Sleep

The failure of education systems worldwide often lies in their inability to emphasize the critical importance of sleep, food, and exercise. While most people are aware that sleep is important, along with maintaining a healthy diet and exercising, many remain unaware of just how vital these elements are for a successful life.

Sleep is the foundation of a happy and successful life. It is not just important; it is essential. Knowledge allows access to the information needed to make informed decisions in daily life. Unfortunately, misinformation is rampant today, making it difficult to navigate the sea of information. Decades of research, compiled by some of the brightest minds from institutions like Harvard Medical School, reveal the profound impact of sleep on overall well-being.

Matthew Walker's book *"Why We Sleep"* is a powerful resource that highlights the importance of sleep. Sleep is the single most important factor to get right in life, yet more than a third of adults in developed nations fail to obtain the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep each night. This is not an exaggeration. For years, scientists searched for the purpose of sleep. Today, they question if there is anything in the body that does not benefit from sleep.

Sleeping less than six hours a night weakens the immune system, *substantially* increasing the risk of certain cancers. Sleep is a key factor in the development of Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Even moderate reductions in sleep for *one week* can disrupt blood sugar levels to the point where one could be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of blocked and brittle coronary arteries, leading to cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Sleep disruption also contributes to *all* major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.

These links between sleep and disease create a compounded effect: the shorter the sleep, the shorter the life span. The belief that sleeping less is a sign of dedication or productivity is misguided. It may lead to a shorter life and a lower quality of that life. The American Center for Disease Control (CDC) has declared insufficient sleep a public health epidemic, highlighting its widespread impact on personal and financial well-being.

Countries experiencing the most significant decline in sleep time are also seeing the greatest increases in physical diseases and mental disorders. Scientists are advocating for sleep to be *prescribed* by doctors as both a preventative and curative measure—not to be confused with sleeping pills, which should be avoided.

Two critical insights illustrate how a lack of sleep can be fatal. One is a rare disease where the patient stops sleeping, loses *basic* brain and body functions, and dies within a year. The other is the deadly risk of driving while sleep-deprived. Drowsy driving causes hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents and fatalities each year, with one person dying every hour in the U.S. due to fatigue-related errors.

From an evolutionary standpoint, sleep might seem like a foolish biological phenomenon. While asleep, one cannot gather food, socialize, or reproduce. There is no ability to nurture or protect offspring, and one is left vulnerable to predators. This suggests that there must have been significant evolutionary pressure *against* the evolution of sleep. Yet, every animal species studied to date sleeps, implying that sleep evolved with or very soon after life itself. The fact that sleep has persisted throughout evolution indicates that the benefits far outweigh the obvious hazards.

Avoiding sleep deprivation is not the same as achieving *healthy* sleep—just as the absence of obesity does not indicate a healthy body. The benefits of sleep are extensive: it leads to a longer life, enhanced memory, and increased creativity. It improves physical appearance, helps maintain a healthy weight, reduces food cravings, and protects against cancer and dementia. Sleep wards off colds and the flu, lowers the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, and promotes emotional well-being, reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Numerous brain functions are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No single type of sleep accomplishes all these tasks; each stage, from REM to light sleep, offers different benefits at different times of the night.

When new information is learned, it is stored in the hippocampus, which can be thought of as temporary memory, similar to RAM in a computer. The storage capacity of the hippocampus is limited, and when full, it inhibits the ability to learn new information. During sleep, these memories are transferred to the cortex, where they become effectively permanent. This transfer frees up space in the hippocampus, allowing it to absorb new information again.

This process offers practical takeaways for maximizing knowledge acquisition. Sleep *before* a day of learning frees up the hippocampus, making it easier to absorb new information. Sleep *after* learning moves the information to the cortex, making it permanent. The amount of information that can be acquired between sleep cycles is objectively limited, so excessive studying without adequate sleep offers no benefit over balanced study and sleep routines.

Research has shown that even a 1-hour nap during the day can improve learning capacity by 20% compared to those who did not nap. The presence of sleep *spindles*—bursts of brain activity during sleep—correlates with improved memory recall. These spindles occur most frequently during the late morning stages of sleep, which are often cut short by waking up to an alarm, significantly handicapping the ability to learn and retain new information.

Getting adequate sleep before exams and while studying is often the biggest predictor of success. Professional sports teams, like those in the NBA, employ sleep consultants because they recognize that sleep is crucial to performance. Without good sleep, no amount of training will yield proportional returns. Sleep is the foundation of success in all aspects of life, from academics to sports, career advancement, and overall happiness and health.

The single most effective change to improve sleep is to set an alarm to go to bed and stop setting an alarm to wake up. This should be complemented by creating a nightly routine of 1-2 hours before bedtime that promotes relaxation. Reading a book before bed can also prevent the usage of screens, which can disrupt sleep. Going to bed at the same time every day is the most significant positive change one can make to improve sleep quality and, by extension, overall well-being.

There are many factors that contribute to good sleep, and it can take years to optimize them fully. However, a good starting point is to assess current sleep habits and identify areas for improvement. By making sleep a priority, the benefits to health, memory, and overall quality of life will be profound.

Now we know that sleep is the single most important thing to get right in life. However, sleep is also one of the hardest things in life to be consistent and good about. Below is a minimal, comprehensive, science-backed guide to the best sleep you can get.

Setup

These are one-time things you can do to have incredible recurring returns on your monetary and time investment. This is the easiest part of improving your sleep.

