Regularly getting good sleep is the single most important physiological factor for keeping my energy levels high.

While I have some tricks for maintaining high focus and momentum even when sleep deprived <link>, those are stopgaps for when something has already gone wrong. With intentional effort, and by riding the wave of my circadian rhythms, I can maintain pretty high efficacy for about 3 days of insufficient sleep, but after that things start to fall apart.

Schedule

I’ve lived on a number of different sleep schedules, depending on the circumstances, and the people that I’m working with, including waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning, waking up at 10 or 11 in the morning, and waking up at 4:00 in the afternoon and mostly being awake during the night, and even a 26 hour schedule in which my sleep periods are not synced up with the days of the week.

Since 2021, I’ve kept to a biphasic sleep schedule: Sleeping for 6 to 8 hours at night, and about an hour in the mid to late afternoon.

At the time of this writing, I wake up at 9:00 AM, and go to sleep at about 1:00 AM, with a nap from about 3:30 to 5:00 in the afternoon (though the timing of the nap varies some). When I’m on an earlier or a later schedule, all the times in this document are adjusted up or down by a constant additive factor.

Some sleep setup and practices

• I usually don’t eat for about 3 hours before bed. (Ideally, I eat one meal a day, in the early evening). If I’m tempted to eat, I’ll chew gum, or make myself tea.
• I’ve set an alarm that rings at (currently) 11:30 PM, not to go to sleep, but to brush my teeth and take a melatonin. That way, I’ll tend to become tired and ready to sleep automatically, about a half hour to an hour later.
  • For more on the impact of melatonin, Gwern’s page says it all.
• I sleep with an air conditioner (in my personal room) or a fan (in my office-sleep space) pointed directly at my face. Being in a cold room, or having cool air blown over me, helps me fall asleep
• I use mouthtape while I sleep, to induce me to breath through my nose instead of my mouth. I don’t know if this improves my sleep, but I buy that it is good for my overall health, and possibly improves my allergies. $^1$
• In my personal room, I use a weighted blanket.
• I have blackout curtains over my windows. $^2$
• I sleep in a room that either has a cracked window or a fan that circulates the air out of the room into a larger space.
• Making it easy to get up and pee
  • This sounds kind of silly, but I have sometimes find that I sleep badly because I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a full bladder. I should get up and pee, but because there are a number of steps between me and the bathroom (maybe I need to put on a robe, or navigate around a desk that I can’t see well in the dark), I have an aversion to getting up, and I just stay there in bed and then fall back into an uncomfortable, restless sleep.
  • I can circumvent this via future-pacing and rehearsal. I’ll practice, when I’m awake, the steps that I need to take to go pee. Then when I wake up in the middle of the night, that’s the default action.

During the day

The clearest impact on my nighttime HRV is doing intense exercise during the day, which I aim to do most days <link>.

Occasionally, especially if I’m taking a rest day in preparation for a sprint, I’ll go to a sauna a few hours before I go to bed. This has a notable impact on my subjective tiredness, and improves my sleep efficiency.

If I’m restless

Mostly, I don’t have any difficulty falling asleep these days. In the past, I would sometimes lie down to go to sleep and my mind would be churning or my physiology activated, or otherwise not be able to fall asleep. That doesn’t really happen any more, and I’m not sure why. Presumably one or several of the interventions above resolved it.