The Sleep Pillar

Bringing awareness to how many hours you typically sleep, as well as how specific changes across your day affect that number, can help you increase your sleep over the long run. Measuring sleep hours is also a useful tool for seeing how your habits are affecting you overall. 

Calibrate syncs with most sleep trackers—or you can enter the number manually in the app. 

The first step to improving your sleep is understanding quantity and quality. That means recording how much you’re sleeping, so you can start to recognize patterns.

It also means removing some simple sleep blockers. This will help you produce more melatonin (your key sleep hormone, triggered by darkness) and less cortisol (the stress hormone that can keep you wired late into the night). To get started, we recommend five habits:

• Make the room as dark as possible for sleep
  Light suppresses your body’s production of melatonin, even when your eyes are closed. Check for light shining under the door or through windows, lights on chargers and alarm clocks, etc. Sleep masks and blackout curtains can also really help.
• Minimize blue light before bed
  Blue light, emitted from devices like your smartphone and tablet, suppresses even more melatonin than regular light. Fix this by using “night mode” on your devices and keeping extra screens off at night.
• Clean up physical and mental clutter 
  Studies show that clutter triggers cortisol, which makes it harder to fall (and stay) asleep. Mental clutter counts, too, and many members find it helpful to clear their minds by making a to-do list before bed.
• Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol 
  Caffeine and nicotine are stimulants, so they keep you up. Cut them out six and two hours before bed, respectively. As for alcohol, it interrupts your sleep signals, so Last Call should ideally be four hours before bedtime. But it’s not all or nothing. If you can’t hit the full window, shoot for the best you can. 
• If you can’t fall asleep, don’t toss and turn 
  Stress interferes with sleep, and that includes stress about sleep. If it’s been more than 20 minutes since you started trying to sleep, take a break. Keep the lights dim, and do something relaxing, like reading a book, for 20-30 minutes or until you feel drowsy.

Your ability to sleep is regulated by the interaction between how long you’ve been awake (your sleep/wake homeostasis) and your body’s internal 24-hour clock (your circadian rhythm). 

If your bedtime is always changing, the amount of time you've been awake and your internal clock stop lining up. This means you might find yourself unable to sleep even when you feel exhausted. A consistent bedtime can solve that. Aim for lights out seven to nine hours before you’d like to wake up. 

Importantly, because you’re not a robot, the amount of time it takes you to get to bed will vary some each day. That’s where a bedtime window comes in—it builds in both awareness and boundaries to keep you on track. A narrow window is best for sleep consistency (20 minutes is ideal, but an hour is a good starting point if you’re new to this or if your schedule changes on weekends). Lights should be out by the end, so if your bedtime window is 11-11:20, that would be 11:20. 

You can think of this whole process as gradually applying the brakes before coming to a full stop. For best results, begin slowing down with some stress-free activities well before your window starts. (We call this a “wind-down,” but think of it however you want. It’s basically when you stop answering work emails and start zoning out.) 

Having the same wake up time every day can be as important for healthful sleep as maintaining a consistent bedtime. That’s because being awake for the same amount of time before your bedtime each day helps make sure you actually feel tired when you’re ready for bed. 

The start of your wake-up window should take the end of your bedtime window into account and keep you in the seven to nine hour range for total sleep. A narrow window is best (about 20 minutes) but a wider one (up to an hour) can also make sense if your hours tend to change for weekends, etc.

Also good to know: Thanks to a concept called sleep inertia (a fancy term for grogginess), studies show it can take up to 30 minutes to fully wake up. You can speed that along with natural light–from your window or even from stepping outside. Sunlight helps to quickly lower your production of the sleep hormone melatonin.

Once you know what to do, it’s about making yourself do it, consistently.

We know that can be the hard part. Now’s the time to identify (and write down!) the things that help you out, trip you up, and everything you can do to make your habit stick. You can use this information to set new goals within the app to keep you moving forward.