Wisdom for Dummies: My Body, Myself. Getting those Zzzzz….

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.—Walt Whitman

I have always considered myself a champion sleeper, inheriting my sleeping abilities from a perhaps even greater champion sleeper, my father. So when my wife was having a few sleep issues and suggested we make a couple of changes to our sleep routine, I had no real objections, but I also wasn’t expecting any real benefits either, other than a perhaps more cheerful well-rested wife—which is certainly not nothing: Happy wife, happy life.

The changes we adopted were to do with diminishing if not downright eliminating exposure to natural lighting post sundown. In other words, we started to try and use only candle lights instead of electricity after dinner, not exactly at sunset but pretty close. We also tried to be in bed earlier and read by candle light or the dimmest (for me) of Ipad light settings, though no e-mail or internet or facebook. No video viewing, or getting scores on my ESPN app; just straight text from books I’d previously downloaded.

Since making this change, we’ve been struggling to stay awake until 10 p.m., and this week’s daylight savings time change didn’t exactly help either. Without phone calls, TV, texts, watching sports at night, and a lot less light, the desire to turn in early is strong, much like the urge to turn in early when you go camping I’ve been told, something I’ve personally done about four times in my life and so can only vaguely recall.

As I said before, while I’ve always considered myself a pretty great sleeper, getting in my eight hours or sometimes even more a night, I have noticed a shift in the quality of my sleep since we made these changes to our nightly routine. My dreams, for example, have been especially intense and vivid, which, don’t worry, I won’t bore you with, but most likely means that the time spent in that deep REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase is now longer than before. (Apparently there are five stages of sleep that we move through and phase five, the deepest, is the phase when we dream the most and our brains are as active as they are during full consciousness.)

While it’s been taking my wife a little longer to get into a better sleep schedule, it is slowly happening for her, too. She’s now sleeping a full seven hours straight through as opposed to only a few. For her, sleeping 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. is a significant improvement than waking up at two and staying awake for the next three hours and then finally drifting back to sleep around five.

This is all good news because, as it turns out, sleep, and getting high-quality sleep, is perhaps the best investment one can make to one’s overall health. Nearly every nutritionist I spoke with of late has mentioned sleep as an area that they investigate as early as they would diet when working with a new client. Sleep, and the quality or lack of it, is arguably more important to someone’s ability to change the way they eat and digest and generally feel as adding in a fitness program. Of course, not too surprisingly the three are all strongly connected: we can’t exercise well unless we’re well-fueled; we tend to sleep well if we’re well-exercised; we certainly eat better and digest better (less insulin spikes) when we’ve gotten our deep eight hours of sleep every night; and we all exercise better when we’re well-rested. It also turns out we make less impulsive decisions when we’re well- rested, usually a good thing. Or in other words, we do a better job of making better nutritional choices when we’ve gotten our eight or more hours of deep sleep in the night before.

While it was news to me that sleep has long been considered the secret weapon of most wellness professionals, it’s not exactly news to a lot of other people. In looking a bit more into it, I came across something called Dan’s Plan (www.dansplan.com) or Eat, Move, Sleep, that has you chart your sleep with the same exactitude as you would your fitness and nutrition. Not to mention that all of the new wellness wrist watches that have either recently hit the market, or are about to, have ways to chart the time and quality of your nightly slumber, considering it to be as significant data as your mile time, or your heart rate during those hard efforts.

But sleep is even more important than just feeling and eating and working out better. One could almost say, it’s a matter of life and death without being guilty of hyperbole. In a recent study it was found that those who slept less than six hours a night were much more likely to die before the age of sixty-five than those getting more sleep. And a separate study concluded that those getting less than five hours of sleep a night were twice as likely to suffer heart attacks, strokes and angina—you can also throw in the fact that those who rely on sleep aids to help them get a good night’s sleep were much more likely to suffer from dementia later in their lives. There is also some evidence that the success or not of most marriages may be directly linked into the quality of the wife’s sleep. Happy wife, happy life. You may be able to burn candles to see better without the lights on, but the old saying you can’t burn those candles at both ends turns out to be

especially true.

If you don’t feel like going whole hog and returning to the nineteen century, pre-electricity, there are a few half-measures you might want to consider trying first. You can keep the lights on until say nine p.m. or so, creating this as your curfew instead of when the sun goes down. One of the negatives of turning out the lights so early in the evening is that it’s much harder to get some of those pesky chores done such as the laundry, or bill paying, or tidying up the house which I find all much more palatable to do at night than during the day.

Perhaps more important to the cause is to remove all TVs, computers, phones, etc. from the bedroom. Stay off such devices after eight p.m. Taking a warm bath before bedtime is an excellent way to shrug off the stresses of the day and transition to the calm of bedtime. Use your bedroom, as much as possible, for sleeping only. Reading in bed before you go to sleep is fine, but you don’t want to do any heavy intellectual lifting, such as bringing work from the office into the bedroom. Table any and all stressful conversations with your partner for another time, another room—we both find this one particularly hard to do but important. And if you don’t want to stumble around by candle light all winter long, at least keep lights as dim as possible. Make sure shades are drawn and that the room is as dark as possible when you decide to actually go to sleep, which you should also try and do if possible by eleven p.m. And finally, best to avoid consuming caffeine or anything with sugar after noon. Alcohol, too, isn’t a great sleep aid. So for those of you who do enjoy a drink or two daily or even on occasion, you might want to try and do so as early in the evening as possible. I’ve more or less relegated my own drinking to the weekends when there is more opportunity to catch up on a bad nights sleep by sleeping in later, or even taking a nap later on in the day. (And yes, I guess it’s true, for those who have been paying attention, I don’t seem to have enough time during the daylight hours to do chores, but I do seem to have enough time to take naps. Guilty as charged.)

I will say this. Once you do start getting your regular dose of deep sleep it may become your drug of choice. You may just feel drunk on sleep and not need the alcohol, i.e. pretty darn giddy during the hours when you’re up and about, and secretly looking forward to climbing into your cave, craving nothing other than a killer night’s sleep and all those weird, intense dreams awaiting you. Happy husband, happy life.