Sun Jul 21, 2019 · 587 words

Not sleeping well? Or just not getting enough sleep?

One common reason for feeling tired by the time it’s time to start learning is poor sleep.

You might feel tired… and definitely too tired to learn.

But you can function fine with limited sleep, right?

There’s a chance that you might even be right.

But let’s be honest…

You’re not getting enough sleep

I’m probably not the first one telling you the numbers are not on your side.

I’m 95% sure, you’re not getting enough sleep.

If you’re not getting enough sleep, then the numbers strongly suggest your lack of sleep is:

Impairing your judgment
Putting you at greater risk for a number of diseases and health problems
Putting you at greater risk for accidents

Most of all, it’s impairing your learning and memory.

But you probably intuitively know this already. You already know that getting more sleep is good for you. Me throwing a bunch of data at you isn’t going to convince you to sleep more.

The bottomline is…

There’s a gap between your sleep world now and where you’d like it to be.

That gap isn’t about understanding why you should sleep more. You already know you should be sleeping more.

That gap is really about understanding why you’re not sleeping more today.

Are you sleeping enough?
How’s the quality of your sleep?
Do you have trouble falling asleep?
Do you have trouble staying asleep?
Is something keeping you up late?
Is something waking you in the middle of the night?
Is something waking you early?

These questions will help you zero in on the key gap that’s affecting your sleep.

From my own sleep experience…

In order to understand why I wasn’t sleeping more, I tracked how much I was sleeping.

There are apps and fitness trackers that allow you to do this. I went old school and just noted what time I went to bed and then what time I woke up. I also noted on a scale of 1-10 how well I slept.

My sleep trends

After about a week, I started noticing trends.

I was only sleeping about 6 hours a night.

I had no trouble falling asleep, but I was staying up mostly to do some random thing on my computer. Staying up late meant I got less than 6 hours some nights.

I was also waking in the middle of the night. Some nights, I got up for a bio break and frequently had trouble falling back asleep.

Armed with data and trends, it’s way easier to understand why I wasn’t sleeping more.

I was staying up too late, and I drank too much water before falling asleep for the night.

To address these gaps…

I set a bedtime so that I would get closer to 8 hours of sleep.
I didn’t have to sleep at that time… just be in bed.
I also stopped drinking water an hour before bedtime.

The results were slow, but I started seeing improvements.

Within a week, I was sleeping 7-7.5 hours a night. Although I was still occassionally getting up for bio breaks, they were less frequent. Knowing I went to bed earlier, it was also easier to fall back asleep knowing I had more time to sleep.

While this worked well for my sleep gaps, YMMV.

It may take some investigation and experimentation to understand your sleep gaps and how best to address them.

Or maybe you want to see the other common reasons for lacking the energy to learn.