How to improve sleep quality with these habit changes
Eight months after starting to track my sleep I was able to improve its quality dramatically. This article describes the experiment, the new habits acquired and the tools I used.
Sound sleep is essential for mental, physical, emotional & intellectual health. However, it‘s a luxury not many can flaunt. Whether due to stress, work or health issues, most people don’t sleep properly.
Why sleep is important
Before diving into the experiment, I believe it’s important to understand a bit more why sleep is so important for all living species. While researching about sleep, I came across this Joe Rogan interview to Matt Walker, professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep.
The following infographic summarizes the key takeaways of this interview:
Sleep disorders are increasing worldwide
Yet, the average modern human is suffering from sleep disorders more than even, no matter the country. This to me was shocking to read, and got me even more interested in learning how to improve my own sleep quality.
Sleep as a pillar of sport performance
During the last 18 months I’ve been reading and learning how to improve health, wellbeing and achieve peak performance (physical and mental). In case you are wondering what I’ve been experimenting with, you can check my collection of articles about building a “Continuous Improvement System”: a dedication to making small changes and improvements every day, with the expectation that those small improvements will add up to something significant.
After reading more about sleep, it was obvious to me that it is one of the main pillars to learning and performing. Coincidentally, back in April 2021 my wife got me an Apple Watch for my birthday. I must confess I was not happy with this gift at first (I never used a watch andI didn’t want to take care of a new device, charge it daily, etc).
However, I soon realized that what I had in my wrist was a Fitness & Sleep tracker (now also track my trascendental meditation with Timefully). So I decided to track my sleep and hopefully try to improve it.
Tracking sleep
I came across the Pillow App, while browsing the sleep section in the Apple Health App. Pillow is an advanced iOS and watchOS app that monitors your sleep. It automatically tracks your sleep, helps you fall asleep, improve the overall experience, and enables you to wake up in a great mood every day.
The app brings a bunch of exceptional built-in modes to analyze your sleep cycles. All you have to do is wear your Apple Watch & place your iPhone on the mattress near your Pillow. It collects motion, audio data, and heart rate to give you a detailed insight into your sleep quality and duration. In the morning, you get a summary chart with valuable data about your sleep.
Pillow offers deep insights about your sleep quality
Designing an experiment
My objective was to learn more about the sleep I’m getting and how changes in habits affect (and hopefully improve) my sleep over time.
What I did it
- Tracked sleep from April 2022 to December 2022 using Pillow
- From April to October I gradually introduced habits changes (more on this below 👇)
- Continued tracking sleep with Pillow after introducing the changes
- Once the data of Dec 2022 was complete, I dowloaded the Pillow data (they offer a CSV in the pro version)
- Analyzed the results to find how the habit changes affected the metrics
Results of the experiment
These metrics where measured on a monthly average to avoid data anomalies (ie: an overnight flight). You can find the complete dataset here.
Improvement 1: Sleep score improved from 75% to 90%
Improvement 2: Sleep duration improved from 6 hours 54m to 8 hours
Improvement 3: Time to sleep (also known as Latency) decreased an astounding 44.05%, from 28.06 minutes to 10.65 minutes
Improvement 4) REM sleep increased from 16% to 33% (1h 16m to 2h 30m) going from a “Low” to a “High” measurement according to Pillow.
Improvement 5) Deep sleep decreased from 40% to 27 %(2h 40m to 2h 05m), going to a “High” to a “Normal” measurement according to Pillow.
It seems like the REM and Deep sleep balanced better over time.
Habit changes I applied for this experiment
- Going to bed at 10:30 pm instead of 12 am
- I switched my workouts from 6 pm to 8:30 am (see Andrew Huberman video below 👇)
- Make sure I see natural light first thing in the morning (see Andrew Huberman video below 👇)
- Put the phone down at 9 pm max instead of 11 pm max.
One more lesson learned: how alcohol affects sleep
All sleep experts I’ve listened to so far, agree on the bad effects of alcohol and cannabis on sleep. Contrary to what many people think, these substances deteriorate our sleep quality.
I believe that most people associate the fact that these substances help us get asleep quickly, with the benefits of getting good quality sleep.
So I decided to do a small experiment within the bigger experiment: to measure the effects of having alcohol before going to sleep by comparing the Pillow metrics with a regular day.
These are from a Friday night having only three drinks. As you can see in the screenshots below, the total time asleep was good (8h 27 min) but the sleep score was 57% (the average of the same month was 88%). Deep sleep was low and Light sleep was very high:
Other recommended actions to improve sleep
Finally, in case you want to try more things that can help, here is a list of other good recommendations I’ve seen consistently in books and podcasts:
- Regularity, 7 days a week (you can’t get back all the sleep lost previously by sleeping for longer afterwards. A regular sleep routine is key)
- One hour before sleeping, eliminate screens & reduce lighting
- Cool room. “Your brain needs to drop its temperature by about 2–3 degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep.”
- Have a warm bath: warm your hands & feet so as to send blood to your core which then radiates the heat outward; aiding sleep.
Additional resources
A super comprehensive toolkit from Andrew Huberman including supplements, how the circadian cycle works and a lot of scientific information from papers
The book Why we sleep by Matthew Walker:
This is part of a series of articles about building a “Continuous Improvement System”: a dedication to making small changes and improvements every day, with the expectation that those small improvements will add up to something significant.
