These 5 things will ruin your sleep

My newfound obsession with quality sleep has a new tool: the Oura Ring. It’s been over two months since I got my Oura ring and have been using it religiously even since. Since learning about the far-reaching importance of sleep, I’ve been focusing a lot more attention on my sleep and the factors that impact it–for better or for worse. Its funny that I’ve become so in tune with sleep, since I’ve never been someone who’s had trouble sleeping at night. But now with the Oura ring I can tell the difference between a good night of sleep and a great night of restful, restorative sleep. It also makes it easier to identify factors, supplements, or stimuli that impact sleep. Some of these things seem obvious, and others are less obvious. While there are many strategies and opportunities to improve sleep, let’s start with the things that will ruin your sleep–and some of them might surprise you!

Alcohol

Of all the sleep-impairing factors I’ve identified, none has a bigger influence than alcohol. And its ironic that a substance associated with helping sleep should cause the most harm, but that been the case with me, and certainly that’s what is supported in the scientific literature. As you can see in the graph below, the nights where my sleep score is the lowest are typically after having a few drinks prior to bed. We’re not talking about going out and getting drunk either–more like sharing a bottle of wine over dinner and then having a nightcap. The results are pretty significant, and seen best with regard to my resting heart rate and heart rate variability, which tend to have an inverse relationship with HRV rising and RHR falling through the night. Needless to say, I’ve been finding myself less and less inclined to have an evening drink these days.

Travel

This may be a no-brainer, but as we recently had the opportunity to travel across three times zones and spend a week in California, I got to see firsthand the impact of travel on sleep. And it’s not good. There’s probably no better way to screw up your circadian rhythm then to travel across time zones on a regular basis. It really makes me feel bad for pilots and flight attendants and business travelers! But you don’t have to be a world traveler to see this effect: you get a similar effect simply with late bedtimes or early wakeups. When you go to bed 2-3 hours later than normal, you essentially sacrifice all your restorative deep sleep. When you wake earlier than normal, you are sacrificing your REM sleep. This is because deep sleep happens mostly in the first half the night and REM in the second half of the night.

For illustration, here’s a sleep analysis from a late bedtime

And here’s a analysis from a early morning wake up (no REM sleep):

Light

We know that light exposure–particularly blue light in the morning and red light in the evening–are very important in setting your circadian rhythm. We also know that circadian biology plays a significant role in weight maintenance and metabolism through very complex neuro-hormonal signaling processes. For years now I have taken early morning walks with my dogs, thereby being exposed to a great deal of that early-morning blue light which is important as a cue to wake up your body. With the advent of infrared and red light therapy, which is now available for home use with devices such as Joov, some folks are reporting excellent improvements in sleep quality. In the near future I am looking forward to trying this out, but suffice it to say the results I’ve heard about with light therapy from folks like Dom D’Agostino are pretty remarkable (see his results below–I cant even come close to these type of numbers).

Eating before bed

This is another one that’s getting a lot of attention. As intermittent fasting and time restricted feeding become more popular ideas and more and more data seems to back these up as profound strategies for weight loss and weight maintenance, I have been paying a lot more attention to the timing of my last meal and the impact it has on sleep. Eating less than a few hours before bed really does seem to make an impact, most noticeably in resting body temperature at night on the Oura ring. In this profound example, I found that my body temp was a full 1.3 degrees above baseline after a late and heavy meal. It also seems to cause a similar effect as alcohol on RHR and HRV (not pictured here)

External Stimuli

Anyone with children know there’s no better way to have a screwed up night of sleep than to have a newborn baby in the house. Although it’s been a few years since we’ve been down that road, anyone with small children at home knows that things happen at night which will interrupt your sleep— nightmares, leg cramps, or just the old falling out of bed thing! Even though these things undoubtedly interrupt sleep, they do not seem to have as big of an impact on sleep quality as some other factors for me. This is because they are “external” stimuli; my sleep seems to be interrupted and picks right back up where it left off without major perturbations in things like core body temp, heart rate, and respiration. The same holds true for other external stimuli such as traffic noise, sirens, etc. These are clearly not helpful for sleep and you will notice on your sleep tracking device all the times you are awake and because of these, but if you’re doing all the other things right— avoiding food and alcohol a few hours prior to bed, setting your circadian rhythm with proper light exposure, and keeping a reasonable bedtime/waking schedule you might find that they have less of an impact.

So what do you think? Have you been paying closer attention to your sleep lately? What are the areas that seem to impact your sleep the most?

~Brendan