Get the best from your rest part one: How electronics, food, and other factors impact your sleep quality

Key Takeaways:

• Adults aged 18-60 need at least seven hours of sleep each night.
• Sleep quality affects overall mental and physical health.
• Electronics usage can disrupt circadian rhythms, making it difficult to sleep.
• Blue-light filters are effective but can be difficult to use.
• Late-night eating can also disrupt sleep.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend adults aged 18-60 get at least seven hours of sleep each night.

However, in today’s fast-paced, always on the run world, many people have become accustomed to getting by on less sleep than they need.

Restful, restorative sleep is part of good overall physical and mental health, and it can be affected by a variety of factors, including temperature, electronics usage, eating, and more.

In this blog, we’re going to talk about things you can do to improve your nightly sleep.

What can I do to optimize the environment in my bedroom? 

I think the best thing to do is reduce the amount of light. It's great also to have it cool. Optimally, you want to mimic what your body is doing, and so if bedtime starts off warm and cools down, that’s great.

Often, people like to take a warm bath or a sauna or something like that, heat themselves up, and then as they cool down, it makes it easier to fall asleep. That makes a natural body temperature rhythm perfect.

How does electronic usage impact sleep?

To talk about that, I need to back up a little bit and talk about circadian rhythms.

I appreciate sleep is the most salient of our circadian rhythms. But it’s just one of the hands of the central circadian clock. What’s interesting about circadian rhythms is that these are internal rhythms that represent the external solar day. For most of us, they run around 24 hours and 15-20 minutes

If you were in a cave and you had no light, dark, or temporal cues at all, you would start sleeping about 15 minutes later every day. Out here in the environment, what sets your clock to precisely 24 hours is exposure to bright light early in the day.

It turns out the receptors that talk to your central clock back in your brain are maximally sensitive to blue light.
Unfortunately for us, all these electronic gadgets, phones, tablets, computer screens, televisions, they’re all putting out blue light.

Don’t believe me? Walk by your neighbor’s house when they have the TV on. Even though it’s a color TV and all the colors are showing on screen, the glow from the room is always blue, right?

In our incandescent bulbs, the compact incandescent bulbs that we’re using to save energy also primarily emit blue light.

That’s resetting your clock throughout the evening and making it tough to sleep.

Are blue-light filters or night-time modes on screens effective?

That’s a great question. 

Apple came up with its night shift feature in response to one of our early papers. We said blue light is bad, so they came up with this.

They can be effective. You know how many hundreds of years we have looked at black ink on a white background? Reading at night on my tablet is tough when I put it in night mode because it’s orangey, sort of a peach or sunset color.

It’s better for your circadian hygiene, but for me, it’s tough to use. When my kids were teenagers and they were gaming all night, I made them put that on there on their computers. It helps. It’s just hard to adapt to.

At what point in the night should I stop using screens?

Most people recommend about three hours before you want to go to sleep, so the idea of scrolling right until you fall asleep is hijacking your circadian rhythms and making your rhythms suboptimal. And those are hormone rhythms, immune responses, and importantly, metabolic rhythms. 

How does late day or night-time eating impact sleep?

Well, that’s very interesting. The primary synchronizer for your clock, as I mentioned earlier, is light. But there are many food-induced daily oscillators that can be synchronized by food, so food can be a disrupter.

If you have a meal right before you fall asleep, it really disrupts your sleep. And if you suffer from any kind of gastric problem, it’s not good.

At what point in the night should I stop eating?

Most people recommend a three-hour cessation of eating before sleep. If you’re just too hungry to fall asleep, which can happen for many people, then a light snack of 100 or 200 calories can work.

Good sleep lessons are based in history

I like to think of lighting as trying to mimic what our ancestors did, what they were exposed to, and what our biological rhythms have evolved to do.

In the same sense, people are familiar with the paleo diet. I don’t think that’s such a great idea necessarily, but I think about paleo lighting. What did my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Stone Age grandma, what was she exposed to? She was exposed to bright light during the day and no light at night.

Even when we started having fire and light at night, that light was orangish yellowish. It wasn’t blue light. It wouldn’t affect our circadian rhythms per se.

It wasn’t until 1879 or so when commercial light bulbs came on the market, thanks to Thomas Alva Edison, that we started really disrupting our circadian rhythms.

We need to reduce those problems because you’re not going to get rid of electric lighting.