Episode 108: The Importance of Sleep
Summary
Nick and Kai spend this episode on sleep hygiene: how they structure evenings, manage technology use, and eat to get consistent rest. Both traced most of their sleep problems back to screens and the mental residue of being online, and arrived at similar conclusions through different paths.
Highlights
- Kai tracked six months of on-and-off insomnia using SleepCycle, added melatonin, and cut screens an hour before bed as his first round of fixes. He also discovered after turning 30 that eating after 9pm reliably wrecks his next day.
- Nick stops using computers at 5pm every day when his tool Draft closes, took up cooking as the replacement activity, and leaves his phone on the middle floor of the house when he goes to bed upstairs.
- Nick’s distinction: Apple’s Night Shift handles the blue light problem automatically, but the harder problem is mentally detaching from Slack, social media, and the dopamine that comes from being connected to people.
- Kai progressively deleted apps as his brain found workarounds, Mail, then Mail.app, then Safari, then Freedom to block Reddit, until there was nothing left to reach for at night.
- Nick eats dinner at 5pm, caps alcohol outings at three per month, drinks no coffee after lunch, and switches to chamomile or white tea in the evenings.
- Nick: alcohol may feel like a downer at first, but the body compensates four or five hours later, which is why you wake up at 3am.
- Kai applies a ‘five Whys’ method to sleeplessness, instead of reaching for melatonin or a drink, ask what’s actually causing the problem. The answer is often stress, anxiety, or a sleep schedule that’s misaligned with when you’re trying to go to bed.
Read the transcript
Uh sleep is very important. End of podcast.
Oh, so I tell you, dear listeners and dear Nick. I’ve been suffering from on and off insomnia for the last six months of my life. And that sucks, dude. I’m so sorry. Oh my God. It is insomnia, I think, is worse than like. A hangover, a drug hangover. It’s just bad. And especially like you end up with insomnia and then you wake up at 3 a. m. and you’re staring at the ceiling and you’re just like, let me contemplate. Every terrible thing that has happened in my life. It’s ugh, it’s a terrible, terrible thing. And then you wake up and you’re tired for the rest of the day. So I’ve spent a little bit of time thinking about like the importance of sleep hygiene. How do you How do you sleep well? How do you arrange your life so that you sleep well? How do you reset when you have poor sleep habits? And I’m curious about your schedule here as well, since I know you have some very strict practices in place for how you communicate and how you use electronics before you go to sleep, so you’re able to maximize your sleep, so you’re able to enjoy your sleep. What I’ve discovered for me is implementing some of the commonplace best practice rules: like: hey, don’t use an electronic device, don’t look at a screen for an hour before you go to sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep, start supplementing with melatonin and see if that helps you sleep more. Track your sleep using something like SleepCycle on your phone to see what your sleep pattern actually looks like. Things like this, small optimizations like this, have helped deal with the insomnia. But I think big picture Simply starting to track and ask yourself the question of, well, how much time am I spending sleeping? And how well do I feel when I wake up? is the first step to sleeping better. What I discovered and This is hilarious to me as somebody who recently turned 30. I can’t eat after 9 p. m. anymore. If I eat anything after 9 p. m. , I will wake up the next day. Feel like crap. When I look at my sleep log, it will be crap. And it’s just terrible. And that’s part of the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful bits about growing older. I just can’t eat onions after 8 p. m. or else I won’t have a good night’s sleep anymore.
I do a lot of things. So I don’t like computers anymore. I I came into this industry liking computers, like thinking they were good. They’re not. They’re bad, and you should avoid them.
We actually record this podcast episode on Real to Real Tape Decks that are then converted to MP3.
