Most of us know we should get about eight hours of sleep a night. But few people actually do.
According to Fitbit’s 2017 sleep statistics (from about twenty five million users), the average person spent seven hours and thirty three minutes in bed and only slept for six hours and thirty eight minutes. And these are Fitbit users—people who are typically more health-conscious than the average person. Most people probably average less.
Sleep is amazing for you. It improves mood, shortens reaction times, enhances cognition, aids memory and learning, decreases muscle recovery time, and rejuvenates you in other ways scientists are just unraveling. Anytime I sleep, I imagine I’m in one of the alien sarcophagi depicted in the TV show Stargate SG-1, which heal injuries and can even revive the dead. Although sleep doesn’t raise people from the dead, it does imbue you with life and enable you to recover from all manner of ailments.
Sleep is fantastic, but how do we get more of it and more out of it? I’ve found two things that have helped me achieve these goals.
Sleep Tracking
Lord Kelvin—inventor of the Kelvin temperature scale—is attributed with saying, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
This clearly applies to sleep. On a basic level, you can track your sleep qualitatively by paying attention to aspects of your sleep. How fast did you fall asleep? What time did you go to bed? How refreshed did you feel in the morning? How long after waking was it before you felt tired again? Asking these kinds of questions can give you a rough idea of whether your sleep quantity and quality are ideal.
However, if you’re more numbers-driven like I am and want to take your sleep more seriously, measuring your sleep quantitatively is the way to go. Although it takes a bit more effort, this will give you a much more precise idea of what your sleep quantity and quality is.
The bottom-line is: if you don’t measure your sleep somehow, you’ll never know if you’re getting decent sleep in the first place, let alone “improving it.”
There are a few ways you can track your sleep: with a sleep journal, your phone, or a wearable health monitoring device.
Keeping a sleep journal can be as simple as writing down when you went to bed, when you woke up, and how well-rested you feel on a scale from one to ten. This gives you a rough estimate of your sleep times and sleep quality.
You can also track your sleep with your phone. I’ve used my iPhone’s built-in Health app to track my sleep, but you can also download more sophisticated sleep apps that use your phone’s microphone to tell you how much you were awake during the night or if your sleep environment was too noisy. There are a few downsides with phones though. They may tempt you with late-night social media doomscrolling, and they don’t track your heart rate or body’s motions, which wearables do. Also, their blue light may mess with your circadian rhythm by tricking your brain into thinking it’s day time. These problems are fixable, though. You could install a social media blocker app (or delete all social media from your phone) and you can adjust your display settings on your phone so it emits warmer light colors in the evening, which don’t mess with your sleep as much.
Wearable health monitors track sleep most accurately but can be pricey. About a month ago I started using a Fitbit Charge 4 because it has few notifications, is relatively cheap, and tracks my sleep quite accurately. I used to wear an Apple Watch, but it’s multi-purpose and I ended up playing with it in bed. You could also track sleep with more expensive wearables such as the WHOOP band or the Oura Ring.
The Fitbit Charge 4 is the best option in my experience because you can own it with no subscriptions for a cheap price and it tracks sleep accurately enough. As this systematic review of sleep wearable accuracy concludes, “[Both Fitbit Charge 4 and WHOOP] seem appropriate for deriving suitable estimates of sleep parameters.”
Stimulating Your Parasympathetic Nervous System
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) is responsible for automatically regulating aspects of our body—such as our heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and so on. Your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is one-half of your ANS and is responsible for calming you.
To achieve better sleep, it’s vital that, a few hours before bedtime, you stimulate your PNS without stimulating the other half of your ANS—your sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Your SNS is responsible for arousing you into fight or flight mode.
Some say you can stimulate your PNS directly via the vagus nerve. The vagus is the longest cranial nerve in your body and runs from your brain down into your vital organs. By stimulating it you may be able to tell your body, “Hey, time to calm down.” There are expensive electrode devices such as the Pulsetto and a variety of ear-clippable ones that stimulate this nerve. Many people who leave reviews of the Pulsetto, for instance, claim it helps them ease anxiety and fall asleep faster. It may work, but I have yet to experiment with it. There are also so-called “body hacks” such as ear massages and gargling water that are purported to provide similar effects.
However, I’d be wary of getting caught up in the vagus nerve stimulation hype. As with most pseudoscience, there’s a grain of truth to it. Yes, we have a vagus nerve that affects our nervous system. But, is it a be-all and end-all solution for getting good sleep? No. Buying into the hype may just cost you a pretty penny and some dignity after you gargle water and rub your ears until they’re red on a nightly basis.
It’s better to simply learn how to relax. As one author writes in “Resetting the Hype Around the Vagus Nerve,”
What the wellness community recommends for stimulating the vagus nerve—eye movements, meditation, massage, cold-water immersion, and singing and humming—, if it works, is likely to be beneficial through a very simple concept: relaxation. Taking a moment to yourself to pause a stressful situation and focus on your breathing can, indeed, temporarily help with feeling unwell. The vagus nerve trappings are just scientific dressing, meant to transform common sense into a cutting-edge, all-natural body hack.
To relax, the first thing you should do is assess your bedtime wind down routine. Is it simple? Can it be without much conscious effort? Is it calming? If it takes too much effort, your sleep routine may make it harder to fall asleep because you’re looking to “fight” your way to sleep.
Before bed, I enjoy taking a hot shower or bath and then watching a light TV show. I do this because increasing your body temperature induces sleep and engages your PNS, and the right entertainment (especially something that makes you laugh) does the same thing. For some, however, watching a TV show before bed may make it harder to fall asleep because it involves staring at a brightly lit screen (which tricks your circadian rhythm into thinking it’s still daytime) and if what you’re watching is scary or emotionally intense, you may get worried and stressed out before bed.
You may also want to try meditation, stretching, reading, or some other calming activity. Anything you can do to relax your mind and body is good for sleep.
Both sleep tracking and stimulating your PNS through proper relaxation techniques are powerful ways to improve your sleep. Sleep tracking enables you to know if you’re improving or not and stimulating your PNS can help you change those results. Hopefully some of these techniques will help you sleep more soundly in the future.
