Hacking Sleep (Part 1)

My sleep habits for all practical purposes are about as perfect as real life permits. I excercise almost daily, I eat well, and I follow the old “early to bed early to rise” philosophy. I travel frequently, but if I’m at home, I’m dialed in.

However despite doing everything “right”, I noticed I was dragging in the mornings. Day after day. I would go to bed early and wake up before my alarm could go off. Solid 8-9 hrs of sleep. But still felt tired.

So I started doing some detective work:

Going to bed early (10pm) – check

Limiting screen time 1hr before bed – check

Limiting caffeine to before noon – check

These are the biggest items that can disrupt sleep, so I got my Sense sleep tracker set up again and started monitoring my sleep. Sense’s scale is 60s= Red 70s= Yellow, 80s+= green. The sensor looks at room conditions – temp, light, noise, humidity, sleep duration, deep sleep duration and agitated sleep. And it seemed like a fair reflection of my sleep. Since I was seeing red and yellow I wondered what it take to boost me to green…

So I started tinkering.

5 days with no changes. Yellow and Red.

Day 6, add ZMA. Green.

Day 7, remove ZMA. Yellow.

Day 8, no changes. Yellow.

Day 9, add ZMA. Green.

Day 10, add ZMA. Green.

Day 11, add ZMA. Green.

Day 12 – Travel –

Day 13 – Travel –

Day 14, add ZMA. Green.

Day 15, add ZMA. Green.

Seeing a pattern here?

Simply adding ZMA boosted my sleep score by 10+ points almost instantly. What is ZMA you ask? It’s Zinc, Magnesium and Vitamin B6. It has a host of benefits you can read about here, but the most important one for the purposes of this post is SLEEP.

Now, do I sleep *perfectly* every night? No chance. The real world intervenes but I have more green dots than yellow dots now and no reds.

I wake up after 9 hrs of sleep and I see I got 4.5hrs of deep sleep. No wonder I feel great.

Sleep is one of the most important things in our lives, yet many people often don’t focus on it. If you’re not sleeping well, run through the brief checklist above. And if you’re already doing these things and want to make further improvements – grab some ZMA. (I buy Phd ZMA in the UK, but if you’re in the US I’d recommend you get Jym ZMA)