How to Put Your Bad Sleep Habits to Rest

The following is adapted from Unstoppable.

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me how important it was to get enough sleep, but by the time I was a young man, I had forgotten her wisdom. The most important thing to me was work. When I started my company, I provided 24/7 customer service to small businesses, and incoming calls went directly to my cell phone. I would answer every call—even if it was in the middle of the night. Sleep was something I thought I could catch up on when I was dead. If I wanted to be successful, I thought, there was no time for rest! 

While I don’t deny that starting a business requires long hours and a lot of work, and probably some sleepless nights, I can’t help but wonder how much more optimal I could have been had I focused on taking better care of myself. I wanted to be unstoppable, and thought I was—for a time. But because of my lack of sleep and poor diet, it eventually caught up with me. I regularly experienced frequent brain fog and, at times, struggled to focus. 

So, how do you know if you’re getting the right amount of sleep? And how can optimizing your sleep rhythms and cycles give you the life boost that you need? Let’s dig into that.

A Common Story

Unfortunately, my story is all too common. Research shows that around seventy million adults in the US suffer from sleep disorders. Which isn’t surprising, since we humans have practically made an art form of delaying natural sleep. Many of us sacrifice healthy habits to pursue other goals, dreams, or outcomes, or we simply get caught up in the buzz of distractions like social media, web browsing, movies, or gaming. 

However, despite their allure, none of those distractions will be able to put back into your life all that they take away from it. Chronic lack of sleep can impact everything from your ability to make better choices related to your diet and having enough energy to move your body, to reducing inflammation and decreasing your risk for metabolic disorders. On the other hand, when you get enough sleep, it’s easier to focus, make better decisions, and be more present in your relationships and daily activities.

Sleep is one of the main areas where there’s the potential for a huge return on your investment of time and effort. Nail this part of your health, and you’ll find yourself functioning better in every other aspect of your life, too. That’s why, if you really want to become unstoppable, you’ve got to make a commitment to optimizing your sleep.

Of course, the definition of “optimal sleep” is different for everyone, so you might have to experiment a bit before you’ll be able to determine the right amount of sleep for your body and what works best for you in your sleep environment. But once you figure it out, you will be well on your way to living a fuller, healthier life. 

Identifying Your Sleep Rhythm

If you want to improve your sleep, it’s important to know some basics: when should I go to bed, and when should I wake up? All humans follow a “circadian rhythm” that dictates when we go to sleep, when we wake up, and when we eat. Our circadian rhythm is produced in large part by natural processes in the human body, but it can also be influenced by external forces, like light.

For millions of years, our ancestors evolved in response to the largest natural source of external light there is, the sun. It dictated sleeping patterns by interacting with our optic nerve, which sends a signal to the brain to go to sleep.

But a funny thing has started to happen in recent history: in addition to responding to natural light sources like the sun, our bodies have begun responding to artificial sources of light like computer, phone, and television screens. By interacting with our optic nerves, these artificial sources of light are able to send signals to our brain to delay sleep.

Besides being terribly confusing for your body—which is trying very hard to prepare itself for rest—our nighttime screen time is actively withholding the release of melatonin, resetting our natural circadian rhythm, and changing our bodies. Over time, this can have massively negative effects on a host of physiological processes, including the regulation of hormones like cortisol, leptin, and ghrelin.

Optimizing Your Sleep Rhythms

So, what should you do? 

Go to bed early and get up early. Sounds extreme, but if you’re trying to tap into your body’s natural circadian rhythm, there’s really no need to ever go to bed later than 9:00 or 9:30, the latest. In general, the more you can get back in line with the rising and setting of the sun, the more you’ll tap into your body’s natural routine. But no matter the schedule you establish, try to stick to it on weekends, too. The more your body becomes patterned, the more you’ll optimize your quality of sleep. 

The more you can stay on the same pattern and schedule, the more you’ll wake up naturally, without the aid of an alarm clock. Aim for eight to nine hours per night. Personally, I go to bed at the same time every night, and there are very few circumstances where I’ve got to use an alarm because I get up so early every day. My body is in its natural rhythm and, as a result, wakes up when it’s supposed to wake up. 

If you’re interested in experimenting with this (and I highly recommend you do), aim to implement this practice for a few weeks while tracking how your body feels at one-week intervals. What changes do you feel outside of simply getting more sleep? Are you more productive at work? Do you have a better ability to focus?

Optimizing Your Sleep Stages

If you’ve improved your sleep rhythms, then you’re probably well on your way to getting more rest. But there’s one more aspect to sleep that you should consider: how well am I sleeping? The quality of your sleep can have just as much effect as the quantity. 

There are three different stages of sleep: REM, deep sleep, and light sleep. When you sleep for a total of nine hours, you cycle through all three stages multiple times. While it’s well established that humans cycle through each stage while sleeping, what’s not clear is how much sleep you need in each stage for optimal rest. Sleep aids and drugs affect these stages and so does your bedtime. That’s because the most restorative and important sleep happens between 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.—and those are absolute times. You don’t get the same benefits if you go to bed at 11:00 p.m. and sleep just as long—you miss out on the deep sleep. It’s a phenomenon that goes back to how humans evolved.

There are some arguments about whether or not sleep stages are important, but I track them because I was one of those people who often woke up feeling like I wasn’t well-rested or rejuvenated, even after eight or nine hours of sleep. I participated in both in-lab and at-home clinical testing, tracking sleep every night for more than a year. I continue to track sleep with my Oura ring because some of the deeper information has been interesting, but the most important measurement is simply how you feel in the morning. Generally speaking, the more REM and deep sleep you can get, the better. 

If you’re going to experiment with optimizing your sleep, there’s one piece of advice that’s more important than any other: don’t overthink it. Most of what we do during our waking hours—move our bodies, eat whole foods, avoid alcohol, take a few key supplements, and so on—has more potential to improve our sleep than the majority of crazy contraptions or devices that claim to enhance our sleep. Move your body during the day, eat whole foods, avoid alcohol, and abstain from eating within three hours of your bedtime. While it might be uncomfortable and challenging to not stare at your phone before bed or to refrain from turning the television on to numb your mind, these small changes have potential for producing major magical moments. In time, you’ll get used to it and finally be able to tap into the natural rhythm of your body.

For more advice on sleep, you can find Unstoppable on Amazon.

David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur who launched several companies before he began high school. David spent his youth working more than one hundred hours a week, until he realized the toll it was taking on his mind, body, and life. After failing to see results from conventional wisdom, he decided to do what he does best: innovate. His unique journey to wellness has helped him realize his life’s purpose of empowering others to optimize their own lives by reclaiming their health. As David continues to evolve, he receives tremendous support from his partner, Dawn, and their three inspiring children.