My sleep routine: how I sleep better every night, from caffeine to a dark room

0:00 Hello explorers. In this video, I am breaking down my exact strategy that I use for getting a good night of sleep, week after week, year after year. If we don't sleep well, we are putting ourselves at a risk for diabetes, obesity, poor cardiovascular health and bad mental health for a very long time. Even if we live long enough, like 80 years, if we don't sleep well, we are not going to get a quality life out of it. So, how do we fix this? Bear with me here. At this point, all of us are convinced that 8 hours of sleep is not just optional, but a necessity to hit all three stages of sleep: light sleep, deep sleep, and the most popular, rapid eye movement, REM sleep. You cannot favor one over the other. We need all three every night. But to achieve that, let's take a step back and find out how sleep actually works.

0:44 In this section, I want to give a huge shout out to Matthew Walker, who is the author of the book Why We Sleep, which has about 35,000 reviews on Amazon and is still holding 4.7 stars. It was only after reading his book that I realized all the mistakes I've been making in my life that were messing up my own sleep. So, thank you, Matthew Walker, for writing this book.

1:03 Now, let's begin. As soon as we wake up every day, our body naturally produces this chemical called adenosine. Let's say you wake up at 7:00 a.m. The adenosine level starts going up and up and up, and it peaks at around 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. At that point, adenosine makes you very, very sleepy. I mean, that's exactly what we want at 10 p.m. We want to feel sleepy. The more adenosine you've got in the system, the sleepier you feel.

1:26 And when you sleep well that night, the adenosine level goes all the way down. And when you wake up the next morning, you feel like a million bucks: so fresh and ready to tackle everything life throws at you. And the cycle continues every day. The more you protect this rhythm of going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time, the better your body naturally gets at producing adenosine, peaking at the same time and making you feel sleepy at the exact same time, so you can get a good night's sleep.

1:50 There is one more thing you can do here to protect the circadian rhythm, and that is intentionally standing under the bright sun as soon as you wake up. By doing this, you're telling your body: hey, don't produce melatonin in the morning. Wait until the evening when it gets darker. That's when I'll go to sleep. And melatonin in your body is very important to go through all the stages of sleep. It should peak right around midnight while you're actually sleeping. But there is a problem. If there is even a sliver of bright light peeking into your eyes, melatonin production will not be as effective. And I've got some great tips on how to keep your room dark. More on that a little later. But for now, tip number one: as soon as you wake up, stand under the bright sun for 10 minutes. You can plan your day, drink water, and walk around.

2:34 So, next is a very big topic: caffeine shutoff. Remember, we talked about adenosine in the beginning of this video, which makes you feel really sleepy around 9 or 10 p.m. Imagine adenosine and sleep are in love with each other, and caffeine is this villain who would not let them marry.

2:50 You see, caffeine has a similar structure to adenosine, and it attaches to the same receptors that adenosine fights for. Imagine these are receptors. I'm going to draw adenosine in green and caffeine in red. You see, caffeine has a very similar structure, and it attaches to the same receptors and blocks the entry for adenosine. So when you drink coffee, the caffeine villain blocks the receptors, and sadly the adenosine gets built up in the system alone. Eventually the caffeine wears off, and all the adenosine built up in the system rushes to get attached, and that is the caffeine crash. Many of us are very familiar with this sluggish feeling, and it is exactly at this moment we decide to drink one more coffee to get the remaining work done, which starts a downward doom spiral of the day, and we should all stop doing that.

3:36 Why? Let's find out. Caffeine has a half-life of 6 hours. Let's imagine you drink two cups of coffee at 3 p.m. By 9 p.m., half of that, which is one full cup of coffee, is still in your system. There's no way you can actually go to sleep peacefully with one full cup of coffee's worth of caffeine in your system. Adenosine will be fighting with caffeine at that point for the receptor slots. Why would you do that to yourself? So, some explorers will be asking, "Hobby, what are you talking about? I drink coffee at 6 p.m. and I can still go to sleep fine." Well, my answer to that is, if you use any sleep tracker like Whoop or Fitbit, I am pretty sure the data will tell you the next morning that you are not hitting all three stages of sleep that are required, and you are aging poorly, my friend.

