Welcome to the Sleep Strategies section. In this section what I’m going to be doing is covering all of the expert sleep strategies and sleep hacks that you can use to optimize your nightly routine and make sure that you’re covering all your basis, enabling you to fall asleep faster at night and sleep more peacefully. Now just a reminder that you don’t have to follow all of the recommendations in this section. The motto that I have for this course is “Find what works for you”. If you like something then take it on. If something doesn’t resonate with you, feel free to throw it out. The most important thing is finding what works for your life and sticking with that consistently over time. Now without further ado, let’s dive in.
Sleep Strategy #1 is to stick with a consistent sleep schedule. As with any other habit, the more consistent you can be with the timing of the habit the easier that habit is going to be to stick with. So, for example let’s say you want to start a gratitude journaling habit. If you do that gratitude journaling in the exact same place and the exact same time each day it’s going to be much more likely that you’ll stick with it.
The same applies to your sleep. Your body is like a machine. It has an internal clock called the circadian rhythm or the circadian clock. And so, the more consistent you can be with the time that you fall asleep and the time that you wake up each morning the better your sleeping patterns are going to be. So, what we want you to do is choose right now what time you’d like to fall asleep each night and also what time you’d like the wake up in the morning. Once you’ve found a time, see if you can be consistent with that. And by consistency, I mean not just on the weekdays but on the weekends as well. If you can be consistent every single day of the week it’s going to be much easier for allowing your body to adapt to the new routine.
Now, the next question is, how much sleep should you be getting? Well, experts are recommending anywhere between 8 and 9 hours is actually ideal. That might be way too much for you based on whether you have a family or busy at work but in general the more sleep you can get the better. If you can’t get 8 or 9 hours of sleep, get as much as you can. Most people in our society are sleep deprived so there’s a good chance that you could really use the extra few hours of sleep.
So, just to recap on this Sleep Strategy. It’s all about consistency. See if you can fall asleep at the exact same time each night within give or take 30 minutes and also wake up at the same time.