rather than to improve sleep quality. I’m all for the reduction in unnecessary carbohydrate from our diets, but if you’re going to eat carbs, sleep research indicates there’s absolutely no need to avoid them after dark or even right before bed. Heck, they can even be fast-digesting carbs, as one recent study showed that carbs with a higher glycemic index shortened sleep onset at night (people who ate the fastest-digesting carbs fell asleep faster than the people who ate the slow digesting carbs). So, if you’ve been avoiding all carbs after dark and eating them in the morning (to “provide energy”), you have probably been doing your sleep a disservice. If you’re gonna eat carbs, eat them at night. You should probably stop reading bad mainstream fitness magazines, too.
You’re exercising right before bed and failing to give yourself time to recover.
At night, your body reduces its temperature, and this drop in body temperature has been referred to as a physiological initiation of sleep onset and facilitator of entrance into the deeper phases. Since exercise raises body temperature, one wonders whether it could affect your sleep. In one study, researchers examined the effects of exercise on sleep with and without body cooling. Subjects ran for 40 minutes at 75% of their V02max on two occasions. The first time, the ambient temperature was raised, prompting a 2.3 degree C increase in subjects’ rectal temperatures. The second time, the ambient temperature was reduced, prompting just a 1 degree C increase in rectal temperatures. At rectal temperature +2.3, slow wave sleep (the deepest, most restorative portion of sleep) was increased. At rectal temperature +1, slow wave sleep was unaffected. This might sound like a big win for exercise-induced elevated body temperatures, but too much of a necessary thing isn’t always desirable. You want to maintain proper ratios between the various sleep cycles, and, as Dr. Emily Deans writes, spending too much time in slow wave sleep is typical of people with bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder, who often complain of lethargy, hunger, and weight gain. If you’re going to work out right before bed, give yourself time to cool off, perhaps with a cool shower, or move your workout to an earlier time.
You’re taking vitamin D too late in the day.
When you think about light and food and activity as entrainers of our circadian rhythms, that the timing of our supplementation with vitamin D might affect our sleep makes intuitive sense. Because what is vitamin D but an indication of daylight, of bright morning or afternoon sun emanating UV rays? If getting sunlight “tells” our body that it’s daytime, perhaps taking vitamin D sends a similar message. Although there’s no clinical trial showing this effect, Seth Roberts has been receiving accounts from readers who modified the quality and duration of their sleep by changing when they took vitamin D. Tara Grant, one of our biggest success stories and the first person to notify Seth, chronicled her experiences on her blog:
I looked aghast at the 10,000 units of Vitamin D I was taking. It was 7 o’clock at night! I was essentially giving my body 15 minutes worth of bright sunlight energy. No wonder I was waking up in the middle of the night! I was telling my body that it wasn’t really time for bed, it was still the middle of the day.
I’m not surprised, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this worked for the diligent, dutiful Primal eater who’s been doing everything right but who gets bad sleep. And hey, say you try it and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on your sleep? No harm done. It’s worth a shot.
You don’t have a nighttime ritual.
I’ve spoken before about the importance of ritual in our lives and our development as a species. What about the importance of ritual in sleep? Any parents out there know how crucial it is to establish a nighttime routine with children so that both child and parent get better and more regular sleep, and I’d argue that all humans – especially modern ones – could use some sort of nighttime ritual to wind the night down and get ready for sleep. It might feel a bit odd at first, because you’re consciously directing your focus toward something that normally comes natural. But today’s world is different. It’s got different stressors – and more of them. It’s got more stimulation – from lights, from sounds, from advertising, from the Internet. We need to force ourselves to unwind. So, about an hour to two hours before your desired bedtime, start winding down. “Winding down” will look different for everyone, since what winds me down won’t necessarily wind you down. What’s important is that you feel rested, relaxed, and calm. I like chatting with my wife about our days in bed with a good book at my side amidst dim, soft light; that seems to wind me down and get me ready to sleep. You might find a fifteen minute session of stretching does the trick for you, or cleaning the kitchen, or taking a warm shower, or praying to your deity of choice. Whatever it is, find it, and do it on a regular basis so that your body begins to associate it with the onset of sleep.
You’re still staying up too late.
I don’t care how orange your goggles are at night. I don’t care if you’re staying up late to read about health and fitness and evolutionary nutrition. You’re still staying up way too late. If you’re fighting yawns and relaying to your Skype chat buddies just how exhausted you are, why the heck aren’t you sleeping? Your body can try to get you to go to sleep all it wants, it can secrete enough melatonin to fill a shot glass, but if you consciously make the decision to stay up and do whatever it is that’s somehow so important, you’re not going to sleep and you will suffer for your lack of it. Your conscious self is the ultimate arbiter of your day to day decisions. Hormones and neurotransmitters and the like have their say and can nudge you in various directions, but you have to decide to close the laptop, turn off the light, shut down the television, and lay your head down to sleep.
