Don't Stress It! - Lesson 6
Dreamland - The Miraculous Cure
Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. I’m Dr. Mariana and you have just arrived to my practical and medically-guided course on managing stress. (To get started with the course, go here.)
Hello! Welcome to lesson 6 of Don’t Stress It!
OMG YOU GUYS!
…Since our last lesson, our feel good family has grown by more than 110 new subscribers - it has pretty much doubled its size! I am here in absolute amazement and gratitude for each and every one of you. Let me give you a warm welcome to this space. ❤️ And also, let me give You a round of applause! For saying yes to yourself by joining this feel good journey. It takes awareness and effort to want to improve and learn about yourself. So, BRAVO!
I am thrilled to have you here, and I hope you get all the good vibes, positivity and motivation to get to know and enjoy yourself, your mind and your body. If you ever want to reach out to clear health doubts of any kind, please just hit reply and I’ll be right with you.
Today’s newsletter is the sixth lesson of my current course which is on stress management. If you’ve missed the first five lessons, do not worry! You can go here to get started. Take your time and enjoy. Ok!
So, are you all ready for today’s lesson?
In our last two lessons, we dove deep into the science of water and hydration, why it matters and how it can affect (or collapse) your body. We also talked about the reward system and discovered the wining formula to creating habits that stick.
As you’ve learned so far, water is one of the vital ingredients to the wellbeing recipe. Today we are going to explore another of these key ingredients.
Before we get started, let me introduce today’s topics:
Sleep & Sleep Deprivation
How To Fix Sleep Issues
Challenge #6: Let's Create a Habit From Scratch
Ready? Let’s go.
Sleep & Sleep Deprivation
Now, I don't normally do this, but - I'd like to prescribe a miracle drug to you.
What if I said I knew of a pill that was guaranteed to reduce your stress levels? Would you buy it? Would you go to your local G.P. / M.D. and demand it?
Like most doctors, I only prescribe pills when strictly necessary. I don’t believe in “magic fixes” but I do believe in many other alternative options to help in advance or as adjuvants to regular treatments.
But this pill? Wow. It blows my mind. And you deserve to know about it.
Within minutes of taking it, your anxiety lifts - and when it wears off a few hours later, you’re physically stronger, your senses are sharper, you have much better emotional control, and you’re capable of feats of concentration that seem almost magical.
But that’s not all.
That headache you had is now gone, and that sniffle has cleared up. What the hell?
It's almost like this pill sent your immune system into overdrive, repairing everything in sight, so now you feel like a different person.
A better person.
Credit card at the ready? I hope so!
I wouldn’t usually recommend long-term use of medication, but in this case, it’s worth it.
One of these pills a day will help you stay trim, it’ll help you exercise, it’ll boost your energy levels to an astonishing amount, it’ll heal you (yes, really), and by improving your attention levels and the speed of your reflexes, it’ll make you significantly less likely to be involved in an accident at home or at work.
I have to warn you, though: there’s a side-effect - and it’s a doozy:
It’ll knock you unconscious for at least 7 hours.
You know where I’m going with this, right? Good.
No, I'm not going to sell you some quack medicine like the worst kind of online "doctor".
I just want you to go to bed more often.
Sleep is a miracle cure. There are drugs on the market, drugs prescribed by doctors around the world, that are really poor substitutes for the incredible life-enhancing, body-building, stress-erasing power of sleep.
Sleep is incredibly powerful.
Unfortunately, so is a lack of sleep.
Sleep deprivation has the same debilitating effect on you as alcohol. In the words of Inc’s Jessica Stillman, “if you’re coming into work sleep-deprived, you’re basically functioning drunk.”
(Check this alarming graph via Harvard Business Review. I highly suggest you take a couple of minutes to read through the article too. It’s quite insightful.)
Now…
The Problem is - sleep is often seen as a luxury.
Worse, it’s seen as something optional.
And far, far worse than both those things?
Going without sleep to hit your work deadlines is actively encouraged in today's work culture.
When the employee who stays up really late and comes in really early is rewarded by management for their diligence, they’re really being rewarded for their ability to sleep less than everyone else.
If they were aware what damage this lack of sleep was doing to their health, they’d stop trying to be Employee Of The Month, and start trying to be Employee Who Will Actually Live To Retirement Age.
“In the short term, a lack of adequate sleep can affect judgment, mood, ability to learn and retain information, and may increase the risk of serious accidents and injury. In the long term, chronic sleep deprivation may lead to a host of health problems including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even early mortality.” - Harvard Medical School.
Hear that?
Sleep deprivation can kill you.
If you get too little sleep one night, it’s carried over to the next night - technically referred to as “sleep debt”. Accumulate enough sleep debt, and your body starts to fall apart.
Let me say that again: without sleep, your entire body starts to fail.
Unfortunately, a lot of people misunderstand how sleep debt actually works.
