My latest sleep stack

I’ve been able to get more regular sleep scores in the high 80% recently, with a few 90%s sprinkled in the past 2 months. I attribute it to my revised sleep stack:

• 5 sleep cycles every night. I used to just wake up at a fixed time (4:40am) even if I slept late, thinking that regular routines is good as the experts say. But now I use a sleep cycle calculator to calculate my wake time based on 5 sleep cycles. So I’m waking later now (after hitting the requisite 7.5h of sleep), but it’s been great for feeling more rested on waking. I find I don’t need naps much, and feel less sleepy during the day (which I learned was the best indicator of whether I slept enough/well).
   
• Food affects sleep. Thanks to the prompting of @therealbrandonwilson, I busted my own myth that I needed to have proper dinners so that I wouldn’t feel hungry before bed and affect my sleep. The fear of hunger is overrated. In the past I would eat a full dinner and go to bed still feeling the food inside me. That affected my sleep in ways I wasn’t aware. I usually skip breakfast now to do 16/8 intermittent fasting, then take a big lunch, so by evening I’ll take light dinners or even no dinner if I’m still feeling satiated from the big lunch.
   
• Less fluid intake in evenings. Because I eat less now in the evenings, I find that I don’t need to have as much fluid intake as well. If I do need some water, I try to sip it instead of gulping it down. That all works out well for better sleep because I don’t have to get up as often in the middle of the night for the bathroom.
   
• Magnesium L-threonate. There’s many types of magnesium supplements, and Andrew Huberman recommends the threonate type in his sleep toolkit. Apparently it’s great for the brain health, cognitive function and positive effects on mental health. I used to take magnesium citrate-malate blend from Thorne Research—which is said to be calming for sleep—but since switching over, this seems to help a little better with sleep (unsure if it’s compounded by the other things I did in this list). Perhaps in reducing the release of stress hormones (as shown in animal research), it helped me sleep better?
   
• Getting the body tired. I always sleep better after I’ve done some exercise during the day, or have been out and about. There’s something about getting the body tired enough so that sleep comes easier. If I spend the whole day sitting down in front of the computer, I’m mentally tired but the body isn’t. I then find it harder to sleep, or even when I do sleep it’s poor quality sleep. I stopped my daily morning exercise and walks in late 2022, and the sleep was bad. Since restarting my workouts, sleep is definitely better.
   
• Sleep aided by quantum energy frequency. This might sound a little woo woo, but I’ve been using Leela’s quantum energy frequency sleep card to help with my sleep. Since starting on it in late Nov, I noticed a flatter chart therefore deeper sleep in the first half of the night. It says on the website that it supports “a much more relaxed and deeper calm and rest” – seems to work as promised!
   
• Less stress. Realising that stress was the root of much of my sleep woes had been an important epiphany in 2022. I do recall feeling stressed about survival in the later half of 2022 due to funds running out, and that definitely impacted my sleep. Stress is subversive when it comes to sleep. I might not be consciously aware of any ill effects or feeling anything ‘bad’ in the moment before bed, but it’s an undercurrent that sweeps good quality sleep away without knowing. And true enough, since winning a $52k consulting gig in January, my stress level fell significantly, and I began to sleep waaay better.
   
• Stability in routine. Late 2022 when sleep was poorer was also when my kid’s pre-school routines stopped. It’s funny how they say structure is important for children. I say it’s great for adults too! Because I could feel the difference when school restarted in January. Much more even-keeled on all fronts in life.

Sleep is such an infinite game. I started being serious about sleep biohacking in January 2020. It’s been 3 years, and I’m still learning new ways to sleep better, and discovering new experiments to do.

Onwards to consistent 90% sleep!