That’s it for today, folks. I hope these tips hit home! Sleep is a tricky one to tackle, mostly because it seems like the realities of modern life run counter to our need and desire for it, but it doesn’t have to be (and, if we care about our health, we have to figure it out!). Feel free to leave anything you’ve learned along the way in the comment section!
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
Great article mark but i have a question to ask if i may? What is the primal position on napping during the day?
Napping after lunch or during the heat of the day is common in equatorial mammals, humans included. It improves mood, lowers stress, and improves your decision making through the rest of the day. If you need a REM cycle in the middle of the day you aren’t getting enough sleep at night, but there is nothing wrong with a 15-30 minute power-nap during the day.
OR you have two young kids who wake you up on occasion throughout the night…
I wonder about native peoples such as the Inuit that live near the north pole and experience either very long days or nights, depending on the season.
I haven’t slept through a whole night–7 to 8 hours–since I can’t remember. But it seems to be a family thing. My sister is the same way as is my older brother. I fall asleep easily and quickly, wake up 2 to 3 hours later, go back to sleep, wake up 2 hours later. Then I have a harder time going baack to sleep. After 3 or 4 hours sleep it takes me an hour or more to go back to sleep sometimes. I’m new to primal but it does seem if I eat carbs, especially the naughty kind, an hour or so before bedtime (between 8:30 and 9) that I sleep longer, like 4 to 5 hours before waking up.
I don’t use blackout curtains–kind of hard to get that fresh night breeze in the room that way. Grok and family probably had firelight/glowing embers, starlight and moonlight to deal with. And from the slight amount of research I’ve done, I don’t think that paleo man (and woman) died betweent the ages of 30 and 40.
I once did some research on the longevity of famous people from the 1600′s through the early 1800′s and found that quite a few of them lived well into their 70′s and 80′s. No antibiotics, no modern medicines, no central head and air, etc. But also, not modern processed foods and no modern lighting or TV, ergo, probably more sleep.
Oh well, I’m 65. If my sleep patterns shorten my life, maybe I’ll only live to be 82 instead of 85.
Maybe the reasons aren’t physical at all: I went through several years of very, very poor sleep. In fact, it got so bad I had suicidal thoughts. Slowly it began to dawn on me that I couldn’t have one way of being all during the day then expect to have a good night’s sleep. I started to train myself to be during the day the kind of person who could have a good night’s sleep. I stopped the worrying, the hustle, the aggressiveness. I began to practice forgiveness, meditation and visualization and my sleep changed for the better. Then I left my job and moved to another area. And my sleep improved even more. As the years went by I worked on myself more and more and my old self was slowly left behind and now I always sleep like a baby.
My message is: don’t be so quick to think EVERYTHING is a matter of food or physical environment. It’s not.
That’s a very prescient thought. I’m going to tuck that away to ruminate on if I have trouble sleeping, thanks!
“to be during the day the kind of person who could have a good night’s sleep.” Those are words to live by. Thank you.
I always take D3 right before bed and have no problems with sleeping what so ever. either my bodies different or you guys are making D3 into a villain againts sleep for no reason.
Our new hot tub is salt water, same as swimming pool. 15 minutes of a 105 degree soak is like taking a heavy-duty sleeping pill. Also, take magnesium with dinner.
I’m 57. For most of my adult life, I’ve slept poorly. Tried all of Mark’s suggestions and more. But for the past 2 months, I’ve been sleeping as well as I did when I was a kid.
What made the difference?
1) Becoming fat adapted, so I no longer wake up hungry in the middle of the night.
2) 3000 mg glycine powder and 1 tablespoon gelatin, which I dissolve in warm bone broth and drink a half hour before bed.
For the first time in my adult life, I’m able to keep a regular sleep schedule (10pm to 5:30am) and am not sleepy during the day. On occasion, evening activities keep me up a bit late, but I sleep so well that I easily get by on 6-6.5 hours of sleep.
For all of you who are asking about napping and interrupted sleep patterns, try this post that Mark did back in June on biphasic sleep. It should put your minds at ease. https://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-conduct-a-personal-experiment-biphasic-sleeping/ There is a link in it to another post about biphasic sleep from February 2011.
I am surprised that Mark did not mention the effects of alcohol on sleep. Drinking too much seems to be what causes more sleep issues for me than anything else.
I’d like to share a recent addition to my life that has made a huge difference with sleep.
I recently bought a new product by Phillips called Hue. It is a wireless hub connected to special LED lightbulbs. It allows you, through your smartphone, tablet, or computer, to control the color and brightness of any of these specialized bulbs.
I have mine set to emit a dim, orange-hued light in the evening, and the one in my bedroom has a bedtime setting that is even dimmer.
Earlier in the day, the lights can be set to a bluer end of the spectrum, to better simulate natural light.
I have found that this has really helped me on the sleep front. The starter pack is only being sold at Apple stores (of all places) right now, and while it is more expensive than regular bulbs, it has been very much worth it to me. The starter pack is the hub and 3 bulbs for $199. These are LED bulbs however, and use much less energy than the old bulbs, last longer, and produce virtually no heat.
The software at the moment isn’t the best, but it works well for the basics. The good news is that it will only improve as people start developing for this product as it is open-source.