If you get, say, 4 hours of sleep for 6 days in a row, and you sleep for 10 hours on Sunday, that doesn’t wipe the slate clean. You aren’t “caught up”, and ready to face the coming week. You're still lacking the sleep-hours you need to function properly.
Maybe that Sunday lie-in feels enough. Maybe a few couple of cups of coffee later you’ll feel fully rested - but you aren’t. You’re still carrying that burden of sleep debt, and while you’re carrying it, it’s slowly destroying your health. Your body does important regenerative processes over night. Skip a night and that night’s regenerative work is gone. The human body can’t really accumulate debt.
And yet pretty much everyone is doing it.
"A 2005 survey by the National Sleep Foundation reports that, on average, Americans sleep 6.9 hours per night—6.8 hours during the week and 7.4 hours on the weekends. Generally, experts recommend eight hours of sleep per night, although some people may require only six hours of sleep while others need ten. That means on average, we’re losing one hour of sleep each night—more than two full weeks of slumber every year." - Molly Webster, Scientific American.
Some recent studies are talking about how you might be able to slightly catch up on sleep over the weekend, however, it’s not entirely proven or recommended. In case you’re curious, here’s some sleep advice by The Sleep Foundation.
Remember how we talked about how dehydration leaves you wide open to the effects of stress?
Same goes for sleep debt. It's equally serious, and equally scary.
As your sleep debt gets worse, your stress levels will rocket upwards.
Check out this exhaustive, increasingly dire list of things that will happen to you if you get too little sleep….
...and then read this terrific overview of the society-wide scale of the problem, from Maria Konnikova at the New Yorker.
So how do we fix this? Let's continue onto the next section, shall we?
How To Fix Sleep Issues
So - we know sleep deprivation is a problem - and we know it’s a major factor in our ability (or inability) to handle stress.
But how do we actually tackle sleep debt? Where do we even start?
Sleep debt is usually constructed on a foundation of bad habits.
Hands up if any of the following is familiar:
You’re super-busy, so you stay up late to get something done. OR: you’re having fun, so you go to bed at insane-o’clock.
You have to get up early the next day - that’s non-negotiable - so you stumble into work like one of the Walking Dead...and then fall asleep the minute you get home, so you're wide awake again at bed-time. OR: you sleep late (but not late enough to catch up on those hours of sleep you lost), and you hate yourself for wasting the morning because you have so much to do, so so much...
You stay up late because you’re massively behind with everything, and it's taking so long to catch up because you just can't concentrate - or you're just wide awake, because you slept out of sync.
(2) happens again.
(3) happens again...
By the time you reach (4), you’re well on the way towards making a habit that’s going to undermine your health and leave you wide open to the effects of stress.
(Plus? You’re not taking that magic stress-busting pill every day, so you're losing all the benefits it brings - so the best you can hope for is your stress not getting any worse.)
This lesson is about never getting to (4).
Like, ever.
Maybe you've tried to go to bed early, or tried to get up early in the morning. You were so determined. THIS TIME. YES. And maybe you even succeeded a couple of times! But then a couple of really tough days came along - and the habit broke. You couldn't force yourself to do it, because you were so drained, so empty.
If you can’t go to bed early on a regular basis, forcing yourself to do it isn’t going to help.
“Forcing yourself” means using willpower too - and the time when you most lack willpower is at the end of a long day. Forcing yourself? Let’s assume that approach is doomed to failure.
We'll find a better way at the end of this lesson, using a combination of the following tips.
How To Go The F*** To Bed
(Title inspired by this book.)
(1) Kill The Lights
Your lizard-brain knows it's time to go to sleep because the light outside starts fading - and it knows it's time to wake up because the daylight's streaming into your room. That’s how circadian rhythm works. However, because our species is obsessed with the invention of one Mr. Thomas Edison, you're really good at ignoring daylight.
The solution is simple: if your sleep pattern is out of whack, check the light you're bathing yourself in.
Is your bedroom dimly lit when you're trying to sleep - or are you shining bright light into your eyes, via your 100W bedside lamp and the screens of your favourite gadgets?
(Perhaps now you're seeing why the Phone Challenge is so important.)
And how about when it's time to wake up in the morning? Are you waking too early because your curtains aren't thick enough to keep the room dark during daylight hours?
If so, get new curtains! You should be sleeping in darkness, and throwing open your curtains to wake yourself up. And if that's not an option - buy a sleep-mask.
Train yourself to use light to make yourself sleepy and to wake yourself up.
(2) Limit Your Stimulants
You probably think I mean coffee - and yes, I do. Don't drink it in the evenings - it'll make your brain too jumpy to relax. Some might also recommend to avoid it after noon or 3pm the most.
But besides coffee, I also mean this:
Or Amazon Prime. Or Hulu. Or Netflix. Or just good old-fashioned terrestrial TV.
It's whatever you use to watch your favourite films or TV shows, on whatever device.
Let's just call all of this "TV" for the moment.
One or two hours before you plan to sleep, I want you to stop the TV-watching.
