My Evidence-Based Sleep Routine

over the last few months I've interviewed a bunch of Sleep Experts and listened to loads of podcasts and read loads of books all about the science behind effective sleep and these are the nine evidence-based things that I've built into my routine to help me get an amazing night's sleep and feel well rested throughout the day let's get started first off I try to sleep for around seven to eight hours each night now the science and how long you should sleep for isn't straightforward but most research says that between seven and nine hours of sleep at

night is ideal for a healthy adult and according to a big 2015 study by the American Academy of sleep science and at the Sleep research Society quote adults should sleep seven or more hours per night because regularly getting less than seven hours of sleep can lead to a load of bad stuff like weight gain and heart disease and depression and charmingly increased risk of death if you're not sure if you should sleep seven or eight or nine hours then the solution is pretty simple just experiment with how much sleep you need to feel happy and

productive the next day and remember if you get too obsessed with getting eight hours of sleep every single night that actually might spike your stress levels ironically making it more difficult to get to sleep and this is called Sleep anxiety so the second thing I try to do for healthy sleep is to build a sleep Rhythm I set a regular time for going to sleep and waking up and I try my best to actually stick to it so for example I usually go to sleep around 11 or 11 30 pm and get up around 7

am the more consistent your Rhythm the easier it's going to be to fall asleep and to wake up and this is because of the homeostatic sleep drive one of the main systems in our body that determines when we feel tired and when we feel awake which is powered by the chemical adenosine see adenosine makes us feel this intense need for sleep from the moment we wake up in the morning adenosine starts building up in our body until eventually we start feeling sleep hungry the more adenosine we have the sleepier we feel when we actually do

get enough sleep that drives our adenosine levels down again and we wake up feeling well rested okay so why does this mean we should have consistent times for waking and sleeping well if we start going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day and get our proper seven to eight hours of sleep then our adenosine levels will regularly Peak at the same time each evening making us feel properly tired and ready for bed and after seven to eight hours of sleep that adenosine will be low enough that we can wake up naturally

without feeling too groggy or tired so the more we can invest in building the steady Rhythm the more we can bring our sleep schedule in sync with the chemicals in our body and the less likely we are to feel weirdly awake at 2am and start playing video games and here are four practical things that can help you build that Rhythm first set an alarm for the same time every day to help you wake up consistently secondly ignore the weekend as far as your body is concerned the weekend is just two days where you do your

best to mess up your Healthy sleep cycle for me I try to personally avoid lions or having a different sleep schedule on Saturdays and Sundays so I don't mess up this adenosine Rhythm that I've been trying to build thirdly try to phase shift your social life basically try to schedule evening meetups with friends a little bit earlier in the day the occasional late night is totally fine I just try not to make too much of a habit of it and the final tip is to actually listen to your body try not to push through that

sleepy late evening feeling that's the exact trigger we're working towards which makes it easier to fall asleep okay so the next thing I do to get a good night's sleep is to catch the morning sun when I wake up that's because in addition to adenosine there's a second system inside all of us that affects when we feel sleepy and when we feel awake I'm kind of internal 24-hour clock called the Circadian rhythm now this system is mainly controlled from a master clock in our brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus which lives just above the roof of

our mouth and sends signals to the rest of our body about whether to feel sleepy or awake the Circadian in Rhythm generally looks like a wave with our brain releasing the chemicals cortisol and epinephrine to drive our upward spike in alertness during the morning and the rest of the day and melatonin driving the downward curve at night making us feel like going to bed and the number one thing that influences this circadian rhythm is light particularly morning sunlight when morning sunlight hits the retina in our eyes it sends a message to our internal circadian clock

to trigger that release of cortisol and epinephrine which makes us feel awake and alert now the sun doesn't need to be just peeking Over the Horizon it just needs to be within a few hours of sunlight and the sooner you can get it after waking up the better so in terms of my personal morning routine I wake up I grab some water I take my medication which in this case is finasteride and Heights supplement and probiotic and then after having a shower I'll normally go for a walk and I'll walk over to the local pret

a mange where I've got the prep coffee subscription because that encourages me to actually get out of the house in the morning to grab my coffee and that means I'm getting the morning sunlight and I've also delayed my caffeine consumption more on that a little bit later now other types of bright light can trigger our wake-up mechanisms but our brain responds best to the quality and mounted light that's coming from the sun when it's at a low solar angle so on bright cloudless days you should apparently stay outside for around 10 minutes after waking up

to properly trigger your circadian clock on cloudy days it might take a bit longer like 20 minutes and if it's really overcast it could take 30 minutes to an hour but the main thing is that we don't want to overthink this perfect is the enemy of good and just getting any amount of morning sunlight in the morning is actually great for our circadian rhythm and for our Sleep Quality now there's a second reason it's important to get that morning sunlight in that it sets our circadian clock on a timer to release the hormone melatonin from

