That is how many hours of sleep I got a night. Eight and a half. It’s hard to pin down when my obsession with getting enough sleep started. Probably five years ago. I was studying longevity. A friend of mine said, “I don’t want to maximize my life span, I want to maximize my health span.”
When he said that, I was doing a ton of research into the field of longevity. The field of knowledge celebrity was exploding with names like Attia, Huberman, and others. I noticed one common thread with all the talking heads; Sleep. Sleep kept popping up as critical ingredient to staving off all sorts of health problems.
But as an entrepreneur sleep comes hard. Busy minds you know. Many of my dear friends take pills to help them sleep. However, when I learned about glial cells, I became borderline obsessed with getting better sleep.
Who hasn’t heard of the precious neurons in our heads? But not many people know about the humble cell which sits next to them and is just as numerous. I’m talking about the glial cell. There are 86 billion of those little suckers in your skull right now. Until recently scientists believed glial cells only provided structure to support our fragile long tailed neurons. However, a new theory has surfaced. The glials do something spectacularly, wonderfully, simplistically yet profoundly important.
During the night, when we sleep, glial cells compress, like squeezing water out of a sponge, thus acting as an organic pump. They push brain fluid into the spinal cord, and exchange the spent biochemical detritus for some nice clean spinal fluid. In short, thinking is a biochemical electrical process, and it produces chemical waste. Glial cells help the brain clear out the waste (brain poop) and wash it in fresh thinking juice, restocking it with the biochemicals needed for another day full of thinking.
When you look at sleep that way, you do not want to skip a night of good sleep.
But how do you do that? For me the answer was twofold. First, I learned to meditate. A combination of body scanning and present moment awareness by focusing on my breathing. With no future worries to focus on, and no past memory traces to relive and regret, my mind often calms down allowing me to drop into sleep. My breath brings up a second “hack”, which I learned from James Nestor’s book Breath.
Sleep with your mouth closed.
That’s it. According to Nestor, our sinus system performs some kind of magical alchemical transformation on the air we breathe in, warming it, moistening it, and generating some kind of hormone that - and this is important to most men - suppresses the urge to pee. Yes, in my fifties I completely stopped needing to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
Therefore my “secret” (it’s not a secret, I’m telling you silly) is to calm the mind through meditation, and stay asleep by breathing through the nose.
If you can’t fall asleep at night because your brain is too busy, give present moment awareness meditation a try. The mind is a tool for time. With no future or past to fuel your thoughts, your mind runs out of steam and lets you drift off. And if you can keep your mouth closed, doing all your nightly breathing through your nose, you could be like me, discovering a long, uninterrupted night of restorative slumber.
Does it work all the time every time? Of course not! Nothing does. Does it work most nights? Yes. Nearly every night for me. Of course, your mileage may vary, however I cannot encourage you enough to develop good sleep hygiene. And if you need a little extra motivation, just think of all the brain poop that might be swirling around your skull. Just, don’t think about that while you’re trying to fall asleep.