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Way back in high school, I was a great sleeper.
No matter what time I went to bed I would fall asleep with relative ease, and sleep soundly through the night.
In college, despite being in great physical shape, I noticed this wonderful gift slowly slipping away from me. And by the time I reached my late 20’s my erratic sleep was a serious problem.
I’ve recently made some changes that have been an enormous help, but I want to wait to write about them until I see how long lasting the effect ends up being.
In the meantime, I feel I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my own experience about what leads to a bad night’s sleep. By comparing my best sleep periods with my worst, I have direct and powerful observational evidence on what works and what doesn’t.
Why Sleep Got Harder
Sleep, as you probably know, is not something to take lightly. It plays a vital role in a variety of health-related systems throughout your body— everything from hormone regulation, immune health, heart health, and memory function are deeply tied back to the quality and duration of your sleep.
It wasn’t until the past few years when periods of bad sleep resulted in me walking around for days at a time in a thick brain fog that I began to take it more seriously in my own life.
Thankfully, for the vast majority of us, sleep is something our bodies can manage perfectly well on its own under the right conditions. It’s only in this crazy modern world, where we’ve drastically altered our environments, that problems start arising for most.
That means that better sleep is likely far simpler than you realize. It’s just about removing the obstacles that you’ve put in the way of your body doing what it already knows how to do.
In the rest of this post I’ll highlight some of the obstacles, or enemies as I like to call them, that have correlated most strongly with my worst sleeping stretches.
I hope you can learn from my mistakes, just as I am.
5 Enemies That Keep You From Sleeping Well
Not winding down your mind at the end of the day.
I’m an easily excitable person, and so it’s not hard for me to get really amped up by some project or idea I’m currently working on. This is a gift during the daytime, but a curse if it happens right before bed.
You know how a child feels the night before Christmas, and they can’t fall asleep, this is kind of the way I get when I’m really excited to keep working on something the next day. While it’s nearly impossible to reign in these emotions once they get going, I’ve found that I can refuse to open that box in my mind when it’s past a certain hour.
Why don’t I? I suppose it’s too enjoyable in the moment, but the price I pay the next day just isn’t worth it— and more importantly, the toll it takes on my long-term health is not one I’m willing to pay anymore.
Bringing your phone into bed.
I feel silly even writing this one. By now, it’s probably obvious to anyone with an internet connection that taking your phone into bed with you is a recipe for bad sleep. Not only does the blue light from your device mess with your circadian rhythm, mindlessly scrolling on your phone is like pulling a slot machine— it’s so hard to stop when you’re enjoying those easy hits of dopamine.
I’m embarrassed to admit the number of different excuses I’ve come up with to myself about why I haven’t just stopped this habit cold turkey, but the truth is, it’s hard to give up things you enjoy in the moment for a payout that happens later.
Not getting enough sunlight during the daytime.
Like many of you, my job requires me to be at a computer all day. And let’s face it, taking your laptop outside to work, even for us work-from-homers, isn’t ideal except for maybe a handful of days each year.
If you work the standard 9-5 and sleep eight hours a night, that means you aren’t getting much sunlight unless you are very intentional about the other hours of your day. This winter, for example, I had multiple stretches where I wasn’t outside in the direct sun for days at a time. I would exercise indoors, eat indoors, walk to my car and drive to another indoor location, but never stop and bask in those glorious rays.
The CDC says that getting bright light throughout the day, but particularly in the morning hours, has a powerful effect on our circadian rhythm, helping us to fall asleep earlier in the evenings.
Being stressed, preoccupied, or stuck inside your own head.
If you would have asked me a year ago I would have said that I rarely deal with stress. By most standards, my life is relatively free of external sources of stress, and I didn’t “feel” stressed, and so I figured by simple math that I wasn’t stressed.
I don’t remember the exact moment, but I do remember a few times where I had been stuck inside my head thinking about some problem I was trying to solve, and noticed that my body was displaying all the symptoms of being stressed: shallow breathing, elevated heart rate, insomnia, and irritability.
What I learned is that stress is all about how you respond to a situation in your life when you don’t feel in control. It might be a relatively small thing in the big picture, but it can still cause real stress, if you don’t have good management of your emotions.
The point is, stress is sometimes not as obvious as you might think. Or maybe it’s just me. But either way, stress releases cortisol throughout to make you alert for potential dangers, which is great, but this makes it really hard to sleep. And constantly being in a state of high alert puts your overall health at risk.
Lack of physical and mental effort throughout the day.
On days when I really exert myself physically, or when I’m really focused at work for the vast majority of the day, I know I sleep better. A 2017 meta-analysis of the literature, seems to back up my experience— sedentary behavior is really bad for sleep.
One hard truth I’ve had to address in my life is that I can sometimes fall into patterns of laziness. Instead of rising to occasion and approaching life proactively, I’ll find myself doing the minimum to get by without too much hassle. I think this is a pattern I learned back in school because good grades came so easily to me, but it’s one I’m actively working to improve about myself.
Like most of the items on this list, not only does the behavior lead to bad sleep, but bad sleep seems to reinforce these unhelpful habits in my life.
Prioritizing good sleep really is one of the best investments you can make in your entire life. I hope you’ll join me in fighting against these common enemies of good sleep and turning a new leaf today.
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