and they’re not converted to MP three by me. We have a fleet of assistants. Um they write me letters informing me. Like kinda I try and Ingvar comprad my life as much as possible where I just hand write letters to the the front desk of IKEA headquarters and This is like a real thing that he does. He’s insane. The consequence of me not liking computers, I think they’re bad. I think they’re responsible for a lot of bad things in the world right now, and way more bad than good things in the world right now. So I try and use them as little as possible after 5 p. m. , which is when draft closes for the day. So the consequence of this is I have I have like an iPhone and I use that. And then I have I guess actual computers and I really try not to use those. I have my email shut off at five. It stopped sending me email. I took up a hobby that sort of requires me to begin doing something else at 5 p. m. that doesn’t involve looking at a computer, and that hobby is cooking. And whatever that hobby is for you, you know, do that. So I cook. I play board games. There might be some light texting with people if they want to go out. I leave my cell phone my my home is three floors and my uh I leave my cell phone next to my iMac on the middle floor of the house. And then I go to bed upstairs. And that’s a thing that I do. So I read a lot of paper books. We’ve talked about reading books and how valuable and important those are. Overall, I look at computers as little as humanly possible. If there’s a pressing thing in my life or something that I have a panic attack about, then I meditate about it or I journal about it and I try and get rid of those bad thoughts because it’s usually fucking computers’ fault. This is a real thing that happened. I threw my biggest party of the year two days ago as of the recording of this podcast. I woke up at 8 a. m. and spent the entire day cooking And then like about a hundred people came over to my house and ate a bunch of food and they left and I had a great time. I picked up my phone zero times. And then the next day I looked at my phone and there were like 85 on red texts from people who like didn’t know my address. But what happened was, it was like, I don’t know your address. And M, I got it. Like, somebody else texted them my address. They got to my address. It’s like. Can I bring something over? Well, err on the side of yes, and we’ll figure it out. It worked out. That’s it. And you end up being a weird person that ends up gaining a reputation for being fuck computers after 5 p. m. The weird thing about it is like you get addicted to this device. and it begins to define you. This is the thing that happens often in Make Money Online podcasts, where you exceed a boundary. And or you define a boundary, you’re do something, and you become known for being a person who has the boundary defined in that particular way. And it’s a hard ship to turn, right? So if I become the like Anna WinTour flip phone fuck computers guy after a number of months I end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecy on that front, right? Like I’m the guy who is on no social media except for an increasingly growing group iMessage that is literally just photographs of my dog. And that’s it. And the reason I’m saying this is because there’s two things. It’s not just. Looking at the screen, right? Like, there’s this whole technology called night shift that Apple does now, where like after the sun sets. It turns your screen yellow, and that keeps you from like, you know, getting the blue rays in your eyes and thinking that it’s daylight, and therefore you don’t go to sleep. That’s fine. That’s like the physical side of it. But that’s only half of it. And it’s frankly the really easy half. They just algorithmically solved it for you. Like. The difficult half is mentally putting the transpirings of the computer out of your mind at the end of the day. That involves no social media. That involves no Slack. That involves like the things that give you dopamine that connect you to other humans. And I get why those are really valuable, because connection to other humans is tremendously important. I agree with people on that. Right? Being fuck computers is a large part of how I’m able to be at peace with myself and get the sleep that I need. Because I found myself Not getting good sleep and exploring in myself the reasons that I’m not getting good sleep. And it always came back to fucking computers. It always came back to how terrible computers are. Because my job hinges on computers. And it’s like pretty much just that. That’s it.
Yeah, for me, it’s been two separate things. One is balancing your sleep schedule with that of your partner, romantic partner, wife, husband, whatever it may be. That is a challenge in and of itself, especially if you have radically different sleep schedules. I was recently in a relationship with a college student, and so it was. Her falling asleep at 2 a. m. and waking up at 10 a. m. , which worked perfectly for her school schedule, and me not working with that at all because I wanted to be asleep at 10 p. m. And so there was a natural balancing that needed to happen there. Aside from that, reconciling your sleep schedule pattern and habits with your partners, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s the technological aspect. And what I’ve noticed more and more is I was developing, let’s use the word addiction here. I was developing an addiction to using my phone in the evenings, in the off time, when I should either be resting, relaxing, playing, reading, doing something else, who knows what. And I just started wholesale deleting and blocking things on my phone until whenever I had an urge to use it at night I just was unable to use it. And so this started off with small things. I deleted all the mail from my phone. I used Newton as my mail app, deleted it. So then I started using Mail. app because my brain is like, okay, we want to check mail. What do we do instead? So I deleted mail. app. And then my brain was like, okay, great. We’ll just log into Safari. So I deleted Safari from my iPhone. And so I’ve progressively just. Every single thing on my phone that acts as a time suck, or maybe it’s Saturday and my phone ended up next to me, and I’m in bed, and I discovered, oh, I just spent two and a half hours on Reddit on Safari. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to use Freedom app on my phone so I can’t access Reddit. I’m going to delete Safari from my phone so I can’t access anything on the interwebs. and just slowly progressively carve off the things I don’t want to be doing on my phone or don’t want to be doing on my computer so I’m no longer able to be sucked into them. The impact of that, easier to fall asleep now. If I’m in bed, it’s not like, I want to dork around on my phone for a bit. It’s like, okay, I’m going to read a book, or I’m going to sit here and meditate, or just relax and rest. And in the morning when I wake up, it’s not I’m going to sit on my phone for two hours or check email. It’s I’m going to get up, eat some breakfast, do these things. And it’s amazing how The pervasiveness and the utility of something like the iPhone really does have that double-edged sword of, well, it becomes the thing I look at before I fall asleep and right when I wake up. And when you fall into that habit, It definitely affects your overall sleep hygiene. The first thing you do when you wake up probably shouldn’t be look at the phone for 30 minutes. It should be shower, think about your day, rest. Think about wonderful things. The last thing you do before you fall asleep, again, probably shouldn’t be stare at your phone screen for 30 minutes. It should be rest, calm down, read a book, talk to a friend, drink some tea, who knows what. But At least for me, by identifying that, the point of failure or one of the points of weakness in my sleep schedule and sleep hygiene was I gravitate towards using my phone to play Hearthstone or to browse the web and then blocking my ability to do those things. It allows me to retrain my brain. So instead of gravitating towards those things, instead, it’s, oh, you know what? I’m going to grab my Kindle and read a couple chapters in this fiction book or listen to an audio book or Read this comic book, things that are analog or things that don’t have me staring at a screen. But it comes first and foremost from recognizing where that time and attention is being spent. And then working to reclaim it, either by force blocking off those things, or by grace, saying, Hey, you know what? I’m going to make this change in my habit.
