How do I average 8+ hours of sleep nightly? More sleep = more happiness! How to do it? I will explain to you here exactly what I've learned after years of having a hard time getting sleep, inconsistent sleep, and almost every kind of disruption you can imagine. I'll explain what I do today that works and I'll speak about some of the common problems you might experience that block you from getting good sleep.
Read this post or watch the original video on YouTube to learn more!
Thank you very much to @gmichelbkk for converting the transcription of the YouTube video from GoTranscript into this beautiful post for Steemit, which is much faster to read than the video and has beautiful illustrations!
How is my life today with 8 hours of sleep?
It's incredible.
I have perfect energy nearly all day, every day.
You might say, "Well, it's just because you're young."
I haven't had this good of energy flow, ever. Not when I was a child, not when I was a teenager, not in my 20's.
I feel better than I've ever felt before and what I've noticed is that the times I felt best in my life is when I got the most consistent sleep. The times I was the least happy, most frustrated, suicidal, depressed, crazy and angry, I did not get good sleep. Now, does the one way of acting and thinking, all of the moods and frustration, cause bad sleep?
Yes, I find lots of times when I'm all messed up inside that I'll do things that disrupt my sleep, but also not getting the sleep feeds into having more moods like that. That's the same thing in my life, I noticed that the people who consistently get the best sleep are the happiest, have the most energy and feel the best about life.
The people who tend to be unhealthy, miserable and frustrated the most also tend to have disrupted sleep. There's a lot within our power that we have to get better sleep. When you just write it off with some excuse right away, then it's easier to just feel helpless about doing anything else about it. It just turns out that there's a ton of little tips and tricks that can help no matter who you are.
That said, sometimes you might have a temporary problem that disrupts your sleep. You might have a newborn that is having trouble sleeping, but even in those cases there are always things you can do to make it a little better.
I used to consistently wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I stopped drinking hardly any water for several hours before I go to bed and now I don't wake up in the middle of the night or need to go to the bathroom.
There are an amazing amount of things that we can fix to get good sleep. I hope I've made clear today, I have an amazing life full of health and happiness, peace of mind and energy levels that both are high when it comes to doing something like my podcast. Then I'm able to drop in and just relax during other parts of the day without being that high-strung and anxious all the time.
Then when I get in bed I'm ready to have great energy right up until when I go to bed. I go to bed and I generally fall asleep pretty quickly. Even if I do rollover a bit it's not mental torture. Even if I think about things I don't get into this fear of, "Am I going to fall asleep?" I don't feel this need, this pressure that I have to fall asleep. Why? A big part of that is because I wake up whenever my daughter wakes up.
When you have a job you have to get up and go to, you set an alarm and this often puts you in the situation of a pressure cooker.
I've had lots of jobs I've had to work and get up for at all hours. From being to work at 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and everywhere in between.
You throw yourself down in bed when you have this pressure cooker where you get up and go to work first thing in the morning, and you set your alarm to the very latest you can. This tends to create an environment of anxiety about going to sleep. One thing you can do to change that is go to bed earlier, and then get up earlier. You might think, "Well, why would I want to do that?"
I like to have at least 30 minutes in the morning where I have some peaceful time to just wake up and get moving. I wouldn't want to step straight out and get in the car anymore after doing it for years.
Today, one of the things that helps me get good sleep is I don't have some alarm to wake up to. I remember some MLM program I was doing, that was the fantasy life in it and I have that today. Now a lot of us force ourselves to get up.
Another thing, I have my wife and daughter in the house with me. I can sleep just fine whether they're in the house or whether they're out of the house. I sleep great either way.
What else do I do for my sleep?
Sleep secrets working for me to get 8 hours nightly!
Some simple tricks that help me get more sleep.
Have the room dark
One of the most critical things is to have the room dark. This was quite obvious to me when I worked a night shift as a police officer. I'd come home and it'd be eight, nine or ten in the morning, and I'd be sleeping the whole day while it was sunny. I realized there that it was difficult to sleep during the day if the windows weren't blacked out, if it wasn't significantly dark in the room.
At the time I looked around and I had all these big windows in my room. I thought, "Well, what can I do to actually black this out?" Then, if you have a partner you're with, the partner might not want the ugly solutions to get the room blacked out that you need to get good sleep.
If you go to bed as I often did at midnight, one or two in the morning, then the sun comes up and you wake up at six or seven. Then, you start telling a story, "Well, I just can't sleep eight hours." That's just not true.
Go to bed earlier, according to the science I've heard, just when the sun hits your skin, it tends to wake you up. It's a sign to get up.
In that same vein, then having a bunch of lights on and things like that if you're trying to sleep is also a sign to stay awake. Now sure, there are some circumstances that will make things challenging beyond your control. You have the ability to move and manage those circumstances though, like if you've got some roommate in college who demands to keep the light on, try switching roommates.