4:19 So what's the solution here? I came up with a guiding policy that I will not drink coffee after 12 noon. It is not easy. You need to also communicate this to your friends and family, so over the years they naturally stop offering you coffee or tea in the evening. But I know it's very hard to resist the temptation, especially in an Indian household, and especially when you are visiting a friend or family after so many years. People will ask you to take coffee: "Just this one evening, nothing will happen." Or they might argue with you, saying, "Oh, this is Indian coffee, this does not apply to Indian coffee." But unfortunately that is not true. Indian instant coffee and filter coffee both have at least 100 milligrams of caffeine, depending on how strong you prefer your coffee, and Indian tea has 60 mg of caffeine.

5:03 By the way, here are a few more common drinks and their caffeine content. Red Bull, one of the popular energy drinks, has 80 mg of caffeine. And if you flip the can of a very common Diet Coke, you can see on the label that it has 45 mg of caffeine. So, you should not hesitate to repeatedly enforce that boundary with your friends and relatives, however long it takes.

5:24 Next up is another important item on the list, and that is exercise, more specifically strength training. At this point, we have very well established that sleep and adenosine are like Romeo and Juliet. So, as the day goes by, you need more and more adenosine in the system building up towards the evening, so you actually feel very sleepy in the late evening. But what happens when you lift a heavy dumbbell?

5:45 Your body uses this chemical called adenosine triphosphate to fuel the lift. Notice this is one adenosine and three phosphates. So it is not exactly the pure adenosine that we need to feel sleepy. But as soon as you start lifting weights, this ATP is broken down into adenosine diphosphate, which is one adenosine and two phosphates. It is still not pure adenosine, but we're getting there. Let's say it's about a 50-minute training session, and you continue to lift dumbbells, attacking various muscles in your body. Your body must be scrambling to refuel. At this point it needs more ATP. So, it will start recycling some of the ADP that's left over back into ATP, and it will find more sources like glycogen, and it will even start burning your fat, which is great news. And this is exactly why everyone should be lifting weights.

6:31 By the way, I conduct strength training classes on Zoom. If you'd like to try my classes, here is a link for a 7-day free trial: hobbyfitclub.com/trial.

6:39 Now, let's get back to the main video. Eventually, after 50 minutes, at the end of your strength training session, you're probably exhausted. You're sitting on your sofa drinking water, and then you're moving around, eating your lunch or dinner. Your body is then flooded with pure adenosine. This is exactly what we need. This pure adenosine will start attaching to your adenosine receptors and start building up more and more sleep pressure. But you should not have had coffee in the evening, because you've already seen that caffeine attaches to the same receptors that adenosine attaches to.

7:10 So, we cannot use coffee as a pre-workout if you are working out in the evening. So, no coffee or tea if you're working out in the evening. Trust me, explorer, you will thank me 30 years later. Don't get me wrong, coffee has a lot of antioxidants. To get that level of antioxidants, you need to eat a lot of blueberries. So, I agree coffee is good. Okay, so let's set a guiding policy here: no coffee or tea after 12 noon. We're going to finish enjoying all forms of coffee and tea by 12 noon. Does that sound fair? Hit that thumbs up button if you agree with me here. Okay, great.

7:45 Now you feel sleepy. How should you go to sleep? Let's talk about the sleep routine. When it is 2 hours to bedtime, we should all start reducing our water intake. Explorer, let me explain. When it's very close to bedtime, it's better to reduce the water intake, because when you wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, it disturbs the whole sleep cycle. We don't want that, right? So, front-load all the water intake towards the morning, afternoon and evening. And when you get very close to bedtime, let's drink less water.

8:14 Tip number seven: try to block the blue light on your phones, laptops and TVs. This is pretty much a one-time setup. Most of these devices come with a night mode, and they'll automatically stop producing blue light as we get close to bedtime, which is great for melatonin production. Tip number eight: consider wearing blue light filtering glasses. They're $20 or $30 on Amazon. This is new. I've not had much success with them before, and this is my second time trying them. If this works out well for you, please let me know in the comments.

8:40 Tip number 11: absolutely no TV in the bedroom. If you want to watch TV, move the TV outside into the living room. Sit down, watch the TV in the living room, and then get back to the bedroom. Your sleeping area should only be used for sleeping, and you will be tricking your mind if you don't do that.

8:56 Next is temperature. Set your room to 68° Fahrenheit or lower. That's about 20° Celsius. This could be cooler than you normally would. And if you don't have AC, that's okay. Set the table fan pointed directly at you. And some people prefer to take a shower before bedtime, which brings the body temperature down, which is great, because that helps you fall asleep faster.

9:17 Okay, tip number 21. Remember how I mentioned we need to protect our melatonin production? For that, our sleeping room needs to be completely dark. I got this room-darkening velcro curtain on Amazon. It's very easy to install, and it darkens the room completely. No matter how bright it is outside, the room is completely dark. I have my ceiling light on. I'm going to demonstrate how bright it is outside and how dark it is inside with this darkening curtain. I'm going to turn the lights off and open this for you. I can barely see anything here. This sliver of light that you see at the bottom, with the naked eye, it's just not that bad. I'm going to use the velcro to open the curtain, and close the curtain with the same velcro. It's this bright. For comparison, it's this dark when I close it.

10:02 If this is not possible at your place, don't worry. I got these sleep masks that I use during travel. Get really good ones on Amazon that do not crush your eyeballs. There are these free ones that they give on long-haul flights, like Emirates, which actually crush the eyeballs. So get a good one, and wash it. This one is going bad after multiple washes, so maybe I need to buy a new pack. Why I prefer this is because of the big slots they have: you can actually blink your eyes even when you are wearing the mask. Let me demonstrate. Okay, right now I'm actually blinking my eyes. Okay, super.

10:37 Okay, tip number 14. I always use some kind of white noise that smooths out the entire sound. Imagine if there is a dog barking in the distance, or a car honking in the distance. I normally use a fan, but if you don't want the fan blowing at you, just turn the fan to blow away from you. But during travel, obviously, if there is no fan, I use this 10-hour box fan sound on Spotify, which sounds very much like a fan. I'll leave the link in the description.

11:01 Okay, great. We are fully set up to sleep. We went to sleep and we slept through the night. We accomplished it. We got the 8 hours of sleep. Now, how should we wake up? Should we set an alarm, or should we wake up when we feel like waking up? I would say the most important thing here is: if you sleep with another human being, don't wake up your partner. Consider wearing a smartwatch to bed. Whether you use the watch for sleep tracking or not, if you set an alarm on your watch, it will vibrate without making any sound, so it will only wake you up, not your partner.

11:33 Research shows that couples who sleep together disturb their partner's sleep cycle. Most of the time, it's because of the alarm. A vibrating smartwatch never makes any sound. It only wakes you up with the vibrations on your wrist. And some watches even notice how deep in sleep you are, and they'll delay the alarm by an hour or 30 minutes, so that you can actually get the most important phase of your sleep if you are in one. I made a very detailed unboxing video of this Whoop and the Fitbit Air. Consider watching that video. I'll provide the link in the description as well.

12:04 With all that in perspective, here is a complete sleep routine that I came up with for you. Take a screenshot of this and maybe set it as your wallpaper. It is 7:00 a.m. You wake up to your vibrating watch alarm. By 7:30 you're standing under the bright sun, drinking your water. At 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., you have your breakfast and coffee. At 12 noon we reach the caffeine shutoff point. You stop drinking coffee and tea after this. At 6 p.m. you've got your strength training class. At 7:00 p.m. your phone automatically goes into night mode. At 8:00 p.m. you reduce your water intake. By the time 10 p.m. comes, you walk up to the thermostat in your home and reduce the temperature to 68° Fahrenheit or lower, 20° C. And at 11 p.m. the dark curtain comes down, you put on your sleep mask, and you go to sleep.

12:51 Bam. That, my explorers, is what I call a perfectly engineered day that will get you a perfect night of sleep. If you notice, most of what I described in this video only takes a few minutes to set up, and you reap the benefits for the rest of your life. If you enjoyed this video, consider watching my Whoop and Fitbit Air video, like I mentioned before. I use my Whoop to track my sleep, and I seem to be hitting 100% of my sleep requirement most nights, which is…

Source: YouTube auto-captions, edited for readability (filler words removed, names corrected).