One of the most underrated tools for improvement in both athletic performance as well as just day to day health and wellness is sleep. It is likely that sleep is the single most important activity to improve regardless of the outcome you are striving towards. Getting the right amount of sleep (generally considered to be 7-9 hours per night) is associated with regulation and repair of nearly every system in the body. When it comes to athletic performance, sleep is when a significant portion of your recovery and growth occurs. Without adequate sleep, you generally shouldn’t expect to be fully recovering from your workouts, which means that will also not capture the full benefit of the work you are putting in.
Because of this, getting your sleep into that 7–9-hour range and mostly sleeping through the night should be one of the first things that you look at when considering improvement in almost any area of sport or life.
Luckily, there are some simple things that can be done quickly and easily to get some almost immediate improvement to sleep quality. Here are what I would consider the adjustments with the biggest impact and lowest effort to implement:
- Finish eating for the day 2-3 hours before bedtime
I see significant differences in how I sleep from night to night depending on how close to bedtime I eat my last meal/snack. Typically, I find that the earlier the better when it comes to this topic, though I find that 2-3 hours is usually a long enough timeframe to avoid having food digestion impact your sleep that night.
- Stop drinking caffeine 8-10 hours before bedtime
The exact timeframe will be slightly different for everybody depending on several factors, but the 8–10-hour range is a good place to start. Personally, I have my last sip of caffeine around 1pm before going to bed at 10pm. If you workout in the evening, you might be able to get away with a shorter timeframe.
- Limit alcohol before bed
Alcohol has a huge impact on sleep quality – I find that I can tell my sleep is impacted (based on heart rate and sleep info from my watch) anytime I have more than ~2 drinks in a night. Generally, I try to wind down drinking as early as possible during the day/night in order to minimize that impact. A couple of examples from 2 distinctly different situations that I find myself in
- Have 2-3 drinks at dinner (a lot of times this is during the work week) – I try to treat this just like my last meal, if you can be done drinking after dinner and a couple hours before bedtime, you shouldn’t have too much of an issue
- Drinking more/throughout the night (typically during the weekend) – this is obviously a less ideal situation, but one that many of us probably find ourselves in regularly. My main goal during a night like this is to try my best to slow down my drinking as the night goes on and stop as early as possible. Try to avoid those after-party nightcaps!
- Limit fluids in the 1-2 hours before bedtime
The main reason for this is just to avoid going to the bathroom in the middle of the night – try to scale back how much liquid you are drinking in the hour or so before bed and you should be able to avoid that.
There are also some additional things that you can try, though it will be harder to measure their direct impact because of the nature of these tips. To get some more detail on all of this, Andrew Huberman probably has the best resources directly related to sleep out there – he has several podcasts dedicated to sleep, which you can find on Spotify.
- Sunlight first thing in the morning
There is a lot of research that suggests directly viewing sunlight within the first 1-2 hours after waking up helps your body reset its circadian rhythm. Since humans operate on a roughly 24 hours rhythm, this reset will help you align your body’s processes towards waking up and going to bed at a certain time (depending on what time you are viewing light in the morning). This can also be utilized as a tool to change what time you wake up at, if you are interested in waking up earlier or later during the average day.
- Improve the consistency of your sleep schedule
Similar to the above point, given that your body wants to operate on a 24 hour schedule - the more consistent that you can be with what time you go to sleep and wake up at, the easier that schedule will become.
In order to figure out which of these changes is the most impactful to your sleep, some sort of tracking could be helpful. I let my Garmin watch track my sleep each night and find that the combination of total sleep time + average heart rate while sleeping seem to be the best indicators of a good nights sleep. Though, its important to mention that this could be counterproductive if it makes you feel like another activity/task to track and negatively impacts your sleep – in that case, I wouldn’t worry about any sort of tracking.
