9min chapter

All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins cover image

Master the Skill of Sleep with Mollie Eastman

All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins

CHAPTER

Improving Sleep Quality and Setting Boundaries with Smartphones

This chapter discusses ways to improve sleep quality and set boundaries with smartphones and late-night work. They suggest implementing a 'no phone in bed' rule and making it more difficult to use smartphones in a relaxed state. The chapter also addresses the dilemma of having a stroke of creativity before bed and suggests scheduling it for a more optimal time to align with productivity and sleep cycles.

00:00
Speaker 2
so what about mouth tape because I feel like I'm not comfortable sleeping on my back if the goal is sleep on my back to prevent mouth breathing could I just sleep on my stomach or my side and tape my mouth this
Speaker 1
topic of mouth breathing in the sleep community has really flared up and there's a lot of concern that so many people now are starting to mouth tape and I can be such a fan of mouth taping but I think here are the caveats and this is why a lot of the sleep community is upset about it is that many people are just mouth taping and not taking the steps to get tested to make sure there's no respiratory based disturbances at play because if you are you truly are just bandating the problem to the point that it can actually make it worse in some cases if you do have sleep apnea upper air resistance syndrome some of the snoring but that's not to say that one if we clear that out make sure that's not present and you're good to go then that you couldn't benefit from mouth taping and it's also not to say that then if we discover you did an at-home sleep test easy breezy you find out you have one of these disorders which are really prevalent then can we use mouth tape to help with the treatment process that you're also being treated for this and using mouth tape you can absolutely do that as well but I think there's just a concern because some people are now just blindly taking these steps without knowing that they might be doing some harm that makes
Speaker 2
sense and you mentioned the at-home sleep test we can all buy these trackers and we're going to get to technology in a little bit but at what point does it make sense or you know maybe high level how much would it even cost to do some kind of more rigorous study on sleep either at your home or in a
Speaker 1
lab? So exciting that we're at a time where now you can be tested at home and for some pretty reasonable price points even out of pocket so in the United States there's a number of companies that you can be sent very quickly an at-home sleep test often around two hundred dollars or so out of pocket to be tested for some of these breathing based sleep disorders so these respiratory sleep disorders now if you think that you might have something more egregious we want to be checked as far as sleep stages are concerned because again to truly understand sleep stages you really do want to look at the brain and the brain activity and then if you're concerned about things like restless leg or other things narcolepsy etc there might be a time and a place to go in lab but now if you're looking at that respiratory piece you can just get tested by companies like Lofta Empower Sleep other companies are available no affiliation but these can send you a medical device that you can test at night in the comfort of your own home which is a big deal because many people feel like they can't sleep well in some of these facilities and so this can be a nice option in between.
Speaker 2
Are these more for testing sleep related disorders or could they be a more accurate version of using sleep trackers or if you're someone who's like I sleep pretty well but I'm certainly open to getting from a 90 to 100 is the sleep study at home is that going to help in that department or is it more diagnosing? So
Speaker 1
there are some pieces of tech like the Wesper is one that you can use literally it's like a little patch and that will give you some information kind of an in between it's not quite a consumer grade tracker it's not quite a at home sleep test but it's giving you more in-depth information so that can glean some more information from something like that but the at home sleep test that are going to give you a kind of medical stamp of approval of saying okay yes it does appear that you do have sleep apnea for example if that's the case you're only going to test for most of them one or two nights and out of that if we do come back with some disorders present that is going to totally ripple into your results with your sleep trackers it won't be the whole story but it will certainly help support the improvement of those stats. I know one of
Speaker 2
the most common pieces of advice everyone says is I'll keep your phone out of your room no screen time before bed how important is that and is there ways to make it better that aren't a total eradication of all screens because I think in many cases that's just not practical right like our phone is our baby monitor like we want to check on our kid kids coughing so we're not going to get rid of screens before bed or next to the
Speaker 1
bed. Absolutely I completely hear that so one and we leverage the light piece so can we put red glow to those screens so what can you do on iPhones there's this hidden color filter that's within there even if you google color filter iPhone sleep it will come right up of how to set this up so you make it all red and so that in and of itself will make a big difference if you have an android you can put on Twilight and so that will go all red even that will make it less excitatory but then there's element of just auditing what type of information are you taking in on those screens and if it's a TV then using blue blockers that are amber or red tinted can also help. Okay it
Speaker 2
doesn't have to be gone but there are ways to improve it and obviously I'm sure if it got completely rid of it it would be even
Speaker 1
better. Totally and can we have a bit of a hybrid can we have the change in color so that it's a little less addictive in nature but then can we also set up some workable kind of boundaries for ourselves. Some suggestions are in our modern day if you have your smartphone out then you're bringing into your bed and can you just have kind of a no phone in bed rule as far as just when you're laying there can you even have to stand to use it just to make it much harder to utilize this in a more relaxed state so that there's just some sort of boundaries but what could be a boundary for you that would be helpful to make it just a little bit more challenging to use a super addictive device. And what about if you just have that like stroke of creativity which sometimes happens to me and I'm like
Speaker 2
I'm trying to go to bed and I have this idea and now all of a sudden I'm like I could probably crank out this entire blog post tonight but it's 10 o'clock do I set up my computer and crank it out how much am I screwing my sleep by doing this versus it might take me three times as long without my productivity tomorrow. What I would
Speaker 1
suggest now of course there might be some time in life where just such a stroke of genius you want to move on that there may be some instances where that can make sense but most of the time if this starts to happen kind of chronically what we're looking to do is bracket so you have this stroke of genius and then you put it into your calendar for a time that you know you can keep your word on fulfilling on working on that thing at that time where it would align with these rhythms align with your productivity so that now instead of working on it at 11 p.m. or whatever now you're going to be working on it tomorrow at 9.30 a.m. you can let your brain relax that you're not just giving up on your dreams or whatever this exciting thing might be but you're instead reorganizing it into a time that makes sense for your sleep wake cycle. Let's
Speaker 2
go on to food because I feel like both timing and what we're eating and let's also include drinking probably has a huge
Speaker 1
impact. Absolutely it's one of the more fascinating areas I find and one of the more challenging areas for a lot of people to make this lasting change what would this change look like well one you can understand something known as circadian rhythm intermittent fasting and this is just a fancy series of words that basically means that we're looking to eat largely when the sun is out and largely provide a bit of that digestive break in the evening when it's dark out and now this is not to lose your mind over because of course there are certain periods of time when you will be eating when it's dark out so just looking to kind of cluster a lot of your eating time closer to these rhythms of nature and this is what we would have done for so many years so how can we bring this into our modern society a lot of the research on this is coming out of the Sulk Institute Dr. Sachin Panda we did a fascinating podcast episode with him and highly suggest checking that out if you want to learn more but what I would say about the takeaways with that is that his finding after decades of research lots of great books etc is that bare minimum the last bit of food you have you're having that about three hours before bed now I will also say that we also find even just all in the ground from a lot of wearable data some benefits for people even going a bit further than that so this is more in the anecdotal clinical setting but if we look at things like four to five hours before bed experimentation with that your last bit of food often we see things like heart rate go down HRV go up changes in body temperature blood oxygen of course your instances of sleep apnea because we know that if you are having any respiratory based issues or mouth breathing etc some of these things can flare up if you're eating too close to bed unfortunately many people that we look at are now eating most of their day from when they first wake up to when they're going to bed not too much before that so this is problematic any particular
Speaker 2
foods

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