Stress, the hidden sleep killer

I know I know, what a dramatic post title. But I really do feel it.

For the past 3 years I’ve been so stressed and anxious. About work, finances, feeding the fam, indie hacking, the pandemic, my health, everyone’s health, the state of the world.

Like the weight of the whole world’s on my shoulders.

It’s only until recently did I realised just how heavy the load I’ve been carrying was.

And it’s during these past 3 years that I started on sleep biohacking. To tragi-comic results. I could never quite nail it. There’s always something wrong, something that went well going wrong again, and countless issues to getting proper sleep, in quantity and quality. Quantity I could still influence somewhat, but it’s the sleep quality that are often out of my control. I would toss and turn, depsite having done everything in the book to help me sleep well. You name it I’ve tried it – magnesium, fluid intake, blue light, screentime, EMF, sleep tracking, exercise, daylight viewing, quantum energy… EVERYTHING. But sleep would sometimes inexplicably get worse without warning.

Sleep is an infinite game, I used to belabour the point.

But recently, I’ve been getting relatively good sleep without much effort. In fact, I’ve been lazy and not been the most disciplined with sleeping early and pre-bed screentime. Yet, better sleep was easier to achieve. The sleep scores are at least 10% higher than usual, if I had slept the same amount in the past. And the only factor I can attribute it to is stress and anxiety.

I’m not the most embodied person. I charge ahead, while not being very aware that I’m holding in a lot stress and anxiety. And that undercurrent of stress ate into my sleep quality. What’s not expressed and managed well in the day, rears its ugly head at night. And that went on in the background for 3 years. I didn’t realise it was that long. I should have.

But things changed for the better this year. And with most of the root causes of my stress gone or diminished, I naturally slept better. Thankfully.

Stress truly is the sleep killer.

Stress biohacking = sleep biohacking.