Convincing people that sleep is a problem worth caring about is half the battle.

There are many resources available that get into the practical/tactical aspect of improving sleep. But if you don't believe sleep is a problem yet, you won't seek those out.

The Huberman Lab has put out a number of good resources for this [0] including a podcast episode speaking with Matt Walker, PhD, sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep [1] (also a good read).

I've been a night owl for most of my life, and only more recently did I fully realize how connected this behavior was to traumatic situations growing up. When I started going down the rabbit hole on how to improve sleep, it was encouraging to find the emergence of a ton of practical non-pharmaceutical resources (I did try sleep aids for awhile, but couldn't deal with the side effects).

The hard part is that it does require willingness to implement real changes. They're not pleasant at first, but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.

I started this journey by setting a goal for myself to see/photograph a sunrise. I now regularly take pre-dawn walks and have seen more sunrises in the past few weeks than I had during the prior 30+ years of my life.

It's worth the effort.

- [0] https://hubermanlab.com/toolkit-for-sleep/

- [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

What benefit do you derive from changing which hours you are awake?

Huberman and Walker cover some of this in the linked materials, but “The Mind After Midnight: Nocturnal Wakefulness, Behavioral Dysregulation, and Psychopathology” [0] is a pretty interesting review of the literature on this.

In short, we’re becoming increasingly aware of the impact of light throughout the day on the body’s circadian rhythm. Bottom line: natural selection didn’t design to be up throughout the night.

As for the benefits I’ve personally noticed:

- I’m significantly clearer in the head throughout the day and feel more able to make better choices during the day (about food, time spent, etc)

- My mental/emotional state has improved, and I have more capacity to deal with challenging emotions

- Increasingly (this has been shifting steadily) I start each day ready to tackle the hard stuff and I don’t have to use as much willpower

- This is the other side of the “mental/emotional” item but I generally feel happier, or have more capacity to experience happy feelings

- There is also a body of research about getting morning sunlight in your eyes, and I’ve found that on days that I do, I sleep much better. Sleep tracking confirms this. Having a science-backed reason to witness/enjoy the sunrise is nice on mornings when my body just wants to stay in bed.

More generally, such a question is starting to look like similar to questions about a healthy/balanced diet: some of the benefits can be experienced now, but prevention of long term issues is just as important. The links between lack of healthy sleep and degenerative brain issues later in life (dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc) seem to be getting stronger based on recent research.

- [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnetp.2021.8303...

> but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.

You also seem to sleep an hour more, so some changes you experienced might be due to that.

Prior to implementing bigger changes, I tried many things to make my late nights “work”, including trying to sleep more.

Sleeping longer while going to bed later didn’t help much with quality (deep and REM phases were poor/short), and was also difficult to achieve for practical reasons.

I took about 3 months to fully shift the schedule, and I was tracking stats along the way. I started to notice improvements once my average bedtime was closer to midnight.

Once I hit that point, I kept shifting earlier because I wanted the benefit of the morning solitude that comes with getting up earlier. But sleep quality kept improving as well.

This annoyed the hell out of me as well. I thought, oh cool, some advice to improve my sleep.

Point 5: "feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week"

But of course! I'll fix my sleep by ensuring I wake up well rested.

Research and summaries of research will rarely hand out advice. In recent years, there has been an explosion of content that provides practical advice on getting better sleep. Most of this advice involves habit changes, and many of these habit changes are hard (e.g. avoiding screen time for ~2 hours before bed is tough if you always watch Netflix in the evenings).

I added links as a response to the sibling comment with some practical resources, and I think it's important to recognize that work focusing on the impact of sleep or the lack thereof is not necessarily in the same category as work that seeks to provide remedies / improve sleep.

Thankfully, as we continue to learn just how important sleep is, we also continue to learn about ways to improve it.

This is probably a clear metric for our annoying friends who complain that they don’t get high enough quality sleep, but go to bed at 2 and have an alarm set for 7 every day. Sure you may have worked best on 5 hours sleep in college (though probably not), but if you aren’t "feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week", you might try more sleep.

Some people need this advice, and a clear metric to hit. I’ve known them, and although I failed to make a dent, eventually something did. Maybe it was an article like this.

Even a lot of the more specific habits that do sometimes get recommended ("sleep hygiene") are:

1) Potentially expensive/disruptive (control of the sleep environment may imply moving house or installing soundproofing materials, air conditioning, etc.)

2) Contradictory (get out of bed if you don't fall asleep in 15 minutes, but also don't look at the clock)

3) Not individually tested or validated

4) Based more on old-school behaviorism than on anything specific to the processes of sleep.

EDIT: forgot an important one

5) Only addressed at difficulty falling asleep initially, not staying asleep or improving sleep architecture.

Drop caffeine after noon, quite alcohol/cig/weed/screens anywhere close to bed time, keep evening meals small and low in carbs/sugar to avoid an insulin spike, wait at least 3 hours before hitting bed after a meal, more is better. Go to bed at roughly the same time every day, make sure your room is as dark as can be, make sure it's not warmer than 20c, exercise so that you're physically tired at the end of the day, only use your bedroom for sleep

Pretty much this. It isn't rocket science. Unfortunately, easier said than done for most people.

Ok, then what?

Yes, I've been following similar recipes and my sleep improved noticeably (after initial ~2 weeks or misery, when my body was getting accustomed to the new sleep schedule)

> make sure it's not warmer than 20c

Do you have a reference for this? 20 C is freaking cold. I wake up because of cold below 23 C.

I sleep at 16c, but I'd say it's more a personal preference. As long as you feel cool while sleeping and after waking up then you should be okay.

To be fair, it's a press release about a scientific study, not a self-help blog post, but you raise a good point when you say that poor sleep patterns "just happen to me." I've always valued sleep, but often in my life, my sleep has been disrupted because of stress, anxiety, and depression. The article says the researchers controlled for "other factors that may have heightened the risk of dying, including lower socioeconomic status, smoking and alcohol consumption and other medical conditions," but did they control for stress?

The author quoted in the press release seems quite confident that we can eliminate these bad mortality outcomes by teaching people to sleep better, but another way to interpret the result is that any factor that increases stress will damage health and also disrupt sleep.

I also wonder where the author gets his confidence that "good sleep hygiene" can have such a great impact. How does he assume that "sleep hygiene" will overcome the factors causing poor sleep? Does he really believe that they've controlled for every other factor and isolated "sleep hygiene" as the root cause? My personal experience says that what he calls "sleep hygiene" helps a little bit, but it doesn't overcome the effects of stress or poor life management due to depression, and those factors have to be managed directly.

Get a sleep study that scored UARS in addition to OSAS.