7 Easy Steps to Get The Best Sleep of Your Life

Did you ever just have one of those days when nothing seems to go right?

I had one of those days last week. I was late for work, I rushed through a project that ended up being a complete mess, I got a $115 parking ticket because I wasn’t paying attention, my car’s battery died, and as if that wasn’t enough, I backed into someone else’s car at an intersection. Let’s just say I wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

Ever wonder why that kind of day happens? I finally figured it out: I had barely gotten any sleep the night before and was actually running on a deficit all week. Like most lessons in life, I had learned the hard way that sleep is a performance tool we consistently need.

Now here’s the pitch: I’m going to explain why sleep is so powerful, how you’re not using it correctly, and what you can do to improve your sleep and your life.

After decades of sleep research, there is no longer a debate that sleep is the body’s most powerful performance enhancer. Something that our ancestors were doing 100,000 years ago is still the single most powerful thing we have to achieve peak performance and improve our health and mental acuity. Yet, most people are still out there doing it incorrectly. Why? Most people think they’re too busy (“there are not enough hours in the day”), others don’t realize how important sleep is (“I’ll sleep when I’m dead”) and yet some simply think they’re getting enough (“four to six hours is good” — this was me for a long time). Here’s the thing: we’re all wrong.

Recent studies have concluded that if you’re awake for 17–19 hours, your body behaves and reacts like you’re almost legally drunk. Staying up for 24+ hours? Studies show that you might as well be drunk, because that’s the way your body and mind are performing. Scary, right? Professor Russell Foster, a leading neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, emphasizes that “Lack of sleep damages a host of skills — empathy, processing information, ability to handle people, but right at the top of the chain you get overly impulsive and impaired thinking, because of this problem.”

Ask any high performing CEO or professional athlete about how important sleep is to them and you’ll get a universal answer: it’s critical.

Sleep is when our bodies recover from the hardships of the day. Our muscles relax and regenerate, our organs work their hardest to achieve homeostasis, and inflammation is decreased. According to a study performed by the National Institute of Health, during your last REM cycle (the most frequently abandoned cycle by those not getting 7–8 hours of sleep) your brain flushes out all the toxins it has accumulated during the day. This includes the number one stress hormone cortisol, which has been linked to obesity, depression, hypertension and heart disease. When we don’t get this last REM cycle and allow our bodies to fully detoxify, we’re beginning the next day full of toxins that don’t allow our minds and bodies to perform at their highest level. Essentially, we’re setting ourselves up for failure before our day even begins. This is why sleep is the most powerful performance tool we have.

Now that we know this, we have the challenge of maximizing that precious sleep. Here are a few tips towards achieving higher performance through sleep:

1. Give yourself 30 minutes to wind down

This means no computer, no checking emails, no reading online, no text messages or Instagram. Stimulation before bed doesn’t allow our brains to prepare for sleep. Just like our devices, our body and mind need time to power down.

2. Leave all the screens out of your bedroom
Light stimulates our visual cortex, which then activates other parts of our brains, including the prefrontal cortex, which fuels our thought processes and creative abilities. This makes it more difficult to relax and prepare our bodies for rest. Personally, I keep my iPhone, which doubles as my alarm, outside of my bedroom (this also forces me to physically get out of bed).

3. You should only be doing two things in bed
Sleeping and sex. Period.

4. Keep your bedroom cool
Ideal temperature is around 66–68 degrees. The National Institute of Health even found that sleeping in a cool room at night (66 degrees) could help raise your metabolic rate and burn more fat.

5. Turn off all the lights
Turn them off in your home and bedroom and close the curtains. As said earlier, our visual cortex is stimulated by light, even that little light creeping under our doors or seeping through your curtains. Invest in a set of blackout curtains. They keep most light out and the thicker ones can even help decrease ambient noise.

6. Take a hot shower or bath
Immersing your body in hot water relaxes your muscles and is another great way to power down our bodies for rest.

7. Wear the right clothes
If you wear clothes to bed, only wear clothes that are used for sleeping. Wearing gym clothes or clothes designed for other activities stimulates and confuses your brain (are we going to exercise, go out, or go to bed?), leading to restlessness.

If you’re not engaging in most of these activities, you’re not getting the sleep you need to perform your best. Think all these tips are a bit too much? Think about how we put children to bed: we turn down the lights, we give them a warm bath, and we put their pajamas on. Sounds similar? I’m frequently jealous of how well kids sleep. They look so peaceful and carefree, so let’s do this for ourselves.

I’m not presuming that we can get eight hours of sleep every night. However, if we make sleep a priority and the inevitable long night pops up, we’ll have sleep reserves to tap into. Over a short period of time, these reserves will help us consistently perform at our best. We don’t always have control over our schedules, but we can prepare for long days by taking care of ourselves during the times we do have control.

The bottom line is that we need to reevaluate our sleep habits — no more treating sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. Think about all the aspects in your life that good sleep can improve: your focus, concentration, physical health, relationships, happiness, and so on. This week, I challenge you to try at least three of these tips out and record the difference it makes in your performance. Sleep is really the most powerful performance tool we have so let’s master using it!

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