Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

In general, on a clear day, meaning no cloud cover or minimal cloud cover, you want to get this sunlight exposure to your eyes for about 5 minutes ... On a day where there's cloud cover, so the sun is just peeking through the clouds or it's dense cloud cover, you want to get about 10 minutes of sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day. And on days that are really densely overcast, or maybe even rainy, you're going to want to get as much as 20 or 30 minutes of sunlight exposure.

Every third or fourth night, I will take 2g of glycine and 100mg of GABA in addition to the standard sleep stack that I talked about before... which I find greatly enhances my ability to get into sleep.

For whatever reason you are not able to get outside first thing in the morning, well, then try to get twice as much sunlight in your eyes, or I should say, extend the duration of sunlight-viewing in the morning for twice as long, the following day ... If you miss a day, you can make up for it the next day, but you have to get twice as much light or twice as much duration of light.

Viewing, so sunlight to the eyes, sunlight in the late afternoon and evening hours... Doing that in the afternoon serves an additional beneficial purpose, which is you protect, or you inoculate, your nervous system against some of the negative effects of bright artificial light, or even dim artificial light, in the nighttime hours between 10 PM and 4 AM.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of quality peer-reviewed papers showing that light-viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day, and it has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep at night.

For those of you that exercise in the afternoon, understand that if you exercise very intensely... typically that's going to further increase your body temperature... and it's going to so-called delay your circadian clock. It's going to make it such that you want to fall asleep a little bit later, maybe even a lot later.

Viewing that afternoon light, the low solar angle light as the sun is heading down in the sky, so it could be sunset or what I call circa sunset (around sunset), well, doing that is going to slightly but not completely offset any of the negative effects of viewing artificial light at night.

If you view bright light, exercise, or drink caffeine, or all of the above in the 2-4 hours before your temperature minimum, that will delay your clock. What that means when I say 'delay your clock' is it will make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later the next night.

You don't want cortisol to be chronically or consistently elevated throughout the day or night, but you do want cortisol to reach its peak early in the day, right about the time you wake up. One way that you can ensure that that cortisol peak occurs early in the day... is to view bright light, ideally from sunlight, within the first 30-60 minutes after waking.

For this morning sunlight-viewing, it's best to not wear sunglasses. That's right—to not wear sunglasses, at least for this morning sunlight-viewing. It is absolutely fine to wear eye glasses or contact lenses.

What you'll do if you delay caffeine intake until 90 to 120 minutes after waking is you will avoid the so-called afternoon crash. And you may still get a little bit of dip in energy in the afternoon, but it's not going to be that massive crash.

Early in the day, in the morning hours, you need a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, to be very alert and to wake up. But in the evening hours and nighttime hours, it takes very little light, very few photons, in order to wake up your brain and body and to disrupt your circadian clock and disrupt your sleep.

There are supplements that, for most people, will greatly improve their ability to fall and stay asleep. And the 3 main supplements in that category or that kit of sleep supplements, and I've talked about these before, are magnesium threonate... apigenin... and theanine.

Do eye masks improve your ability to stay asleep? And indeed, they do—provided they are not too tight and provided that the room is cool enough.

If you have a hard time being a nose breather in sleep, you can try doing your cardiovascular exercise, at least the lower intensity cardiovascular exercise, through purely nasal breathing.