There are always things you can do. I'm grateful that today, I have my windows blacked out because my bedroom is also my studio, which is where I work. I negotiated with my wife that I get to control the bedroom and she gets to do the whole rest of the house. In the bedroom, I've got foam pieces that are stuck with a piece of cardboard into the windows to reduce outside sounds.
Well, the nice thing is that it also completely blacks the windows out, so there's no sunlight that gets in. If I close the door of my bedroom, it's hard for me to tell whether it's two in the morning or two in the afternoon. The room is completely blacked out.
That is one of the top tips I have to give for falling asleep and staying asleep. In fact, when blacking a room out too effectively and without an alarm, you can easily end up sleeping 10 or 12 hours because your body just doesn't get any signal from the Earth in the form of sunlight to wake up. If you've ever slept in on a cloudy day, you've experienced this.
Routines before bed
Another huge tip that works really well for me is to have some unwinding routines hours before bed.
When you combine this with the blacking out, it's almost a guaranteed good fall asleep routine.
Why?
Because if you look at yourself more like a big baby, it's quite easy to manage your life.
Today we get all these complicated crap in our head and we think that we are all these certain ways when really, I look at my daughter who's a year and half old, and I work on just about the same principle she does.
What does my wife do with her?
My wife winds her down every night. She has a set of routines that she goes through every night before bed and our little girl falls asleep consistently, which I'm grateful for every night. Why? A big part of the reason is that when it hits eight o'clock at night, my wife puts her and I'm there to brush her teeth, do bath time and say goodnight to her.
Every night she winds down. She has these same set of routines she goes for that signals to her brain and her body that it's time to go to sleep. Then she gets in bed and falls asleep. My wife has done a good job of getting her room nice and blacked out as well, so that she can stay asleep. If you've got a baby and their room is light and you wonder why they wake up so early and wake you up, try blacking their room out and I bet they'll sleep longer too.
I find it's important for me to have longer bedtime routines than my daughter.
Why?
Because I get more wound up.
My daughter is very flexible at a year and a half old. When it's time for bed, she just switches off and gets ready to go to bed, but I need about two hours of sleep routines to get ready to go to bed. I have several things that I generally avoid doing before bed. One of those is getting on my mobile phone. How do I do that? Well, I listen to a book or I call people on the phone. I have about two hours of bedtime routines.
After going through my daughter's bedtime routines, then I have my bedtime routines. I might watch one video course at the very end of the day at about 8:30, and then we're in the bedtime routines. I take my dogs out for a walk, I call friends and family on the phone. If no one answers, I listen to an audio book. I come back in, I take a shower, I sit down and read.
That's what my parents had me do as well, sit down and read before bed. I read before bed and that takes the very last mental energy out of my mind. Lots of times occasionally I get fired up right before bed whatever I read.
Going to bed at the same time
Then, I go to bed when my wife goes to bed. Now my wife's had a lot of patience with me waiting that I figure out that it's better for everyone in the house, if all of us wake up at the same time and if I go to bed when she goes to bed.
Why?
If you have a self-centered focus like I've had a lot of my life and still could have some of today, I would stay up and play video games with my friends till one, two or three in the morning. My wife would have gone to bed at eleven, here I come in bed at two and I wake her up getting in bed. I'm tossing and turning because I'm all fired up playing video games. I fall asleep at three in the morning, then our daughter wakes up at seven in the morning.
I've got four hours then, of often halfway done sleep, and then I'm tired and cranky the next day and whose fault is that?
Whose fault is that?
Mine.
You know how many times I went through that sequence of events before I figured it out?
Just go to bed when your wife goes to bed and guess what?
It works really well.
When you got one person who's all selfish and not paying attention to what's going on in the rest of the house, it can disrupt everyone else's sleep. I know this can be difficult in a family and sometimes you just have to have loving patience with them and lead by example. My wife didn't get nasty with me and say, "You need to go to bed with the rest of us."
She just let me suffer essentially and she even was grateful about the pains that I would cause coming in and waking her up at night. She gave me space to figure out, "You know what? If I go to bed with her, everything tends to work a whole lot better."
It took me a year after having a newborn to figure that out, to see, "Oh, why don't I just go to bed with my wife, and then everything will work out fine."
Now, I've been doing that for eight or nine months and it works. We are social human beings and it's best if all of us go to sleep together, and if you live alone, then this is an easy one. However, I'll point out some other things that you may run into if you live alone. If you live with other people and they have good sleep routines, let them help you out. If you live with other people who have really bad sleep routines, then leading by example is the best way to teach.
Just simply trying to get frustrated or getting angry with them often will only encourage them to stay the same. Lead by example like my wife did, she led by example, putting my daughter to bed, putting herself to bed and I finally figured out that I should come along. Now, I'm totally converted. When everyone in the house goes to bed at the same time, it really helps.
