Convincing people that sleep is a problem worth caring about is half the battle.
There are many resources available that get into the practical/tactical aspect of improving sleep. But if you don't believe sleep is a problem yet, you won't seek those out.
The Huberman Lab has put out a number of good resources for this [0] including a podcast episode speaking with Matt Walker, PhD, sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep [1] (also a good read).
I've been a night owl for most of my life, and only more recently did I fully realize how connected this behavior was to traumatic situations growing up. When I started going down the rabbit hole on how to improve sleep, it was encouraging to find the emergence of a ton of practical non-pharmaceutical resources (I did try sleep aids for awhile, but couldn't deal with the side effects).
The hard part is that it does require willingness to implement real changes. They're not pleasant at first, but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
I started this journey by setting a goal for myself to see/photograph a sunrise. I now regularly take pre-dawn walks and have seen more sunrises in the past few weeks than I had during the prior 30+ years of my life.
> but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
You also seem to sleep an hour more, so some changes you experienced might be due to that.
Prior to implementing bigger changes, I tried many things to make my late nights “work”, including trying to sleep more.
Sleeping longer while going to bed later didn’t help much with quality (deep and REM phases were poor/short), and was also difficult to achieve for practical reasons.
I took about 3 months to fully shift the schedule, and I was tracking stats along the way. I started to notice improvements once my average bedtime was closer to midnight.
Once I hit that point, I kept shifting earlier because I wanted the benefit of the morning solitude that comes with getting up earlier. But sleep quality kept improving as well.
Huberman and Walker cover some of this in the linked materials, but “The Mind After Midnight: Nocturnal Wakefulness, Behavioral Dysregulation, and Psychopathology” [0] is a pretty interesting review of the literature on this.
In short, we’re becoming increasingly aware of the impact of light throughout the day on the body’s circadian rhythm. Bottom line: natural selection didn’t design to be up throughout the night.
As for the benefits I’ve personally noticed:
- I’m significantly clearer in the head throughout the day and feel more able to make better choices during the day (about food, time spent, etc)
- My mental/emotional state has improved, and I have more capacity to deal with challenging emotions
- Increasingly (this has been shifting steadily) I start each day ready to tackle the hard stuff and I don’t have to use as much willpower
- This is the other side of the “mental/emotional” item but I generally feel happier, or have more capacity to experience happy feelings
- There is also a body of research about getting morning sunlight in your eyes, and I’ve found that on days that I do, I sleep much better. Sleep tracking confirms this. Having a science-backed reason to witness/enjoy the sunrise is nice on mornings when my body just wants to stay in bed.
More generally, such a question is starting to look like similar to questions about a healthy/balanced diet: some of the benefits can be experienced now, but prevention of long term issues is just as important. The links between lack of healthy sleep and degenerative brain issues later in life (dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc) seem to be getting stronger based on recent research.
There are many resources available that get into the practical/tactical aspect of improving sleep. But if you don't believe sleep is a problem yet, you won't seek those out.
The Huberman Lab has put out a number of good resources for this [0] including a podcast episode speaking with Matt Walker, PhD, sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep [1] (also a good read).
I've been a night owl for most of my life, and only more recently did I fully realize how connected this behavior was to traumatic situations growing up. When I started going down the rabbit hole on how to improve sleep, it was encouraging to find the emergence of a ton of practical non-pharmaceutical resources (I did try sleep aids for awhile, but couldn't deal with the side effects).
The hard part is that it does require willingness to implement real changes. They're not pleasant at first, but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
I started this journey by setting a goal for myself to see/photograph a sunrise. I now regularly take pre-dawn walks and have seen more sunrises in the past few weeks than I had during the prior 30+ years of my life.
It's worth the effort.
- [0] https://hubermanlab.com/toolkit-for-sleep/
- [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep