• Sleep enough. Or die early

• If you can’t tell what you desperately need, it’s probably sleep

• Restful sleep. It is the quality and richness of sleep, not the quantity. Sleep is a habit. Sleep is like a drug. Sleep less, but more deeply. More than 9 hours of sleep is not good for you.

• Don’t read in bed.

• Collect the best memories of your day in mind eye. Count your blessings, stop counting your troubles. Empty your mind: write down all the things you worry about and the challenges you foresee on small papers and shred the papers.

• And Leonardo da Vinci: a day well spent brings happy sleep.

• Key point: if you sleep less than 8 hours or go to sleep at inconsistent times, you are fucking yourself, making yourself stupid, and helping yourself get Alzheimers.

1. How to fall asleep quickly?

• How to fall asleep quickly? 4-7-8 breathes

2. The pre-sleep ritual

• The quality of your day is largely determined by the quality of your sleep. Which is determined by the evening before your sleep: the battle of your bed. As you know I rise at 5:00 AM, but I do want to get 7-9 hours of sleep. It is vitally important that I keep to a healthy pre-sleep ritual to ensure these the quality and quantity of my sleep. My battle is between a movie with Ben & Jerry and my wife on the couch versus sleeping early and feeling great. This is my spectrum of extremes and I tend to move between them. Note; I deliberately ignore outliers, like drinking & partying till early morning. As long as these situations are outliers, not your standard ritual for the weekend, you can ignore them.

• Find your extreme evening scenarios and plot them in a spectrum. Turf each day: where are you in your spectrum? How do you feel? It is not a good/bad scenario; sometimes you feel like quality time with your partner, and sometimes you feel like being the world’s instrument. You can reset your defaults by training (see habits), you can create alternatives for watching tv, but walk/chat/play games/….).

• From 5 AM (an extreme in the spectrum): To decrease the demand of my willpower and to increase the chances of winning the battle of my bed I try to stick to the schedule. Generally, this ritual should occur between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM. You should make sure that, by this time, you have had your last meal of the day. You will also want to turn off all your devices and keep them away from the bed. Try to isolate yourself from overstimulation. From 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM, you can have family time. You can have honest conversations with your loved ones, or meditate if you want. You can spend some time reading or listening to audiobooks or podcasts. The idea is to just relax and calm your mind before sleeping. 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM is when you have to prepare for your sleep. Make sure your room is cool, dark, and technology-free. You can organize your exercise gear for the following day to be ready and motivated to start your day in the right way. And last but not least: Practice gratitude before you sleep. Doing this means you are ending your day on a high note, on a positive note.

• Before going to sleep:

  • 7 to 8 p.m. – Eat the last meal of the day. Turn off your devices. Isolate yourself from overstimulation. If you have a different schedule: no food 3 hours before sleep, no screens 2 hours before sleep.

  • 8 to 9 p.m. – Have conversations with loved ones. Meditate. Read. Take a bath.

  • 9 to 10 p.m. – Prepare for sleep. Your bedroom should be cool, dark and tech-free. Lay out your gear for your 5 a.m. workout. Practice gratitude.

3. Perfect your sleep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2aWYjSA1Jc

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1WtITGcwwZYQZHVJGciMJp?si=CO8DFFATRx2BFeM6sVysEQ

4. Dream recording: DREAMS.

Your subconscious is trying to talk to you. Start listening. How? DREAMS. Diving into dreams and maxing out on their potential is vital for success. Many great inventions came via dreams. From sewing machines & the periodic table to Google and Frankenstein. Learn how to talk with your subconscious.

Your dreams are your subconscious mind (and perhaps even your spirit guides?) talking to you. It is vital to dive into your dreams. Here is how: D R E A M S. Decide, record, eyes, affirm, manage, and share.

Decide: the night before, make a conscious decision that you’re going to recall your dreams. If you set the intention, your chances improve dramatically. Hack: set reminders, visual or physical. E.g., put a note on your pillow, set the alarm, hide your

Record: Keep a pen and paper by your bedside, or even have a recording app readily available on your phone (best to keep the phone out of the room). Record any lingering remembrance of your dreams as soon as you wake up. Hack: buy 2$ pen with illuminating light to write in dark.