That's why I'm sharing this with you today because it works really good for me and they are my bedtime routines. My mind then gets in the bed prepared to fall asleep. Now, it doesn't fall asleep every single night right away when I get in bed. However, with my sleep routines, I have faith when I get in bed and I trust that my body will fall asleep and get enough sleep.
Sleep disruption and racing thoughts
Now, the beauty of this is that I get so much sleep on a normal basis. If there's a temporary disruption to my sleep, like if my daughter is teething or she has some challenge she's going through and she wakes up in the middle of the night, I get so much sleep normally that I'm incredibly resilient when there's a disruption. What you'll notice is if you're getting bad sleep on a regular basis, any little disruption will just push you right over the edge.
If there's some outside force, you'll scream and complain about the outside force when the truth is that you don't take care and focus on fixing the problem of your sleep on a regular basis, then whenever something externally happens it's like this straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. Today, I'm grateful that if there's some unusual disruption and I don't get a good night of sleep, I have so much stored up essentially that my body still functions as if I had.
Then it's very easy to fall asleep right away on a subsequent night. If you're laying in bed and you often are full of racing thoughts, one strategy I used is to consciously let go. Let it go, it's like the way you might imaging dying. Just essentially die. Let go of your whole life, let go of all the stories, let go of everything.
I find that it is the one mental strategy that consistently works to fall asleep because the mind with all of these racing thoughts is really trying to grab on everything tight.
"Oh my God, what can happen when this…? Well, all right, so next month will I have enough money? Oh my God, I've got what… That person said this!"
You just let go of it all.
I trust it will work out and there's a certain amount of thinking like, "I don't care, whatever. I got here somehow just fine. I'm sure everything else for the rest of eternity, will be fine as well. I don't have to think about it while I'm laying in bed right now. I will handle it when I get up tomorrow."
I noticed that I rarely ever have a good idea when I'm laying in bed. It's almost always anxiety, worrying useless time. It's almost always some self-sabotage attempt to hold on to whatever happened.
When I consciously just say, "Let it go, let it go," I generally fall right to sleep after that, and even if I don't, I have peace about it.
I remember where I am, "Look I'm in bed with my wife. From 15 years old, I've completely made it. I've totally made it right now. Here I am, this is a spot I fantasized about being at for 10 years of my life. Here I am, right in the middle of it. Our daughter is asleep."
I focus on what I'm grateful for and the mind often gets bored with that and will fall asleep as a defense mechanism. If you have these thoughts that are torturing and persecuting you, things you've done before that will come out, trying to hide that will come out in the form of, "This person's such an effing jerk. I can't believe they did that. Now I'm going to…"
If your mind is full of that stuff before bed like mine used to be, which is why I used to like a drink or 6, 8, 10, 15 or 20 drinks before bed because then I'd just fall asleep like a zombie and pass out more like.
If those kinds of things are going through your head, it's very helpful to do a confession, to go to someone who's religiously or occupationally bound like a priest or a therapist, depending on where you live or wherever you are.
I mean it could be a close friend, a family member, someone in a 12-step program or it could just be your mom or dad, I don't know. I trust you can find the right person. Doing a confession will often unload all those thoughts that are racing around. If you are like me in your head, these thoughts really want to get out, to be seen in the light, to heal and be moved on.
Lots of times, all these judgements against others that you might be stuck with in bed at night are things that are trying to cover up things. They are thoughts trying to cover up stuff I've done. When I look, "Okay, what are these thoughts trying to hide?" Then I usually find things,"Well, remember when you did that," so I go confess to another person, "Look, I did this."
Then, not only I don't get the judgmental thoughts, but then I feel okay about whatever a horrible sin I did in my past. What you might notice if you actually start trying to do better on your sleep, is that this is one of those things where what I call insanity will come out hard.
Getting into this insanity
I have a family member who for at least 10 years consistently has been telling me about how they've been trying to go to bed earlier. If you are in the grip of what I call insanity or what Eckhart Tolle might call "unconsciousness," when you try and do something about your sleep you will get a hellacious push back. You will find every single reason to not go to bed. You'll be up at three in the morning when you swore you'd go to bed at 9:00 p.m. This often can be a big challenge if you live alone or if you're disconnected from the people you live with.
If you are connected to the people you live with, it helps a lot to have a partner and go to bed with them, but if you live alone or you're in your mother in law's suite or something, it may be very easy to get into this insanity, and I've experienced a lot of my adult life in insanity. Insanity being where I want to do better at something, but I can't. No matter how hard I try, I do not get any results or progress.
In my case, the insanity was best shown by my drinking. I knew since before I drank that I should never drink because my dad was an alcoholic, and my grandparents were alcoholics. I knew I should never drink, and yet I drank anyway, and not only that, I knew after the first time I had a hangover that I should never drink again. Not even have one drink and guess what?
