Matthew Walker, PhD is a sleep scientist. I first heard about him on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I credit his interviews and his book Why We Sleep with kicking me into high gear to improve my sleep. If you don’t have time to read his book, at least carve out 19 minutes and listen to his TED talk Sleep is your superpower.
As @abrahamKim pointed out, sleep is the fundamental pillar that provides the foundation for health.
Last night I achieved a sleep score of 91 (out of 100) as measured by my Oura ring. I slept for a total of 7h 49m. My sleep wasn’t always this good, and even now there are nights when it’s not great. But I can usually pinpoint behaviors or factors that contributed to a poor night of sleep. As Matthew pointed out at the end of his talk, one major key is consistency. You need a sleep schedule in which you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, seven days a week. None of this, “I’ll catch up on the weekends.” I realize this is difficult. For many people, life gets in the way. You owe it to yourself to do anything you can to improve the quality of your sleep.
Rather than repeat what I have previously written about sleep, I’ll just link to those posts (channeling @lucjah for a brief moment) in case you want to go down the rabbit hole.
The most important question when you wake up
6-11-20
A year ago I was very focused on sleep. I will admit I don’t obsess about sleep as much as I used to because I have it dialed in. I should have written my book while I was in the middle of all the sleep improvements. Now that I’m not obsessing about it, I don’t have the motivation to finish it (among other reasons). Lesson learned.
I still think sleep is very important. In fact, if someone asks for advice about how to improve his or her health, I would say start with sleep. Sleep is the foundation and then build on that with diet second and physical activity last.
One of the key concepts I learned while improving my sleep is that there was a lot of experimentation and use of gadgets and techniques, but in the end, it boiled down primarily to habits. You might need some help with supplements or gadgets, but over the long term, you should not need all that extra stuff as long as you establish good habits. Keeping the same sleep schedule seven days a week is one of the big ones. Getting sunlight exposure is another one. Cutting off calories several hours before night-night is also a good one.
I think I have sleep as close as I can get to set it and forget it.