🔋ATP#7: Sleep as if Your Life Depends on It

After a bad night’s sleep, I feel the consequences the next day:

• I struggle to focus.

• I get emotional more quickly.

• Everything feels more difficult and exhausting.

Yet, as a student in my 20s, I would load up on coffee and study until dawn.

It makes sense: More hours of study = more knowledge, right?

From a logical perspective, that’s correct.

But we’re not machines.

Sacrificing sleep to get more done is a losing game.

Sleep is still one of the most underrated tools for health and productivity, and it should be your top priority.

In this newsletter, we’ll cover:

• How sleep improves your brain function and life

• How to improve sleep

• When to seek professional help.

Let’s go!

How sleep improves your brain function and life

Here’s a list of 7 benefits of sleep:

1. Memory consolidation.

Memories stabilize while you sleep.

You’ll have difficulty learning if you don’t get enough sleep (and that’s why my strategy as a student was dead wrong).

Pro tip: shift your learning activities to evening hours. What you learn in the hours before sleep gets prioritized for consolidation overnight.

If you study earlier, do a recap before you go to bed.

2. Higher cognitive functions.

Your reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making processes only work if you get enough high-quality sleep.

Sleep deprivation impairs your thinking because your prefrontal cortex (the most essential structure for higher cognitive functions) underperforms when sleep deprived.

3. Toxin removal.

While you sleep, your brain cleans itself from waste & toxic proteins.

That’s your glymphatic system at work. It’s like a waste disposal system on autopilot that keeps your brain healthy.

It reduces the risk of dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders.

4. Emotion regulation.

Have you noticed that when you’re sleep-deprived, you overreact quickly?

That’s because a lack of sleep makes you hyperreactive to emotional triggers.

After a good night’s sleep, you regulate your emotions a lot better.

5. Reaction times.

Some situations require quick reactions, e.g., when you’re driving or practicing certain sports.

Research shows that even small increases in sleep duration boost reaction times.

Quicker reaction times could even be life-saving!

6. Creativity & innovation.

Have you ever been chewing on a problem for a long time, and after a good night’s sleep, the solution appeared like illumination?

Or woke up with a great idea in your head?

Your brain forms new connections overnight, leading to new ideas & solutions.

If you’re stuck on an issue, postpone it to the next day.

Most of the time, the solution appears like magic (but in reality, your brain did the work overnight).

7. Appetite regulation.

Sleep deprivation messes with your hormones, your brain’s reward system, and your brain’s hypothalamus (where appetite is regulated).

You won’t feel adequate hunger and satiety signals anymore, and you’ll make more impulsive food choices.

Sleep is a central pillar of weight management.

How to improve sleep

First of all, your ideal sleep duration is an individual phenomenon.

Most adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night for optimal results, and very few thrive on less sleep (really very very few!!!).

It may take some experimentation to find your sweet spot.

And there are a few things you can do to sleep better:

1. No screens in bed or shortly before bedtime.

The light exposure messes with your sleep hormones.

A workaround is a blue light filter, and I admit that I sometimes read in bed from my tablet with the filter on (I live in South America and it’s hard to find books in German or English here, which are my preferred reading languages, so I rely a lot on ebooks).

Filters help a bit because they reduce the blue light that disrupts sleep (because it suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin), but they’re far from perfect.

So even if you use a filter, don’t overdo it. My limit is once or twice a week.

And you should definitely not scroll on social media in bed, even with the filter on.

Opt for quiet activities like reading a book.

2. Maintain constant bedtimes.

Going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, even on weekends, helps a lot.

Aim for a deviation of ± 1 hour max.

3. Sleep in a cool environment.

Science identified 16-18°C or 60-64°F to be the ideal bedroom temperature.

4. No heavy meals or alcohol in the last 3 hours before bed.

Heavy meals mean your digestive system is busy, which is ok during the day but not when you want to sleep.

Alcohol helps you fall asleep (and many people drink it for that reason), but it messes with your sleep cycles so you’ll wake up earlier or have lighter sleep in the second half of the night, and you’ll feel like sh*t the next day.

Why not move your glass of wine from evening hours to lunch?

If you have trouble waking up at night to go to the bathroom, limit your fluid intake at least 2 hours before bed.

A word about caffeine: It stays in your system longer than you may think. Try cutting it out at least 8 hours before sleep.

5. Ensure a quiet surrounding.

It reduces the times you wake up during the night.

Use earplugs or a white noise machine.

6. Create a dark environment.

Our ancestors used natural light as a pacemaker, but it's not recommended today due to luminous contamination.

Light exposure during sleep alters your sleep hormones and reduces sleep quality.

Use blackout curtains or a sleep mask.

7. Consider separate blankets.

If you share your bed with someone (e.g., your partner), you may share the same blanket.

In my home country (Germany), it’s atypical, but I’ve seen it in other countries.

The problem is that if you share a blanket, the other person’s movements are more likely to wake you up.

Research also shows that men and women have different temperature regulation systems, and with a shared blanket, individual temperature needs are hard to meet.

So: For the sake of your health, consider getting separate blankets.

Here in Chile, couples share a blanket, but I brought the German tradition of separate blankets with me. 😉

8. Wind down in the evening.

A wind-down routine, such as stretching, breathing exercises, or journaling, prepares your body and mind for bedtime.

Especially after an intense day, calming down is necessary for good sleep.

Find a routine that works for you.

If you wake up at 3 am thinking about stressors (e.g. your work), it’s a sign that stress is affecting your sleep. If this is you, you need a wind-down routine to process your stressors before sleep.

9. Don’t stress over sleep.

There are times when sleep is suboptimal.

Either because you have a baby or young kids at home who wake you up at night, or you’re going through difficult times.

Sometimes, you may just have a bad night for no specific reason, or there may be some special event that causes you to stay up longer and eat and drink late.

It happens, and it’s part of life.

Accept that not every night is perfect. Aiming to have a good night on most nights is enough.

When should you seek help?

If you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up too early at least 3 times a week for 3 months or more, it’s a sign of chronic insomnia, and you should contact a registered healthcare provider.

Also note: Waking up several times at night is normal, but repeated full awakenings that interfere with daytime functioning may require professional assessment.

Treatments such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) have proven effective in treating insomnia.

Wrapping up

Sleep is essential for every function you can think of: memory, reasoning, emotion, and many more.

That’s why you should give it the top 1 priority in your life.

And there’s a lot you can do to optimize it.

Sleep as if your life depends on it, because it does.

Until next time!

Best wishes,

Patricia (Dr. Schmidt) from creatorschmidt.com.