I kept trying to do it and do it again. Then I'd swear off forever, "I'm never going to drink again." Then the next day, week or month I decide, "You know what? Let's try this again. Maybe I can do a better job."
That's insanity when you keep doing this, and that's the same thing that goes into unhealthy relationships. You're with the person who abuses you physically, emotionally, or some other way who treats you horrible, you swear that you're not going back to them and then guess what? You're right back to them.
This happens in work environments as well. You go into work, you get treated like crap. You say, "I'm going to quit that job," and then you're right back in there the next day getting the same abuse.
Insanity will often come up in sleep.
"I'm going to go bed earlier."
It will come up in dieting.
"I'm going to eat better."
You keep trying and trying and if you look at the truth, which might make you cry at first, you don't do any better. You try to go on a diet, but you don't do any better. You try to go to bed earlier, but you don't do any better.
I have a family member who's tried and tried with sleep, but they still do not go to bed early and do not get good sleep.
They've resorted to all kinds of things to get better sleep and they do not get better sleep.
Why?
Because there's some mental thing that happens, which is insanity. For me, it was the compulsion to drink, you might call it, the desire to drink the flip.
I'd be, "I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to drink."
Then four o'clock would come around, my friend would want to play video games, my wife would be at work late or out with her friends and I'd think, "Maybe I'll have a drink." I would selectively forget everything else, all the things that went wrong.
I would imagine it's the same with the family member and their sleep.
They said they were going to go to bed at 9:00 p.m., but they just need to do one more thing and all of a sudden it's 10:00 p.m., and then we're going to clean the whole house right now. We got 15 minutes and we're going to just do all these things. All of a sudden it's 3:00 a.m. and here we go again.
"Now, I'm an awful person. I was going to go to bed at 9:00 p.m."
What I've found is that I need a whole community of people to help me with staying sane on a daily basis.
That's why I go to Alcoholics Anonymous every day because I'm not cured. I could forget in five minutes everything I know and talk myself into getting a drink again. I'm not cured from being insane. I essentially work on staying awake constantly because I realize that if I dip off into sleep and into autopilot, I'll probably go get a drink again regardless of every single other thing, regardless of having been to probably a thousand AA meetings, regardless to everything else.
I drift off to sleep again mentally or I'm not paying attention, I'm on autopilot and that will happen complaining at the world, cussing people out and doing things that are selfish. I will dip into going to sleep and I'll probably go straight to the liquor store as soon as I've fallen into a complete, essentially mental sleep.
I've found that staying awake requires an entire community of other people for me who are awake, who are paying attention, who are present in the now. I don't know exactly what form this takes, but if you can honestly detect insanity in your life where you say you're going to do one thing and you do something else, where you say you're going to go to bed earlier, where you are going to diet or you are going to not go back to this, if what you say and what you do consistently does not line up, that in my experience is insanity.
"I'm not going to drink."
"Why are you drinking tonight?"
"I'll never drink again. I'm drinking next week."
What I've found is that I need a whole community of people to be a part of, to participate and help others. If that's the case and you detect this in your sleep then that's a miracle.
If you honestly notice it doesn't matter if you want to go to bed early or not, you are not going to do it. Instead of giving up, I don't know exactly what the community looks like for you whether it's a 12-step program, whether it's just getting more involved with your family or your religion, whether it's moving to some other place. I don't know what it looks like for you.
For me, it's been going to AA meetings on a daily basis. It's been reading more spiritual books. It's been listening to what my wife suggests I do. It's been participating in my family and friends more. It's been working a little bit less. It's been giving up lots of things.
I'm grateful today because if you look you'd probably think I live a pretty sane and reasonable life. In the middle of that life, I'm grateful it is pretty easy for me most nights to get sleep.
I asked myself the question today, "What problem have I solved or do I not experience anymore that many other people on the planet are suffering in the middle of?"
Now I take a good night's sleep for granted. If something disrupts it, I don't get too upset with it. I know I've got another good sleep just around the corner.
Final words
I hope this has been helpful for you because I love you and I want you to have the most beautiful life possible. I would not deny you anything I have in my life. I have a wonderful life today. That's why I try to share about it so that you might copy and put into your life anything you like, as I've copied so many things from other people and substituted them in my life for things that weren't working.
Now today, I'm grateful for this.
My exercise today is to be grateful for all the people who've helped me get better sleep, all the books I've read, all the people I've listened to who shared their experience, and all the people who helped me, the thousands of people who've collectively helped me to be able to get a great night of sleep consistently.
Then, my exercise for the evening is to again, put into practice what I do that I've done every night before, do it again tonight and be grateful for the chance to do it.
Thank you very much for reading this post, I hope this is helpful for you.
I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield