Everyone sleeps. Not everyone gets good sleep though.
Despite it occupying almost one-third of our lives, there remains plenty of mystery surrounding this integral part of all our lives. In particular, there remains plenty of mystery around sleeping better.
The modern world is obsessed with health and well-being, almost unlike any era previously. In this climate, there are plenty of avenues that the average consumer can get informed on sleeping better. Whether through social media accounts, video and audio podcasts, YouTube videos or online gurus, this information is readily available to anyone searching for it.
However, there’s no better way to get information than from the source. For us compiling this article, those sources were sleep expert, Dr Dean Miller, and AFLW player, Tayla Harris. Both recently shared their fundamentals for sleep at WHOOP House.
The 3 fundamentals of good sleep
Length of sleep
You know the rule. It’s been drilled into you since you were a child. Yet, somehow, it still evades you. By the rule, we mean getting eight hours each night.
For Dr Miller, before anything else, duration is the most important factor that will dictate the quality of your sleep. An avid WHOOP user for many years, Dr Miller shared in his WHOOP House session how the first metric he assesses in the WHOOP app upon waking each morning is how long he slept the previous night.
They say ignorance is bliss. Many of us cruise through life believing that falling asleep at 10 pm and waking at 6 am equals eight hours of quality sleep. That really isn’t the case. Wearables such as WHOOP indicate the staggering amount of time we unknowingly spend awake each night.
However, as Dr Miller indicates, eight hours of sleep is ideal but it’s far from the law. Anywhere from seven to nine hours works just fine, so long as it occurs regularly.
Variation from this range of nightly sleep isn’t unusual. However, if it’s a long-term trend it becomes a problem.
He also professes the importance of assessing different stages of sleep – awake, light, deep and REM – all of which can be tracked through WHOOP. Like hours of sleep, variations from baseline levels in each of these four stages aren’t uncommon, however, it may indicate an underlying physiological variable.
However, Dr Miller stated; “As long as it [the data] goes back to that baseline, then you’re fine.”
Consistently sleeping within the recommended seven-to-nine-hour range is also critical in allowing our bodies to correctly move through the sleep cycle, which is crucial for performance and recovery.
REM sleep, which Dr Miller explained typically occurs towards the end of our night’s sleep, is critical in memory consolidation and brain development and function.
For Tayla Harris, a 2022 AFLW Premiership winner with the Melbourne Demons and duel-sport athlete, sleep is the absolute top priority when it comes to her recovery. Through her WHOOP, she schedules exact wake and sleep time each day, allowing her to ensure she hits the optimal length of sleep to maximise her performance and recovery.
Harris, a WHOOP ambassador, explained she uses the wearable’s sleep score to influence her training and not allow poor sleep to influence her performance. Rather, she uses the data to re-jig her approach and ‘challenge’ herself to ensure her output is maximised.
The importance for her is to ‘understand that our bodies incredible.’
“We need to understand that they can do more than we give (them) credit for,” she told Only Sports.
“[Especially] if you can rest, [that’s] a huge factor.”
Morning and evening sunlight
This is a critical element both in the mornings and evenings, Dr Miller shared. By now, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with your body’s circadian rhythm, or, in Layman’s terms, its 24-hour clock. Thanks, Andrew Huberman.
As Dr Miller explained at WHOOP house, the role of your body’s circadian rhythm is to ‘pre-empt when we’re going to be sleeping and when we’re going to be waking up.’ He added our bodyies ‘get used’ to this rhythm.
For this reason, it’s important to embrace a morning routine involving ‘getting sunlight at the right time.’ The same is true in the afternoon and evenings. Essentially, Dr Miller explained our post-waking and pre-bed routine must consist of getting sun at the right time.
This is because the sun ‘helps our body know what time of day it is.’
For him, our bodies must get sunlight ‘when the sun’s at a low angle.’
“Morning, when it’s rising [and] evening when it’s setting.”
Crucially, this must be done without sunglasses so ‘it [the sunlight] is going into your retina.’
“That’s basically how our brain knows what time of day it is.”
Controlling pre-bed artificial light consumption
Carrying over from morning and evening sunlight intake, Dr Miller explained controlling your consumption of artificial light before bed is critical in ensuring a good night’s sleep. In particular, he spotlighted controlling house lighting as crucial for this.
Now, you may be thinking: ‘Hang on a sec, I thought blue light from screens is the worst kind of light to see before bed?’
Dr Miller explained ‘the house lighting that we have is far worse for us.’ As he shared, this is because back when humans lived in nature, our sleep was connected to the sun. While society has advanced beyond the point of sleeping and living in nature, our bodies are still tuned to use light as a marker for when it’s time to go to bed.
“If we have all the lights on at night, we’re not physiologically used to that,” he said.
“If, as soon as the sun sets, we flick all our house lights on, it’s saying to our body the sun is still up, delaying our naturally occurring tiredness and uprooting our sleep cycles. This does not mean eliminating light.
“Obviously, cook in some sort of light,” Dr Miller shared.
“But definitely don’t have all the lights on.”
For blue light, typically emitted from any screen device – phone, TV, laptop and computer monitor – Dr Miller believes there are many ways to manage this light consumption.
Glasses that prevent blue light are one way. Another is to turn the lights down.
“If you’re working on a big screen, you can turn the brightness down,” he shared, adding that most devices have features, such as dark modes, allowing users to turn their screens to softer light tones at certain times.
Put your phone down
Everyone knows they should spend less time on their phone, particularly before bed. Does everyone practice this? Debatable.
While Dr Miller noted viewing a phone screen before bed is harmful because of the blue light emitted, his reason for putting the phone down an hour or so before bed is largely down to behavioural, not physiological, implications.
“You will hear me recommend putting your phone away an hour before bed,” he said.
“That’s really not because of the light that it emits. It’s just the behavioural aspect of it. It’s literally delaying your bedtime because you’re scrolling, or sending emails, or something like that.”
Individuals can also limit bedtime phone usage by purchasing an alarm clock, leaving their phone to charge either on the other side of their bedroom or in another room of the house entirely.
