People are finding it harder and harder to be alone with their thoughts. Just think how kids come after a couple hours of learning some new physical skill-mental and physical exertion-and totally crash. Testing the capacities of the entire organism makes the organism rest easy. You won’t have that voice in the back of your mind scolding you for failing to achieve anything, even if that “anything” is a long hike, a few chapters in a hard book, working hard on a complex problem in your job, or cleaning the kitchen. You’ll sleep better after a big day full of hard work and small wins. Physical exertion-workouts, hiking, long walks, gardening, playing sports, sex-during the day improves sleep. Let this be a strong kick in the pants to motivate you toward more efficiency and less wasted time during the day. If that means getting all your work done before dark and turning off your phone at night, so be it.
In other words, getting out of your own way is the biggest sleep “hack” you can make. Eliminating the fluff, the useless extracurriculars that impede you in getting to bed. It can’t wait ’til tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring its own set of happenings. Something just happened in the world, and you need to find out about it right away. Why do most people fail to get to bed on time? There’s too much to do, see, read, and watch. General Sleep Strategies Stop Wasting Time You can, however, hack the timing, quality, and positive effects of your sleep. You can’t hack the amount of sleep you need. Sleep hacking doesn’t work without the actual sleep. What about polyphasic sleep-taking a bunch of micronaps throughout the day in lieu of a single block of sleep? Maybe during crunch time you could use it for a short period of time to meet some serious deadlines and command a greater proportion of the day without falling to pieces, but it’s not a sustainable long-term strategy.Ĭaffeine and prescription stimulants can certainly reduce the performance deficits caused by inadequate sleep, but for how long? And they don’t replace all the important processes-neurological housecleaning, memory retention, tissue repair, muscle growth, workout recovery, to name a few-that occur during adequate sleep. Sleeping pills? They’ll knock you out, but throw off your sleep architecture while inducing a ton of nasty side effects. Yet, we try to hack it just the same, with terrible results. And it needs to arrive at them naturally. The human brain needs those hours to pick up trash and clean up around the cranium.
You can’t escape the need for 7-8 hours (perhaps 4-5 if you’re genetically gifted). You can fast-track your stamina in a fraction of the time with sprints and intervals.īut you can’t hack sleep. You can condense your training time by choosing the right exercises and upping the intensity to a sufficient level. You can cook the entire week’s meals ahead of time, buy high-quality prepackaged foods and ready-to-cook meals, cover your nutritional bases with smart supplementation. You can “hack” a lot of your health, diet, and lifestyle.