What You Should Do At Night To Improve Your Sleep

What You Should Do At Night To Improve Your Sleep

Viewing bright light in the late evening hours and nighttime hours is really not good for your sleep quality and your ability to fall and stay asleep. A simple rule of thumb is to avoid bright artificial lights of all colors, and in particular, overhead bright artificial lights, between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. - AH

Plain and simple, your body triggers mechanisms depending on the time of day. Light, through your eyes, tells your body what time it is.

When there’s a lot of light, your hormones behave in a way that promotes activity and wakefulness. When there’s little/no light, they gear towards calmness and sleepiness.

So, when you see bright light at night, your body gets a signal to be awake when you should be trying to go to bed. So it's harder for you to fall and stay asleep.

To be clear, this is not just blue light from screens. It's all types of light.
​The degree of brightness of your screen or artificial light is more important than the quality/source of light.

Ideally, you'd want to cut out all the lights at 10 PM. That's way too difficult for most lifestyles. Especially with exams and playoffs seasons. But there are things you can do without disrupting other areas of work, amusement, and socializing.

So, if at night, you want to work, stream, play, study, or whatever, try one of these:

1. Lower the brightness on your screen or TV screen

2. Switch off the lights in your room a bit earlier than usual

3. Use a lamp instead of overhead lights

4. Choose less light-intense locations (ex. outdoor garden)

5. Leverage moonlight. It doesn't have these negative effects

Even if it’s a tiny change, you'll notice the benefits from it immediately. Like, if you do one of these today, you will wake up tomorrow much more refreshed than usual.

So, get less bright light into your eyes at night.

If you want to do something right now, add this to your calendar or task list. There's a higher chance you'll remember.

This is from the "Sleep Toolkit" episode where Andrew covers the best protocols for optimizing your sleep.
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