7 Ways to Improve Your Sleep and Be More Skilful In Your Work
In her powerful, practical and short book Unleashing Your Complexity Genius, developmental psychologist and complexity expert Jennifer Garvey Berger outlines they ways we can change ourselves and tap into the attributes that allow us to move towards a state of thriving in complexity.
The alternative is what most of experience: being stretched to the edge of our capability by the increasing complexity of the challenges we face.
One of the places Unleashing Your Complexity Genius focuses is on the things we can adjust for ourselves: the basics of our physiology that allow us to dance more nimbly in the face of complexity, staying focused and acting as what I sometimes called our Higher Self.
It reminds me of something I heard the futurist Jordan Hall say a few years ago: sometimes when people lose their sovereignty or centredness, it’s just because they aren’t well resourced on a physical level. The example he gave is that many Americans spend most of their life dehydrated. How many conflicts, how much stress, how much wasted energy might be changed by everyone just drinking enough water?
And as every new parent knows, it’s harder to do almost everything on no sleep.
Whilst I’m no sleep expert, from my work coaching leaders and entrepreneurs over the last nine years, and from my general curiosity about how to increase performance in our lives and work, here are 6 ways to increase your quality of sleep and therefore your ability to cope with what life throws at you:
1) Check what you’re consuming.
Let’s start with what almost all of us know, and many of us choose to ignore: consuming certain things disrupt our sleep.
In the early days of Fitbit, for example, I remember a friend being excited by seeing just how much a late coffee disrupted his sleep score.
Those of us who have played with blood-sugar monitoring have seen that having your blood sugar levels change dramatically in the night will disrupt your sleep (because you’ve eaten delicious cookies or drunk some lovely sugary drink just before bed). Even if you’re getting a good quantity, you may not be getting good quality.
One of the most powerful consumption changes I’ve made was based on what firefighter Caroline Paul once said she did on the Tim Ferriss show: stop drinking anything after 9pm (except when it’s socially important). Now I no longer wake up to go to the bathroom, and my sleep is better.
2) Beware disrupting your circadian rhythms.
We no longer get up when it’s light and go to sleep when it’s dark. If you’re struggling to get to sleep, you might want to think about your circadian rhythms. Two techniques to try:
Reduce screen time in the evenings (the bright light of our screens can make our bodies think it’s still daytime).
Open your eyes towards bright daylight early in the morning: make sure your body knows it’s daytime. It’ll wake you up and start the body clock ticking.
3) Tire your body out.
So many of us live sedentary lifestyles. If you want to sleep better, sometimes tiring your body out can help. Are you exercising at all?
And when are you exercising?
One of my clients swore that by getting on his rowing machine at 7pm, he was always ready for sleep at 10:30pm.
4) Distract the mind.
When my wife spoke to a sleep coach, the suggestions she gave for getting to sleep changed my life.
If you’re lying awake (and particularly if you’re lying awake having woken up in the middle of the night), try these:
Count backwards from 1,000 in 7s. (1000, 993, 986…)
Run through an alphabet of something (i.e. what’s a ‘something’ that begins with A? Then B? Then C?) (US States can be fun, Tottenham Hotspur players can be fun, characters from an epic novel or TV series can be fun).
We’re looking for something just challenging enough to distract you from what you were thinking about and not challenging enough that it keeps you up. Those two work amazingly. I use one or both almost every night and I get to sleep (and back to sleep) better than ever before.
5) Check if something big needs to change.
When I interviewed leadership expert Robert Stephenson on The Coach’s Journey Podcast, he said that when a client was struggling with a decision of whether to leave his leadership role, Robert asked him: how are you sleeping in this role?
The answer was not good. And the client knew something needed to change.
Sleep problems might be fixed by tactical changes; but they might need something bigger.
6) It doesn’t all have to happen at night.
Tony Schwarz and The Energy Project convinced me of the power of naps. If you can’t get it at night (and even if you can), get it in the day. 20 minutes between 2pm and 3pm is a good place to start.
Use the ideas from 4 to help get to sleep.
7) If all else fails, lying still with your eyes closed in the dark is better than nothing.
That’s essentially Garvey Berger’s starting point in Unleashing Your Complexity Genius.
Best is more sleep.
Better is more rest.
Make it achievable at first.
Do what you can and see what happens.
—
PS Read my latest long-read article in the Leading With Honour series, here: The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth (Leading With Honour II)
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. (I cheated a little on this one - took about 15)
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.