Eyes: Keep your eyes closed right after you awaken. Dreams can disappear within minutes, and if you keep your eyes closed, this will help you reflect. Hack: (voice) record your story ASAP. Your memory hormones drop when you wake up.

Affirm: Before you go to sleep, affirm that you are going to remember your dreams, because affirmation is a critical tool in accomplishment. Still not sure how/if this is any different than step 1. @jimkwik might have needed the A for his DREAM abbreviation.

Manage: for lots of reasons but specifically here for the sake of remembering your dreams, it’s important to manage your sleep and establish good sleep routines. Also:

• discipline and consistency are king and queen

• no screens/food&drinks + dim/less lights (!) 2 hours before sleep

• journal/bath/chamomile thee

• cool, dark and tech-free.

• Lay out your gear for your 5 a.m. workout

• Practice gratitude

Share: talk about your dreams with others. When you do so, you bring them more and more to the surface, and you develop the routing of tapping into your dreams so you can discuss them later. This might take some courage. But, do or do not, there is no try.

5. Lucid dreaming

https://101.xyz/course/cl3x6mhzb081809kyu040ymed

6. More about the importance of sleep

https://hackernoon.com/biohack-your-intelligence-now-or-become-obsolete-97cdd15e395f?ref=hackernoon.com

If anyone wants all the science, look into this book — it references hundreds of studies many of which the author (the director of the UC Berkeley Sleep Lab and one of the world’s leading sleep neuroscientists) performed himself. Here we will just list the highlights.

Even minor sleep deprivation (sleeping 6–7 hours); circadian shift (changing sleep time by 1–2 hours a day from one night to the next); or reduction in Deep NREM or REM sleep reduce our intelligence in the following ways:

• Applied Intelligence: Severely lowered emotional control, stress resilience, willpower and focus. Significant increase in procrastination.

• Hormonal misregulation. With consequences like worsened mood and lower energy. And smaller testicle size (yes, really). See chart above — the more you sleep the better your hormones get.

• Significantly reduced immunity => more sickness => less productivity. They tested this by giving people rhinoviruses and depriving some of them of sleep. For science!

• Dynamic Intelligence: Significantly worsened ability to remember what you learned the prior day AND worsened ability to learn the next day.

• Classical Intelligence: Significantly worsened cognition and ability to see creative non-trivial solutions.

• Social Intelligence: there are actual experiments showing sleep deprived people are less able to read facial expressions, are rated less attractive and persuasive etc.

• Worsened clearance of waste from brain (occurs in deep NREM) => accumulation of Alzheimers-causing proteins => permanent damage to sleep enabling centers => further sleep degradation => we are fucked. I have a grandma with Alzheimers. And I would personally cryofreeze myself the second there were any indication I had it. If cryofreezing were not an option, I would prefer to die.

Plus on top of the Things That Make Us Stupid above, we have: worsened insulin resistance, cancer, cardiovascular disease, car crash risk, athletic performance etc.

I don’t have time to link all the studies but it is in the book. Besides pretty sure most of us will know the above to be true from personal experience. I for one feel like a moron in the afternoon after undersleeping.

In other words, sleep is a major opportunity for intelligence enhancement. It impacts many other things. And for most of us, sleep quality is poor.

First a bit of important theory:

• Sleep is driven by two independent functions: accumulating sleep pressure (adenosine) and circadian rhythm (internal clock + melatonin). How long you sleep and when you sleep. If these are not in-sync with each other, sleep quality declines.

• Sleep has many different stages (REM, light NREM, deep NREM is a simple classification).

• The stages (1) have very different functions (2) happen in a different order, at different times of night, and depending on sleep pressure/circadian rhythm (3) are all essential.

• Sleep is not actually a state where you are “turned off”; it is a stage of very active work throughout the brain and the body.

