5 Enemies of Good Sleep

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 that this wonderful gift was slowly slipping away from me. And by the time I reached my late 20s, 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’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.Why Sleep Got HarderSleep, as you probably know, is not something to take lightly. It plays a vital role in core systems throughout your body—everything from hormone regulation to immune health, heart health, and memory function is 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 my walking around for days at a time in a thick brain fog that I began to take it more seriously in my own life.Related StoriesFor the fortunate, sleep is something their bodies can manage perfectly well on their own under the right conditions. It’s only in this crazy modern world, when 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’s doing what it already knows how to do.In the rest of this article, I’ll highlight five obstacles, or enemies as I like to call them, that have correlated most strongly with my worst sleeping stretches.Not Winding Down at the End of the DayI’m an easily excitable person, and so it’s not hard for me to get amped up by some project or idea I’m 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. Although it’s nearly impossible to rein 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 keep that box closed by default if I know it will keep me up? 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 the Phone to BedI 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, but also, 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 SunlightLike 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 to 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 during which I wasn’t outside in the direct sun for days at a time. I would exercise indoors, eat indoors, and walk to my car and drive to another indoor location, but I never stopped and bask in those glorious rays.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 and PreoccupiedIf you had 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 when 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 emot