One of the things I want to do in these “off-topic” articles is to share things I have learned over the years that’s made my life better. I wouldn’t exactly call these cheat codes for life, but reasonable things that I think reasonable people often don’t do but would make their lives so much better. Please enjoy! Stay tuned for a very long transit-related article tomorrow.
One of the most challenging things about being self-employed or being a student I’ve found is maintaining a schedule (and probably actually getting things done — this is just not a problem I have faced much), and not maintaining a schedule often means horrible sleep — which is way underrated.
But horrible sleep is horrible, and I think if people seriously thought a bit more and put a little more effort into something that is so critical to their health and that they spend a lot of time doing, they could be fitter, happier, and much more productive; it’s really just a simple thing to majorly upgrade your quality of life.
I have a pretty typical-young-adult history with sleep. In high school and university, I started staying up late (12-2AM) and waking up pretty early (7-8AM); not only did this mean not a lot of sleep, but it was also quite inconsistent, which I’ll get back to. I wasn’t horrible about it, but in university I would say I feel asleep in about 10% of my classes — it was not a very good situation.
When I graduated in 2020 and all commitments went online, my sleep got even worse. By the end of the year I was basically in full crisis — my sleep was low-quality (I was waking up a lot), I never felt rested, and it was all over the place. I would go to sleep at 4AM wake again at 11AM, then go for a nap at 2PM and wake up at 6PM. I do not exaggerate at all when I say this was a nightmare and maybe the worst experience I have ever had. There is a reason why sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture — you cannot think properly.
It was around this time I started meeting with a social worker and getting prodded by some friends to fix my sleep hygiene, which was very wise. The basics are this, and they are good.
Do not nap midday if you have problems sleeping through the night. This depletes your “sleep drive” (basically just your body’s accumulated desire to sleep), and not being able to sleep through the night often means you get tired midday, then nap, and you get into this irregular and unstable sleep cycle. If you end up napping, you should try to not do it too long or too late in the day.
Go to sleep at a consistent time. It seems that sleeping at irregular intervals and an unusual times just throws things off. It also risks tempting you to sleep at irregular times, which is when you get into the sort of “sleep death spiral” I mentioned in (1).
Do not use your bed, and ideally bedroom for anything but sleep. Living in a small space with a partner who also works from home makes this very challenging, but it’s absolutely correct. I used to sometimes go into the bedroom and sit on the bed with my laptop when my partner was taking a call, and when you are tired, this creates a significant temptation to sleep. It can also be a bit confusing for your body to be in the place you sleep and not be sleeping.
Avoid physical activity in the hours preceding sleep. This one is kind of counterintuitive, but apparently the research shows that working out right before bed actually kind of “agitates” you and makes it hard to fall asleep. I love going for long walks, and as it turns out the ones I used to go on right before going to sleep probably did not help.
Doing these things really helped improve my sleep and make my life less of a living disaster. It’s amazing how much easier writing and doing work is when you aren’t tired all of the time. But better hygiene didn’t fix the other big problem — the amount I was sleeping.
As I mentioned at the top, since university, I was generally getting a lot less than eight hours a night, and that’s also going to contribute to being tired — and make not giving in to bad sleep hygiene a lot harder. Fortunately, after travelling to Europe, I took advantage of the time change returning back to fix my bedtime, which is generally very hard to fix — it’s just so much easier to stay up late to get more work done than to wake up early to. Constantly staying up to 1 or 2 or 3AM and then waking up mid-morning not only gave me a lot of leeway in my day to waste time and be unproductive (because hey, I can just stay up really late and work!), but it also eroded the good sleep schedule.
When I came back from Europe (where I was still staying up until 1 to 2AM every night) I was tired and my usual bedtime was much earlier, so I bit the bullet and tried to set a new sleep time of around 11PM — which is way earlier than I’ve gone to sleep since I was in high school. Going to be earlier is good for a lot of reasons: it better aligns you with the world’s normal 9-5 working schedule, it lets you be less overwhelmed in the morning with tons of emails that people send when they get into their offices at 9AM, and it avoids the time-wasting that often happens late at night when people are watching shows, playing video games, or messaging one another back and forth. Going to bed early requires some discipline, but when the punishment is the idea of going back to a miserably tired existence, it’s a lot less hard.
So these days things are pretty good. I have a really consistent sleep schedule, I often wake up without an alarm (which is great, alarms suck), and I get lots of hours in — all of this means I am able to do better work! But honestly, having good sleep is just kind of removing a needless drag on everything else you do — it’s life-changing!
Another piece of advice I received which has helped me tremendously: find a mattress, blanket and pillow that work for how you sleep. Softness, warmth, shape and breathability are different for each person, but old and worn things generally don't work for most people. You should enjoy where you sleep, and wake up rested and comfortable (acknowledging that cost is always a concern).
And of course the elephant in the room is ... sex.
Stop smirking, I am serious.
We all learned that the bedroom, and the bed within it, should be reserved for sleeping.
Unfortunately, the bed in the bedroom also happens to be the most convenient place to have sex. There is a reason why many languages use expressions like "go to bed with someone" or "sleep with someone" as euphemisms for "to have sex with someone".
Don't tell me there are other places you can have sex. I know. Partly from experience, even. But the bed in the (master, if you will) bedroom is THE most convenient place for live-in couples.
How does one square that?