Witnessing Bryan Johnson‘s very entertaining sleep intervention on Balaji this weekend got me thinking: How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? My work in the longevity field has shown a few patterns worth illuminating.
If you are tired of wearing fatigue like a badge of honour, read on. We’ll summon Charlie Munger’s “invert, always invert” mantra and try to re-loop our habits. Spotting a behaviour we need to reduce or remove is easier than adding something new.
Curious? Here’s your Top 10 Commandments of Ruined Sleep – you may already be practicing some, but there’s so much more to do!
1. Morning cortisol rush. Start your morning by reaching for your phone for critical overnight updates, ideally while still in bed. Ensure a simultaneous dopamine and cortisol spike to condition your body’s wake-up cue.
2. Ensure Orthosomnia. Check your sleep tracker to feed the obsessive pursuit of “optimal sleep”. Embrace the “sleep score” and ignore inner signs of readiness and alertness. Your wearable knows better because it is an exact and consistent diagnostic tool.
3. Ingest caffeine before hydrating correctly (e.g., with salt) within 90 minutes of waking to block those pesky adenosine receptors. This is step 1 towards ensuring fertile conditions for an afternoon slump.
4. Carb up for lunch. In a quest for “energy,” load up on blood sugar-spiking carbs so the subsequent crash makes you sleepy. Step 2 is complete—slump assured.
5. Time your second caffeine hit in the late afternoon, ensuring its half-life of 5-6 hours covers you to midnight.
6. Avoid physical exertion. Kevin Kelly was wrong to say that “the best sleep aid is to get really tired”. Take the elevator, not the stairs.
7. The Evening cortisol spike is best achieved by staring at blue-light emitting screens, mixed with some stressful work and a stimulant before bed. Choose wisely, as a poorly timed post-dinner walk may take your stress levels below the required minimum.
8. If your workload is insufficient to ensure a crisp set of issues at the top of mind when you smell the pillow, please feel free to consider further excitement in the form of a TV drama or something else that makes you alert. If you’re sleepy, you’re not doing it right.
9. Avoid bedtime consistency. Condition your mind and body just to be able to hit the sleep switch at various times in the 10 pm-1 am range. Expect Navy-seal-like slumber to ensue without a wind-down ritual. Use a drink or two to take the edge off.
10. Embrace rigidity. Perfection trumps balance; the idea of listening to your body and adapting routines as needed is simply yoga babble. Rely on being guided solely by data points, and don’t allow flexibility in your health routines to accommodate life’s natural ups and downs.
Congratulations – welcome to the sleepless elite! Don’t send this to a friend who may need it – life is a single-player game after all.