Check out the website here: http://www.meethue.com/en-US
And for the nocturnal folks, does the red hue of sunrise usually tell you it’s bedtime? It does to me…
My current routine works wonders for my energy and sleep at night:
Breakfast: Meat+ a piece of fruit + some nuts
Lunch: Veggies and protein
Dinner: Sweet potatoes or rice, cooked veggies, light protein and a piece of tropical fruit. Throw in some magnesium and snooze!
Natural sleep is something I wonder about: I’m 100% compliant where nutrition, physical activity, play and stress are concerned, but my work schedule dictates that I wake up in the dark. I get up at 3:30am every day, and then walk 45 minutes in the dark to work. Is waking up in the dark every day a cause for concern? I am guessing that it’s okay, because I feel pretty good most of the time and I really enjoy my pre-dawn alone time.
I just laugh every time I read Mark’s recommendation to wake up to the sun and get sunlight during the day. I live just north of Seattle in what’s called the convergence zone. Nuf said!
Ugh, I thought I had it bad up here in the Northeast. I haven’t been affected personally by Sandy and Athena, but it’s made for some miserable, gray days. Top that off with “fall back,” and I pretty much guarantee that while I might still be going to work in the daylight, I’m coming home at sunset. At this time of year, my job is primarily indoors, so I’m just looking more and more into sunlight simulators because it is SEVERE how different my mood is when the sun is present.
I don’t know how ANY of the test subjects managed to fall asleep while researchers were taking their rectal temperatures.
Exactly! haha. Highway to nightmare zone.
What about living on the west coast where it’s been dark and raining since fall started…I find it very hard and depressing at times. I’ve been thinking of going to tanning booths…any thoughts on that one? I’m definitely not getting enough light during the day.
Get good rain gear and get outside whenever you can to enjoy the beautiful scenery.
I have a dog and I take long walks rain or shine. I also have an outdoorsy job, not a desk job…
What kind of cruel study opts to use rectal thermometers with all the technology today? haha
Interesting I was just looking at the various posts put out today and yours was right in line with mine. Great read.
People are overstimulated. So right about winding down. Shut the TV/computer/Iphone off an hour before. Read a book. It’s surprising how quick you run out of gas.
I have a question about winter time sleep. It gets dark around 6 and light 630am. My husband doesn’t even get home till 7p and dinner then so we can eat together as a family. I’m sure this has been addressed before and I’d be happy for a link
thx all
You must live closer to the equator, 6-6:30 with the sun is just setting! I say eat as a family if possible. If you have little kids, then maybe feed them and send them to bed. Nothing like a grown up dinner with your partner and quiteness.
Caffeine is the biggest disruptor of my quality of sleep…too much during the day causes me to have restless sleep, and I feel wired when I wake up. No caffeine = best sleep. Also if I’m having trouble sleeping, a bit of Niacinamide or Niacin (B-3) will have me sleeping like a baby. Magnesium works too – I find Mag. works on the muscles, while B-3 calms the mind/nervous system.
Or maybe the exercise-before-sleep test subjects couldn’t slumber due to the paranoid thought of more rectal thermometers.
I believe that about Vitamin D. When i take my Fish Oil Capsules, that contain lots of Vitamin D as well, shortly before I go to sleep I can’t feel asleep for hours.
Really grest article Mark…but I didn’t see “You have small children” on the sabotaging list (my default excuse for fatigue haha).
We definitely need to stop overlooking the cyclic relationship between sleep and obesity (i.e. sleep deprivation supports weight gain, and then weight gain makes us more sleep deprived).
Either way, it really is amazing how responsive our bodies are to such subtle (sub conscious) cues throughout the day
So, apparently segmented sleep (like waking at 3 a.m.) is perfectly natural. The important thing is that your sleeps are good quality. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19ekirch.html?_r=2
Regarding Mark’s first bullet point, I have to go to work before it gets light, then I work inside all day in a Hospital. Usually no chance to get daily sunlight on winter workdays! I invested in a Happy Lite to use in my bathroom on workday mornings when I’m getting ready. It works wonders!
I really struggle to get into a good sleep routine at college. I wanted to ask for the opinion of others. I can get to bed by around 10:30 – 11 on weeknights, but the weekends just really throw me off because I’m up so late. Would it be better to force myself to wake up early on weekends so that my schedule stays together, or is it more important that I actually do get the sleep on weekends but have trouble getting into a routine?
When I was eating wheat, I could sleep 16 hours a day. When I was eating lots of rice and no wheat, and walking 5 miles every morning, I slept 8 hours a night but had no energy in the early evening. Now that I am eating primal, pretty strictly, I sleep seven hours per night and, work out 5 mornings a week, and never run out of energy until 10:30 pm, when I shut down. If I eat sardines in the evening (I never ate sardines before PB) I get such an energy boost that I often go to the gym.
The Discovery Science channel once aired a show on sleep. If you need an alarm clock to get up, regardless if you are a morning person or not, it was a sign you did not get enough sleep.