the pineal gland in our brain in about 12 to 14 hours time which is going to make us feel sleepy later that evening so the earlier we get that morning sunlight the sooner that clock starts counting down and the sooner we start feeling sleepy in the evening so if I wake up at 7am and then I go for a morning walk to get that strong burst of Morning Sun for about 10 minutes I should start getting the Sleepy signal from my brain between about 7 pm and 9pm that night but if I wake up later

at 8am for example the Sleepy phase is going to move forward to between 8 pm and 10 pm and before we continue I want to give a massive shout out to the huberman Lab podcast and heberman's podcast is absolutely sick I listen to it all the time and the episodes about sleep really helped me figure out all of this stuff around the evidence around sleep and helped inform a lot of the research for this video so thank you Andrew huberman and your team okay next let's look at what time we ideally want to be exercising

to get the best possible sleep so sunlight is the most important thing to focus on but exercise does release endorphins which also make us feel happy and more awake now in an Ideal World I would be doing weight training in the morning but I personally find that if I go gym in the morning then I kind of feel a bit groggy for the rest of the day so I'm not a huge fan of that instead I do my morning walk thing this is a thing that I figured out with my health coach he was like

you know try and get some steps in in the morning and it also doubles as an effect in that it gets me the morning sunlight as well now if you can actually do some proper exercise in the morning then according to Andrew huberman there is evidence that our body starts to develop this anticipatory circuit expecting that hit of morning exercise because it happened over the last few days and getting us to wake up and feel ready for it to happen again and that adds to that morning Spike of energy that we want and it sets

us up for healthy sleepiness in the evening because our body is going to be tired and is going to need sleep to recover from that training like think about the last time you went for a really long hike or had a lot of exercise you probably had a long deep sleep that night so we've talked about some of the stuff that I do in my morning routine so far but one thing that I do that's unrelated to sleep is browse a cheeky newsletter called morningbrew on my phone who are very kindly sponsoring this video now

morning Brew is a totally free 100 free daily newsletter that's delivered every single day Monday through Sunday and it just takes a few minutes to read and it gets you up to date on all of the interesting news from the worlds of business and finance and Tech which are three of the things that I care most about and it's my favorite way to consume the news because a it doesn't take very long and B it's written in a dry witty kind of entertaining manner unlike most other sources of news which are kind of dry and

kind of boring and it's really useful for keeping up to date with the content creative business stuff that affects me personally like for example Zuckerberg recently rolling out meta verified which I heard about because I read my morning Brew newsletter and it's been great for also keeping me up to date about what's going on with the whole AI stuff because there's just too much going on it's hard to keep track of it on Twitter and so on morning Brew I get like a decent write-up of what Microsoft Edge is doing and how chat GPT is

going and like what's going on with Bing and how it's just started making absolutely ridiculous statements and it's just generally funny and interesting reading about this kind of stuff so if you are interested in anything to do with business or Finance or Tech or you just want an entertaining way to browse the news once a day then there is no reason not to sign up to morning Brew it is completely free and it takes less than 15 seconds to subscribe so if you're interested then head over to morningprewdaily.com forward slash LA and then you can

subscribe there and you'll be supporting the channel along the way that link is also in the video description so thank you so much morning Brew for sponsoring this video alright time to talk about a big topic caffeine now remember the chemical adenosine which makes us hungry for sleep well to actually make us feel sleepy adenosine needs to get picked up by our adenosine receptors and what caffeine does is act like an adenosine antagonist blocking those adenosine receptors in our brain to stop the Sleepy adenosine signal from being processed so the caffeine Keeps Us alert and

awake initially but when the caffeine wears off we get a caffeine crash as the blocked adenosine rushes through our receptors again making us feel really tired now I drink coffee every morning and around two to three times a day but there are two things when it comes to caffeine timing that I find quite useful firstly I try to avoid coffee for the first hour of the day and the idea behind this is that it gives your body enough time to naturally clear the adenosine that's left behind in your system and secondly to get better quality

of sleep I try to avoid drinking coffee or any other caffeinated drinks too late in the day specifically after around 2 to 3 pm now caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours which is the time it takes for the caffeine levels in your system to drop by 50 but it takes even longer than that after drinking caffeine for our adenosine to be working normally again so to stop caffeine interfering with our sleep Dr hiberman reckons that we should avoid it eight to ten hours before our normal bedtime so stop drinking between 1 pm

and 3 pm if your bedtime is 11 pm Matthew Walker the author of why we sleep is a bit more conservative and says aim for 10 to 12 hours so basically only caffeine in the morning but I personally stop around 3 pm everyone has different caffeine tolerances though like some people can't drink any caffeine past 11 am without it messing with their sleep but for other people the cutoff point is more like 4 pm there's a small percentage of people that can even have caffeine late at night and still fall asleep easily but that probably

