4 Steps to Better Sleep
Posted July 25 by Admin
When you sleep normally, insomnia doesn’t come up in conversation. As I’ve discovered, even people who don’t sleep well rarely talk about it, and it’s only when you mention your affliction they say “me too”.
Seems to me that if you suffered from insomnia, you would do whatever it takes to figure it out. Come to some understanding about your condition, and take whatever steps necessary to deal with it. But most people don’t. They suffer alone quietly, and surrender to their new fate.
I’m unwilling to do that, even though I’ve only suffered with insomnia for about two years. It’s been two years of frustration, but I can start to see light at the end of the tunnel. This is how I’m reaching conclusions:
Knowing Your Sleep Through Data
Knowing how to get better sleep is easy. But knowing how to get better sleep for you is hard. Tips that work for someone else may not work for you. And it may be a combination of things that prove useful to you.
There’s one overwhelming tip I’ve discovered about sleep that seems obvious to me – but I’m shocked as to how many people actually use it: you’ve got to get to know your sleep. And the only way to get to know your sleep is to log it, analyze it, experiment with it, and then do it all again.
These steps sound much more complicated than they actually are:
- Logging your sleep can start our with a simple calendar beside your bed, where you score your sleep the previous night (1-10). But you’ll soon find that you want to track more variables (did I exercise today, did I stay up late watching TV, etc.), so graduating to a spreadsheet is a good idea. You can manage much more data, and it still takes only a few seconds every morning to fill in the log.
- Analysis is where your move to a spreadsheet makes a difference. Start graphing quality of sleep versus a variable you are tracking. If there seems to be no correlation (or even a negative one), toss out the variable and stop tracking it (be aware though that it may be a combination of variables that your looking for). If you’re a spreadsheet expert – pivot tables work well for this.
- Experimentation comes next. Start playing with these sleep variables, and run experiments with yourself – “if I do this, the sleep outcome is that”.
- Go back and start all over again (log-analyze-experiment) until you have figured out what most affects your sleep.
I’ve actually taken to using a Zeo Sleep Manager to do all of this now because I can get better quality data about my sleep and they have online tools that track several variables for me. They have an online tool that lets me do “this versus that” experiments ad-hoc. Very powerful.
Using this process (log-analyze-experiment-repeat) I’ve come to some real conclusions about my sleep. It’s taken two years of trial and error to get here, but the destination (good sleep) is worth it.
So why don’t more people do this?
Posted by Doug at BuildBetterSleep.com
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