How to sleep well
Five totally doable things that will change your life
I started to go to bed early, so I can sleep more and it changed everything in my life postively
— Pedro Barros
By now, there’s been an incredible amount of evidence over decades of science that shows how important it is to sleep well. If, like me, you’ve been following Bryan Johnson, you know that sleeping well is one of the most important things to longevity. And so it really cannot be emphasized enough that you must sleep well if you want to do well in life. If you want to remain healthy, and if you want to live a long life: sleep.
Now to help with this, there’s a million people that are going to want to sell you things that help you sleep well. But really, the basics are not that difficult. And so this is incredibly simple. How to sleep well:
Sleep in a completely dark and quiet room
At the same time every day
With a cool ambient temperature around 18 degrees
Not having recently eaten, preferably at least 4 hours after your last meal
With a wind-down period before going to sleep of at least an hour where you read a book, or do something without a screen involved.
Do all this, and you will have done everything you could to at least set yourself up for success.
Now, there are many reasons why you might not be able to sleep well, but at least getting these basics down is going to help you have better sleep: longer and deeper, and therefore more restorative sleep.
A good measure to see how good your sleep is your resting heart rate. An Apple Watch, Whoop, or Garmin watch can help track this well. It will give you a good indication on whether you’re doing well, plus you will see progress.
You can also consider taking magnesium supplements, which helps with sleep, plus a whole bunch of other things. Melatonin helps falling asleep, but you should really only need it if you’re jetlagged or otherwise struggling to fall asleep (e.g. in a new environment). If you take melatonin take no more than 3mg. Larger doses are not more effective.
All great tips, but they miss the real prerequisite: knowing how to let go. Without that, everything else is just optimization on top of anxiety. As self‑worship rose and religion faded away, we’ve lost that skill.
People spiral into endless ‘how can I do better?’ thoughts.
TL;DR if you know how to let go, you'll sleep better on a piece of wood than on the perfect setup