still affects their Sleep Quality even if they get technically a full night and by the way if you're enjoying this video so far I'd love it if you could drop a little thumbs up on the thing apparently it really helps us for the algorithm now this is potentially getting a bit overboard but the sixth thing that I try to do every day is to go outside around an hour or so before Sunset and get a good 10 to 30 minutes of evening sunlight so the sunlight trick that we talked about earlier Works in Reverse when

the light sensitive melanops and neurons in your eye detect the specific color and intensity of evening sunlight they send a signal to your circadian clock that it's getting to the end of the day and that sleep is coming again try to be in direct sunlight if at all possible because windows and other kind of barriers like sunglasses make the sunlight a lot less effective so if you get the sun in the morning and in the evening you give your internal clock consistent light anchors making it way easier to get into a healthy rhythm of waking

up and going to sleep at the same time every day alright so now it's evening and for me I try my very best not to expose myself to artificial lights after around 8 pm and I try to avoid viewing Bright Lights between 10 pm and 4 AM including my laptop screen and my computer monitor and my phone the reason we want to avoid light is because bright artificial lights mimic the effect of bright sunlight somewhat which like we've seen tells our brain that it's daytime and releases cortisol and epinephrine that keeps us awake and being

awake in the evenings is exactly what we want to avoid now scarily the longer that we've been awake the more sensitive we are to Bright Lights making us feel even more awake so the later it gets in the evening the higher the stakes in fact this 2018 study which was published in the journal cell which is a high quality Journal showed that light arriving to the eyes between 11 pm and 4 am even suppresses dopamine the thing that makes us feel good and is a natural antidepressant and it also activates the habenula the disappointment nucleus

in our brain and so over the next few days this lowers our mood and makes us feel more disappointed and actually can make it harder to learn new things so for me personally the way that I avoid all these lights is I try to avoid going on the computer Beyond 10 pm if I am on the computer I try and dim this brightness setting on my computer down I try and use the kind of flux night mode display setting on the Mac to try and avoid the blue light that comes in from the computer screen

I also try my best to avoid using my phone at night time and instead I use my Kindle which is generally on a fairly dim dark mode warm light setting now apparently the positioning of these artificial special lights can make a difference because we're particularly sensitive to overhead lights because we've evolved to detect the light from the sunlight and so having warm lights that are positioned low like lamps and candles that are low down instead of having the ceiling lights on apparently it can make a difference to how effective our sleep can be okay a

really quick tip here I always expect to feel alert around one hour before my natural bedtime and I know that if I just read a book and stick to my normal habits then I'll eventually feel sleepy again now this is totally normal and according to Dr heberman's podcast this is a naturally occurring spike in wakefulness so don't freak out if it happens it's gonna pass now the final step in my sleep routine is keeping the room where I sleep nice and cool now our bodies need a drop in temperature by one to three degrees to

fall asleep and to stay asleep effectively so here's what I do personally firstly if I'm in a hotel room or anything that has air conditioning and thermostat I generally set it quite low some people say that 19 degrees Celsius is the ideal I find that that's still a bit warm for me and I like to set it at like 16 17 degrees if I can in my own home I don't have air conditioning and so I'll sometimes open the windows if it's particularly warm in the room and I'll use a fan if it's particularly hot

plus I like the white noise of the fan which helps me fall asleep and this one's a bit extra but I do also happen to have an eight Sleep mattress I interviewed the founders of eight sleep on my podcast a little while ago we talked a lot about sleep I'll link that episode down below if you want to check it out but the eight Sleep mattress is basically like a mattress topper thing that has a liquid cooling system in it and so I usually have that set to the colder settings honestly something like that is

pretty Overkill you really don't need it it's pretty expensive you can just leave a window open or just get a cheap ass fan just to cool your body down to the temperature that it needs to be and some people find that having a hot bath or a hot shower before bed really helps because it helps reduce your internal body temperature so if you incorporate each of these nine science back tips for my routine your day might look something like this you'd have a regular bedtime and waking time so you'd get around seven to eight hours

of sleep you'd view the sun just after you get up and maybe do some exercise as well you'd delay your caffeine consumption for around an hour after waking up and you'd stop drinking caffeine after around 2 or 3 P.M you might go for a walk and view evening sunlight for about 10 minutes just before Sunset you would dim all of your house lights just a few hours before bed and avoid any bright screens you try and ride out any spike in energy before your bedtime and finally you'd keep your bedroom cool so that you can

fall asleep easily now I'll be honest I don't do all of these things every day I try my best to stick to them but I don't beat myself up if I have a little bit of a lion or if I have coffee a little bit too early in the morning or a little bit too late in the day and if you go to this video you might like to check out this video over here which is a video about why you might find yourself always tired and it's about seven myths that are ruining your sleep

and so with this video and that video that's basically everything you need to know to have a fantastic sleep routine thank you so much for watching