What this means is that if we spend 7 hours in bed we sleep ~6 hours and cut out the last stages of sleep, degrading their unique functions by >80%. If we change our bedtime by 2 hours from one day to the next, we destroy the early stages of sleep and degrade their unique functions by >80%.

KEY POINT: you think sleeping 6 hours or going to sleep 2 hours later degrade sleep marginally, but actually they do so very severely.

So sleeping better means spending more time asleep, in the right sleep phases, at the right and consistent time of the day*.*

The first thing to do is measure. Go Oura ring.

Here are the key things we want:

• 8 hours of actual sleep per day. This means we spend 8.5–9 hours in bed. I spend ~8:30 in bed on average, of which ~7:45 is sleep. Aiming to get to around 8:10 of sleep every day, so 9 hours in bed.

• Same sleep time every day. When every day our sleep time shifts by hours, we are effectively living in a permanent state of jetlag. This de-synchronizes our sleep pressure from our circadian rhythm and destroys certain parts of sleep, especially deep NREM sleep.

• 1–2 hours of deep NREM sleep per day. According to data I’ve seen from Oura this will be the biggest challenge for most of us. On a median day I get ~1:20; am aiming to get to 1:30 and make it consistently good (I sometimes have unexplained drops down to 20–30 minutes).

• 2+ hours of REM sleep per day. I get 2:45 on average and up to 5:30 when I do a lot of mental work. This is very high already.

Resting heart rate trends through the night

• Low, stable resting heart rate. We can see the rough reference ranges everyone quotes for different ages above. I’m around 47 on great days, 56 on bad days, 52 on average, which is excellent. We want this to be low + stable during the night like in the graph above. This indicates highly restful sleep.

• All this life-long

To sleep better:

• Pick a sleep time where we spend 8.5–9 hours in bed and do not shift it by more than 20 minutes a day. This is incredibly hard in modern society and is the #1 thing that makes our sleep better.

• Use blue-light-blocking glasses for 3–4 hours before going to sleep. Gunnars are good. Plus lately I’ve been using these because they block even more blue light. They do look weird, but we have to decide whether our ego matters more than our health/intelligence.

• Do not drink alcohol. Even a small amount degrades REM sleep which is the key part of sleep focused on intelligence. Interesting tidbit: the main difference between human and monkey sleep is that humans have more REM. So those of us who drink basically shift our sleep quality to monkey sleep and we can speculate as to long-term impacts of that. By the way — those studies about the benefits of red wine are bullshit, sorry.

• Do not drink coffee or tea for 9 hours before sleep time (if a fast metabolizer) or at all (if a slow metabolizer). Caffeine half-life is surprisingly long. The graph above is average, but 50% of us (like me) metabolize much faster and 50% metabolize much slower and should not drink caffeine at all (for them it is associated with major health risks). The distinction is purely genetic and based on gene rs762551.

• Sleep in cool temperatures (18 degrees Celsius; 65 Fahrenheit) and try out hot or cold showers before sleep. Low body temperature helps get into deep NREM sleep. I find that ice showers make me fall asleep very fast (counterintuitive).

• Make sure our bedroom is totally dark and quiet. Use earplugs and sleep masks. Even sounds that do not wake us up actually make our sleep worse.

• Exercise improves sleep, but do it >3 hours before bedtime. Consider not eating heavily for at least 3–4 hours before bedtime.

• Sugar and carbohydrates reduce quality of deep NREM sleep. Yet another reason not to eat that shit.

• Do not use sleeping pills. They make us lose consciousness but they actually don’t make us sleep. These are different things.

• Consider meditating or otherwise turning off before bed.

Here’s the thing: like most suggestions in this article the stuff above has compounding benefits. Each night of bad sleep permanently damages us and we can never fully recover that damage. Part of the damage is to the apparatus of sleep itself, which over time makes us stupid and ages and kills us.

Many of us do not want to make the changes to our social lives, dating etc. for the sake of sleep.

It is a matter of priorities. You want to go to the club, or you want to not have Alzheimers.