Comment by xeromal
2 years ago
I think you have a key component in good sleep but there are 2 more imo.
The first is that phones and light break our natural sleepiness triggers and the second is that we don't exercise our bodies enough because of our sedentary lifetstyle.
I used to struggle with terrible insomnia and I still get bouts of it time to time but I've also found it's related to my laxing my 3 rules.
If I have a good workout about 5x a week, I turn off my phone and the lights 30 minutes before bed and take a good long shower in the dark and I have a regular alarm set at 7am that goes off 7 days a week, I'm almost guaranteed a good nights sleep every night. It also had the added affect of ridding me of my night terrors and sleep walking I used to have frequently but I'm 90% certain that was correlated to me using my phone in bed and it causing my brain to enter a weird state where it never really turned off.
I'm going to "yes, and" this with just one more thing that may seem obvious: almost any amount of alcohol is enough to throw that pattern out of whack.
The older I get the more reluctant I am to make the trade. Few glasses of wine with friends is hard to pass up though :)
I do none of those things and have great sleep.
Shutting off your phone and lights early is especially smart. It lets your mind and body transition smoothly into rest mode
I think it makes the biggest difference out of my habits. I kind of picked up on it when I realized that I never struggled to sleep when I went camping out in the woods. My body would instantly fall into sleepiness when it got dark out because I had no artificial light keeping me up as well as no easy access entertainment like TV
In these conditions, your body just knows when to shut down and recharge