  • Blackout blinds and eye mask. It’s really that important to have a dark room

  • Quiet environment, before and during sleep. Can try sleep earbuds if comfortable but ideally soundproof your windows and doors with some sticky foam strips, or best get an apartment that is quiet

  • Cool temperature — recommended 62–70 Fahrenheit (or 17-22 Celsius) to sleep, don’t go above or below that range for optimal sleep quality.

  • Good mattress — Good mattresses can seem really expensive but the value over time they provide in irrefutable. I recommend the Dream Cloud mattress for a $1000~, but general guidelines are a mattress that is firm and has good springs, but a memory foam-ish soft top layer to relive joint stress.

  • Good pillow — just as important for both comfort and neck pain and joint stress prevention.

Execution

This is about building and keeping good habits. To make this easier I’ve split this up into three phases, combining importance and ease. Building habits can be a lot more nuanced and trickier than it seems, and failing at these without understanding why can be frustrating and demotivating — I highly suggest using the ideas suggested in Atomic Habits to help bring these into your daily schedule effectively.

  • Sleep at the same time every day, say 10:30pm
    — Don’t go into bed even a minute before no matter how tired you are and not a minute after. Soon you’ll start falling asleep on your own. The ideal range to pick is between 11pm and 1am, but that window is much much less important than going to sleep at the same time daily. If that’s 3am for you, do it.

  • Have a night routine — no screens or talking to people for 60–120 mins before bed. Quiet also helps during this. You’ll see a spike in energy 1 hour before your natural bedtime but you should stick to your night routine and trust in the process

  • Never be in your bedroom and especially not in your bed for anything other than sleep. Not even to lay in bed trying to sleep.

  • Wake up without an alarm, and get out of bed immediately when you do. **Your body knows how much sleep you need**, give yourself time so you can get enough sleep before you need to wake up to an alarm. Eg. If you need to wake up at 7:30pm, go to bed at 10:30 so you have upto 9 hours (more if you worked out). You can cut it closer once you get used to your body’s natural schedule in a healthy sleep environment, i.e. only after phase 3.

  • Sleep for at least 7–8 hours, for most people at least 8 hours, and for those regularly weight lifting 8–10 hours

  • Avoid all caffeine. No tea or coffee, except when resetting jet lag. If you must, consume it at least an hour after waking up and 12 hours before bedtime.

  • Morning Exercise. Any exercise improves mood and sleep quality — even just a 10 min walk in the morning — and the following are three separate buckets that each need to be met for good overall health and sleep.

    • 150 mins brisk walking, or 90 mins intense cardio per week

    • Weight lifting - At least 1 exercise with progressive weight lifting for each muscle group, minimum of 2hrs at the gym per week, 3 including warm and cooldowns which are also important

    • 10000 steps walking, aka active non-sendentary days. General activity level is considered a separate standard and doing the above two is not enough to implicitly meet this one. Remember that this is a minimum, and 20000 steps is much better than 10000 and so on.

  • Morning sunlight — at least 10–30 mins of exposure to direct daylight (aka thru windows) within first hour of waking up to synchronize your biological clock. Not a good idea to wake up before sunrise.

  • Don’t lay in bed for more than 20 mins awake — if you’ve been in bed for 20 mins and not asleep yet, you already tucked up. Don’t try to keep sleeping as that will make you sleep even later. Instead, get out of bed and read a book for 20 mins in dim yellow light and then go back to sleep. Repeat until asleep.

  • Evening sunlight — it’s also good to catch the evening sun, and avoid white lights after sunset. Home lights should be yellow, as well as blue light filters on devices and even dark mode helps a lot.

  • Meditate, ideally before bed. Even 3 mins goes a long way, but I recommend 15 for the double benefit of meditation itself and the benefit to sleep right before bed.

  • Set aside time for unstructured thought — your brain constantly has a backlog of things it wants to think about, and if you don’t set aside an hour for this every day it’s going to happen once you hit the bed. This time is also very useful to take a step back the chaos and reflect on your life, preventing you from spiraling downward in whatever rabbit hole you may be going down. This can often be multitasked, like while you commute or clean or shower etc, just don’t have any output stimuli or concrete topic driving your thoughts — let them roam free. The key distinction of this from meditation is that you’re not trying to focus or rein in your thoughts at all, simply doing what you would normally do in the shower anyway if you don’t have music on.

  • Don’t eat anything at least 3 hours before bed — eating food gets your digestive system going and is shown to negatively affect both your digestive processes and your sleep quality.

Example Routine

One example of a good routine for someone needing 9 hours of sleep looks something like this:

  • Before 7:30am: Wake up before your alarm and instead of from it

  • 7:30am: Freshen up and grab a small bite to eat

  • 8:00am: Commute to the gym, getting a good 20–30 mins of sunlight on the way, using this time either for unstructured thought

  • 8:30am-10am: Workout at the gym

  • 10:00am: Commute back, another 30 mins to complete your daily unstructured thoughts

  • 10:30am: Breakfast and shower

  • 11am-6pm: Work at the office, away from your bedroom

  • 6pm: Eat dinner, spend a few hours socializing with friends and partaking in hobbies — creative or problem solving hobbies are a plus, like drawing or playing video games. For good braincare and also a plus for sleep, it’s important to spend at least a few days each week socializing with friends or making new ones. This doesn’t need to be exclusive to your own interests — you can find friends to draw with too.

  • 9pm: brush, floss, facewash etc

  • 9:15pm: Read a book for an hour (must be done in a relaxing way)

  • 10:15pm: meditate for 15 mins, focusing on breath and clearing thoughts

  • 10:30pm: go to bed, and if you’ve done everything correctly, fall asleep instantly

  • 10:30pm-7:30pm: I require 9 hours of sleep, especially because I work out regularly.