David's Blog

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Do your own research and consult with a qualified professional before trying anything in here.

TLDR

In the span of 6 months I went from waking up tired most mornings, being awake for extended periods in the night (1+ hrs), and struggling to get through the day, to sleeping soundly and waking up refreshed most mornings. I also did this with a newborn, which I consider no trivial feat. Your mileage may vary, but this is a list of what did and didn’t work for me.

What Worked

1. Taping my mouth shut
   • My wife got super sick of hearing me talk and so Just kidding. This is a super weird one, but it easily made the single greatest difference of anything I tried. It was a step function improvement in my quality of sleep: dramatic and immediate. Even with frequent (3+) wakeups to help kids, I now sleep better than I have in literally decades.
   • It’s admittedly a little scary to deliberately obstruct your largest airway. I’ve since come to think of it as similar to sleeping with a pillow or a blanket: they are both suffocation hazards, but we never worry about them because whenever they become a problem we simply wake and remove them. Same thing with the tape. There have been nights when it’s been an issue and on those nights I just wake and take it off. Before trying this out, I wore the tape for a couple of hours while awake. This made me feel more comfortable about its safety. Obviously, don’t try this if you’re drunk or high or sick or something. Did I mention I’m not a doctor?
   • Why does this work? I have no idea. There are books (e.g. this one) that speculate on it. There may be some connection between mouth breathing and activation of the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) nervous system. For example, if you were running from a lion, you’d be breathing through your mouth. So, the thought is that if you breathe through your nose you’re forced to breathe deeper, which helps activate your parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) nervous system, which makes you sleep better. But again, this is 99.9% conjecture from random people on reddit, so take it with a big grain of salt.
   • This is the tape I use. It costs ~$15, and it will probably be enough for 5+ years. I’ve still not finished a single roll
2. Wear headphones with brown noise
   • This is probably the second most impactful change that I made. I’m a super light sleeper and can now sleep through just about anything.
   • I tried a bunch of headphones and these were the most comfortable as a side sleeper. Most headphones hurt my ears, but I barely feel these.
   • I also tried a few white noise apps. This is the one I settled on. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s free and gets the job done.
   • Before this I had tried all kinds of noise machines and fans. None really solved the problem, and all were detrimental to my wife’s sleep.
3. Keep your room cold
   • Everyone says to do this, and they are right. I simply cannot sleep if I am too warm. Even a little too warm and I wake up frequently, toss and turn, etc.
   • We keep our house cold in the winter (~60°F at night). In the summer, we blast the AC as high as it will go.
   • We also invested in a temperature-controlled mattress cover (referral link).
   • This is by far the most cost-intensive of the changes I made, but I think the changes were easily worth it.
4. Eat a balanced diet
   • This was a surprising one. I tried a number of specific dietary changes (listed below), some of them fairly extreme. Ultimately, the one thing that helped the most was just eating a balanced diet: not too much salt, and not too much generally. I consider myself a decently knowledgeable person about diet and fitness, but loosely tracking my meals using MyFitnessPal really helped me recalibrate my intuitions about how much and which foods I should be eating.
5. Limit alcohol consumption
   • Specifically: don’t drink alcohol within 4 hours of bed, and don’t have more than 2 drinks (3oz of liquor)
   • This is another one that you see a lot of people suggest. If I drink late or too much I always feel tired in the morning and throughout the day, even if I think I’ve slept well, even if I’m not hungover.
   • If you’re wondering where I got the time and amounts from, 4 hours is roughly how long it takes for my body to completely metabolize the alcohol in 3 oz of liquor, according to this calculator.
6. Limit water consumption
   • Specifically, don’t drink water within 2 hours of when you are trying to sleep
   • Getting up to use the bathroom was a significant cause of extended wake-ups throughout the night. I often have trouble falling back to sleep after it – more so than if I had just gotten up to help a child (don’t ask me why). But I’ve found that if I stop drinking water within 2 hours of bed, I can usually hold it until I’m ready to get up in the morning.
   • This is also made easier by eating right (too much salt makes you thirsty and retain water) and not drinking too much alcohol (which is a diuretic, and makes you pee)
7. Remove the clock from your room
   • It is normal to wake up at various points in the night. But I found it was giving me anxiety to wake up and see that it was (say) 2am. “Oh no, I’m already awake!” Then that anxiety would make it harder to fall back to sleep. I find it’s easier if I just don’t know what time it is until my alarm (i.e. child) wakes me in the morning
8. Stretch
   • Over the years I have lost a lot of sleep to chronic pain that I could have easily prevented had I just known it was caused by muscles that needed to be stretched. Back pain, elbow pain, knee pain, and foot pain have all tanked my sleep quality at various points in my life. In each case, the solution was just a simple stretch or massage – though in some cases it took years of trial and error to figure out which one
   • Stretching has done more to reduce my chronic pain levels than any other medical intervention I have tried over the last two decades. If you have chronic pain that is preventing you from sleeping, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
   • Everyone’s body is different, so I don’t think there’s much value in listing the particular stretches I do. But I will say that my glutes and calves are chronically tight, and learning how to loosen them up has worked miracles for me.
9. Improve your kids’ sleep
   • Because child wake-ups are one of the most common causes of bad nights of sleep for me, I really try to avoid unnecessary ones. So just before I go to bed for the night, I check on my kids. They’re often half covered, hanging out of their beds, pillows at their feet, stuffed animals on the floor, etc. – wake-ups just waiting to happen. I correct the situation while I’m still awake.
   • Kids with ear infections have resulted in some of the worst weeks of sleep in my life – Zero-Dark-Thirty level stuff. So we invested in an otoscope to help us spot them without a doctor’s visit.
   • Sleep training our children was enormously beneficial for them and us (though that’s not something I did in the last 6 months). We followed the instructions in this book.
10. Supportive spouse
    • In case it’s not already clear, I’m insane. I couldn’t do all of this crazy stuff if my wife wasn’t on board with it. It’s crucial to be able to explain why good sleep is so important. I found this book to be really helpful in that regard.
    • I also do things to help my wife improve her sleep. In particular, I make sure she gets 2+ extra hours of guaranteed, child-free sleep each night. I also make sure she wakes up to a piping hot cup of freshly ground coffee made her way. This probably makes it easier for her to put up with me.
    • It was also helpful to just have some conversations about sleep patterns with my wife. For example, I have trouble falling back to sleep after I wake up. But this also makes it easier for me to get up early with the children. My wife, in contrast, can fall back to sleep after ~anything, so she has a hard time getting up while still tired. Knowing these facts allowed us to modify our nightly responsibilities with the kids in ways that have improved both our quality and amount of sleep.

What Didn’t Work

I don’t have much to say about these things other than that you often see them recommended and they didn’t make a difference for me.

• Ear plugs
• White noise
• Running a fan
• Cold showers before bed
• Wash hands and face before bed
• No computer in bed
• No screen time before bed
• Tint screens yellow
• Get blue-light blocking glasses
• No lights on in the room
• Blackout curtains
• Sleep mask
• Meditation
• Sleep tracking apps
• Memory foam bed
• Better pillow
• Fixing posture with pillows
• Air pillow
• Intermittent fasting (12+ hours)
• Extended fasting (24+ hours)
• Consuming no added sugar
• Daily exercise
• Morning exercise
• Reading before bed
• Reducing stress
• Not working in the bedroom
• Eliminating caffeine
• Developing a sleep ritual
• Going to bed at the same time
• Snack before bed
• Avoiding naps
• No phone use in bedroom