Sleepertember
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As I’ve grown in various aspects of self-awareness, one thing that’s become more and more clear is how much the quality of my sleep impacts the quality of my life.
This Suffertember I’m recommitting to a bunch of my sleep goals. In the grand tradition of everything being an especially bad pun, I’m calling it Sleepertember.
Routine
My overall goal is to have an average sleep score of 90+ for the month. My plan for this is mostly just to stick the routine of things that I’ve found most impactful for sleep quality:
no coffee, sweets, or fried food
6:15 AM: bed/apartment warm up
6:30 AM: alarm
6:31 AM: out of bed
7:00 PM: no more food
7:30-8 PM: finish pre-sleep hydration
8:00 PM: lights off, candlelight only
8:30 PM: no more work
9:00 PM: magnesium tea
9:30 PM: take 300 µg melatonin
10:00 PM: 20 min yoga nidra in bed
10:30 PM: asleep
The more sensitive I’ve become to this the more I feel like Taravangian—the king who wakes up every morning with a different IQ and then has to plan his day based on that. Also good sleep seems to be one of the strongest mediators of warmth and responsiveness for me. When I haven’t slept well it feels so much harder to deeply connect with others.
Might skip this one. But recently have noticed that if I time melatonin right it gives me a short window (~45 min later) where I’m drowsy enough to fall asleep quickly, and that seems to be correlated with my sleep quality. To expand a bit, an important tenet of CBTi is to not get in bed until you feel tired, but this never works for me because even the act of standing up and walking to bed is often enough to wake me up again. Then I lay in bed and don’t fall asleep quickly which is bad for sleep hygiene. Melatonin might be a fix for that, although I’ve definitely noticed overuse of melatonin seems to quickly begin to negatively impact my sleep too…