There are 2 reasons why this will help:
a) TVs emit bright light (and as we've already seen, the last thing your brain needs is bright light). Particularly blue light, which can highly suppress melatonin production (the sleep hormone) in the brain.
b) TV shows and films are almost all exciting. Tension, blood, death, murder, war, sarcasm, romance, goofy comedy, politics, courtrooms, remote islands with weird monsters made of black smoke, and so on. Whatever your small-screen preference, it's not designed to make you doze off - it's designed to grab your nervous system and give it a shake.
The solution is to turn to one of your other senses.
If you're addicted to modern entertainment, try audio instead.
You've heard of podcasts, right? No? They're the new radio - except, better than radio's ever been. The best podcasts are some of the best entertainment media, period.
If you're addicted to whodunnits, start with Serial.
If you love ideas and science, start with Radiolab.
Currently learning how to start your own business? Fill your ears with StartUp.
Not interested in any of those things? Go here and scroll down until something catches your eye. And remember, this is the most popular 200 podcasts from thousands out there now.
Podcasts are completely free to download, and there are tens of thousands of hours of amazing, amazing shows to listen to...
And you can listen to them with the lights out.
You prefer books, you say? Use Audible - you get a free book with its 30-day trial offer, after which the book remains yours whatever you decide to do - or maybe download classic novels in audiobook format from LibriVox, totally for free.
Whatever you prefer to do with audio (podcasts, audiobooks, music, meditation lessons, the sound of distant thunder), it's much better for calming down your fevered mind at the end of the day.
Just remember, if you're listening to audio using your phone, the Phone Challenge still applies. Once you've finished listening, that gadget goes outside the room or away from your bed - and if you find you're prone to drifting off to sleep in the middle of listening to something, simply make sure you leave your device out of reach. Maybe use wireless headphones? Just don't break that good habit you’re building!
(3) Sex
I don't think I need to explain this one.
So!
That's 3 medically-approved ways of getting to bed - but we’re all different.
For example: some people find themselves nicely sleepy after a milky drink or a camomile tea; others eat something just before bed, so their post-meal nap leads straight into a full 8-hour ZZZzz. Not ideal but it happens.
I even know people who swear that an espresso helps them doze off. (I'm raising my eyebrow at that one.)
The rule is: experiment. Try stuff. Find your thing.
Then turn it into a habit.
That's your Challenge this week! :)
Challenge #6: Create Your Own Bedtime Habit From Scratch
If you went through the previous lessons and did the Challenges, you have now learned the basic mechanics of healthy habits that stick. Let’s remember the formula:
Trigger ---> Habit ---> Reward
The Trigger requires no effort on your part, because it's a thing that always happens at roughly the same time of day, or happens as regularly as you want to perform the habit. For example: peeing first thing in the morning, brushing teeth, coffee or meals.
The Habit is the thing you want to do. It's easy, it's simple to the point of being kinda dumb, and over time it adds up to a meaningful, lasting change in your health. Such as exercise, your favourite art class, reading a nice book.
The Reward is an enjoyable consequence of doing the habit. It can happen naturally or artificially, it has to be something you really want, and it has to kick in quickly. Rewards that feel distant won't cut it - your brain needs gratification NOW. Maybe an ice cream after that run, a lovely power nap after a strong session, or enjoying your fave movie after a busy and productive day.
This week, I'm letting you have a shot at creating a bedtime habit on your own!
You can use any, all or none of the tips I gave you in the “going the f*** to bed” section. Your habit could be about going to bed at a certain time, or getting up in the morning to do a certain thing, or trying to get at least X hours of sleep every single day without fail for 7 days in a row.
It's your habit.
You have complete control over what you do with it, how it's triggered and how you're going to reward yourself. Just make sure you apply the 3 things: trigger, habit, reward. Now you know it works, so it’s time you put it into practice.
Make it. Test it. Adjust it if necessary. Find out what works for you...
And stick to it.
(And if you're struggling? Don't worry - I'll start the next lesson by giving you a few examples of my own.)
Ok, ready to get some proper sleep starting tonight?
3, 2, 1…Go!
Sweet dreams and see you in the next lesson!
Dr. Mariana
P.S.: If there’s any question or doubt you’d like to clear about the lessons or the challenges so far, please, just hit Reply to this email or message me at thefeelgoodlife@substack.com. I’ll be right with you! :)
Image Credits: Unsplash and Pixabay
Thanks for sharing all this! I wondered if you've looked into how culture affects how much sleep you need–not just how you sleep. I spoke to Dr. Benjamin Cheung about his study, where they found Japanese participants not only idealized less sleep but needed less sleep than Canadians (according to the physiological responses). If you're interested, here's a link to the study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33901233/
I'm curious to know your thoughts!
This is my favorite one so far! I am the worst with sleep habits, but I've gotten better at stopping watching tv before it gets too late. I also found that a reward in the morning (reading a book) gets me to wake up earlier.