I’m going to go back to eating bit for a minute. I eat like a Midwesterner, which is to say at 5 p. m. And I think that actually helps. I would move up your meal time as much as humanly possible so you’re not getting like indigestion right when you go to bed. The same with alcohol. I now do, if I have to go out for drinks with somebody, there are two things that I do. Number one, I cap that at about three a month. any more than that and it becomes a habit and I just have drank too much over the course of the month. That it doesn’t work for me. There are so many studies, so many, that say that you need to curb the amount of alcohol you drink, especially right before bed. Don’t blame me, blame science for that one. Like, this is very much a thing, and it’s not anything that you can prevent. Like, the less you drink after dinner, like, the better off you’re gonna be. So the consequence for that is that I usually, you know, I’m actually going out for cocktails tonight, but that’s a rare thing. And I move up my time as much as possible. If I can get away with doing like a bar date with somebody where they have good food, then I will say, Let’s do it at 6 p. m. and then we get a dinner. and we manage to knock out two at the same time, that’s amazing to do. Amazing, because it allows you to Drink early and then you’re done. You just go home and you drink some tea and you go to bed. I don’t drink any coffee after lunch. I don’t drink any caffeinated tea after dinner. So I switch to like chamomile or like white tea, which has hardly any. I think that’s my that’s it for putting things in my body. So
One interesting realization and thought I’ve had over the past few months has been: well, why do we gravitate towards using substances like alcohol or marijuana to help us fall asleep? I’ve started applying sort of the five Y’s, six Y’s method here to try to get to the root of the problem. If I’m having trouble falling asleep and my natural inclination is, okay, let’s smoke a joint before I fall asleep so it’s easier for me to fall asleep. Well, Sure, that’s a solution to the problem of me not being able to sleep, but why does that problem exist? What is the situation causing that problem? And I think By going down that path, you find out a lot of interesting things. Well, I feel stressed, or I feel anxious, or I’m just not tired right now. Well, Sure, medicating, whatever way, maybe it’s ambient, maybe it’s pot, maybe it’s alcohol, maybe it’s melatonin, maybe it’s something else, can help you fall asleep. But I think the more interesting thing to focus on is. Why am I having trouble falling asleep right now? Oh, historically, I stay up until midnight and today I’m trying to go to sleep at 9 p. m. Well, you’re going to have some trouble doing that. Your body just is not primed to fall asleep at that time. Or it might be there’s something unresolved inside of you that’s keeping you awake, keeping your time and attention focused on it. By addressing that, by figuring out sort of what the prerequisite to the problem of I can’t fall asleep is You start improving your overall life. You start solving what the actual problem is rather than treating the symptom of I can’t fall asleep.
Yeah. I think that, I mean, even with alcohol, like alcohol is, you know, it has a reputation for being a downer, but your body compensates for that like four or five hours later. So it might help you to fall asleep, but then at 3 a. m. you’re bolt upright having a panic attack. Not that I know that from experience or anything. So it’s like not okay to even be saying that. And honestly, the more that you can live like a natural, comparatively unencumbered lifestyle, probably the better. Like think about like it’s We’ve talked about this analogy before, where it’s like when you have a house and your house is infested with ants, and you solve it by infesting your house with spiders, and they eat the ants. But then you just now you have a bunch of spiders, so you have to get like mice to eat the spiders or something. You work your way up the food chain until there are two lions in your house. And neither lion is on your side. Worst roommates ever.
Fuck those roommates. Go to bed.