Sleeping like a baby 👶? Let’s fix that

Do you want to know something I find funny?

When people say “Oh, I slept like a baby!” they mean they slept well and undisturbed till they woke up. But this is the complete opposite of how babies sleep. They wake up a million times during the night and are terrible at going to sleep when you want them to.

In this day and age where there’s so much to do, sleep has turned into an afterthought. And this is why we burn out so fast.

When was the last time you had a good night’s sleep? A week ago? A month?

No?

Honestly, same.

It’s always been a struggle for me to figure out how to get enough rest and wake up energized and refreshed.

There are multiple factors affecting how you sleep and I asked myself this same question a while back.

What intrigued me

If sleep is necessary to repair your brain and make it revitalized, I wanted to learn the mechanics of sleep (since an average person will sleep for 229,961 hours in their lifetime or basically one-third of their life).

But before I start — how did I get into all this? I had a single mission statement. I want to sleep as little as possible but get the best amount of rest.

Below are a few findings I have found during the past 25 years:

• If I sleep too little — say less than 4 hours I am going to feel drowsy in the middle of the day
• If I sleep too much, more than 7 hours, I am going to feel lethargic and I also end up having spinal issues.

So ideally I should get between 5 hours to 6 hours of sleep. So I would say 5 and a half hours is the ideal time.

Findings

I tracked my sleep patterns for almost a month in order to diagnose the problem.

Below are my findings from the past month:

• I happen to go to sleep close to midnight. I personally thought that I usually go to sleep around 10 in the night but according to the data — I’m basically 2 hours behind schedule.
• I made it a goal to wake up at 3:30 in the morning and I thought I was waking up at that time. But according to my data — I only wake up between 4:30 AM to 4:50 AM. The idea behind waking up at 3:30 AM was to get a good night sleep from 10 PM to 3:30 AM. This would give me 5 and a half hours of sleep.
• I wanted to stay 5 and a half hours in bed and with my data, I realize that I am sleeping for 5 hours on a daily basis. I would like this to improve up to 5 and a half hours.
• The worst stat I have is that my sleep quality is always at around 50%. This doesn’t instill confidence in me at all. I am beginning to question the app I use on the quality part of it and I will monitor the results using two apps to ensure the quality metric is kept.

Learnings

• The biggest learning I’ve realized is that I should aim to go to sleep at 11 and set my alarm to wake up at 4:30. This gives me my target sleep time.
• I should figure out a way to increase my sleep quality

Tips and Tricks to increase Sleep Quality

Sleeping at the same time

I am going to make sure I go to bed at 11 pm every day. This gets a bit difficult with a busy schedule and other materialistic problems. If I have a heavy dinner, I won’t be able to get to bed for 2 hours, thus putting me behind schedule.

Fixing dinner

A tip from the previous point — I should aim to eat dinner at 9 pm. This should be a rule I stick to myself in order to build good habits.

Relaxation

Before I go to sleep — I want to do a ritual set of activities to relax and make sure I fall asleep fast. For this, should perform light stretching, apply my calming balm and then spend about 15 minutes emptying my thoughts. Drinking camomile tea and having a warm bath also helps.

So all together this ritual takes about 30 minutes. With my ritual in place, I would lose 30 minutes from my target sleep time of 5 hours and 30 minutes but I am hoping that this would increase my overall sleep quality.

Environment

Your bedroom plays a huge role in your sleep quality. It needs to be quiet, cool and comfortable. According to experts, the optimum temperature should be 16–18°C (61–64°F). The usual room temperature where I live (Colombo, Sri Lanka) is around 27°C. So having an air-conditioner helps a lot.

Better sleep = quality life

With my new adjustments to my sleep schedule, I have dramatically improved my sleep quality. I feel much refreshed throughout the day. If you haven’t given any thought about sleep and how sleep affects you, I hope with this Read, I have perked your curiosity.