Eric Siu shares 11 sleep habits he uses: mouth-taping for better REM, keeping the bedroom at 68-69°F, blue-light glasses before bed, a silk sleep mask, and tracking sleep with an Oura Ring. He also recommends an air filter, magnesium, and avoiding hot showers before sleep.
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Today we're gonna talk about 7 simple sleep hacks to help you perform at a very high level. So I remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger said that, you know, when you die you can sleep all you want. When you are living, I mean, sleep faster, right? And, you know, the common thread growing up was that sleep was for the weak. You don't need to sleep that much, right? Why do you need to sleep so much? Just focus on performing, performing, performing. And you realize reading books like Why We Sleep or even watching a TED Talk that sleep matters a lot and that sleep is in fact Your superpower. It's one of the power-ups that you have in your life. Earlier, I would think to myself growing up, oh, maybe I only need to sleep 4, 5 hours or so. And then the reality, at least for me, every human being is different by the way, is I need 7 to 8 hours of sleep or else I'm just not gonna function. I might need a nap during the day. And I remember in high school, I would fall asleep all the time in class. Same thing in college, I would fall asleep all the time in class. Probably because I get bored too, because I need something really engaging or stimulating. I want to talk about a couple things that you can do immediately that will help. And again, I didn't find this to be super important until later when I started to get, you know, do more research and then more people started talking about how sleep is actually really good and started to become more acceptable. So the first thing that you can do to sleep better, it seems counterintuitive, but it's actually to put a tape, a piece of tape over your mouth. So if you just go to Amazon, you can search for a sleep tape and mine, it looks like an X and I just put it over my mouth. By doing that, when I use my sleep analytics tools, I get about 30 more minutes of REM sleep. So that's rapid eye movement sleep. I also do want to disclaimer this with saying I'm not a sleep scientist at all. This is just what's worked for me. When I put that on, the other thing that's good about it is that I would used to have to wake up a couple times to use the restroom and I'd have to drink water too during the night because my mouth would get dry because when I'm sleeping, I'm using my mouth to breathe and I'm usually a mouth breather, which is not good by the way. When you close your mouth off, it doesn't— your mouth doesn't keep sucking in air. It doesn't need to. It doesn't start getting dry, right? And you don't become dehydrated. And so the more time I'm staying in bed sleeping, the more I'm staying relaxed, the better. Number 2 is actually making sure that I'm sleeping at about 68, 69 degrees or so. And some athletes like LeBron James, he sleeps at about 66 degrees. And that seems super cold. You know, I used to sleep with just the fan on. And when I slept with just the fan on, it would get really hot in the evenings and I would have to get up maybe 5 times a night sometimes. And that's just too much. That's just not good sleep at all. Sleeping at 68 degrees, your body does need to cool off when you're trying to rest and then kind of, you know, Let your body tell your— tell everything to shut down. I think it's Matthew Walker has talked about this where a lot of people, it's just they sleep too— or it's too warm. When I started switching over to 68 degrees, that got a lot better. But then the problem with that— so this is actually tip number 3— when you have a lot of air blowing around, well, you need to make sure it's high-quality air. So I started sneezing a lot. What I did to counteract that was I got an air filter called the Alen air filter. So that's A-L-E-N. Really good air filter. I hardly sneeze anymore, you know, at home. And that's been good. Those are just a couple things out the gate. And then number four would be tracking your sleep. So I use an Oura ring. That's O U R A. And then it'll show you your REM sleep, your deep sleep, how often you're waking up, your HRV. It will also show you your resting heart rate. And it basically shows me if I'm drinking alcohol, my heart rate becomes a mess. Usually my resting heart rate's about thirty nine to forty or so, which is decent. But I'm feeling pretty good. My HRV could be triple digits, right? Which is which is really good. So I highly recommend. Googling that. But I also cross-reference it with another sleep tool that I use called Eight Sleep. Basically, I put a cover over my bed and what that does is it has sleep analytics so I can cross-check with my Oura Ring and it gives me a sleep score every morning. And then the other thing is it cools my bed. So, it goes on a schedule. So, at 9:30 PM, it starts to cool my bed. It cools it and I can make it as cool as I want. And then also on the other side, I can make it warmer too if there's someone else on the other side. So whatever temperature they want to do. So that's been super helpful for me because now my mattress is cool, the room is cool, and I'm just feeling good when I'm going to sleep. So I got the, the Allen air filter, I got the Oura Ring, I got the Eight Sleep. Number 6 would be making sure that I'm not trying to take too hot of a shower before I go to bed. So if you go super hot, your body's warming up. But if you actually go cold, you can try going completely cold, it actually starts cooling down your body faster and then you're gonna have a more relaxing sleep. So you can try that out. I generally go about warm. I don't go too hot. So it's up to you, but you can see the theme here is, you know, you want cool, calm, you wanna be collected, you want your body to kinda just relax at the end of the day. The other thing is I don't try to look at screens too much. I actually try to read and then I go shower before I go to bed. So I try to read a physical book and I'm not trying to look at screens. But if I am looking at a screen, I'll put my Felix Greys on. Those are my blue light glasses. Those are super helpful 'cause my eyes won't feel as strained. And then my phone usually throughout the day is on orange light. On iPhone, you can switch it to night mode and then it's just orange. And then I try to switch it to dark mode so I'm not straining my eyes. Same thing with Instagram. my laptops or my desktop computers, I'm using f.lux. So f.lux will actually make my screen orange, and then so I'm not gonna strain my eyes too much. Tip number 9 is my sleep mask. So I wear a silk sleep mask. It's called Slip. That's the brand, S-L-I-P. I take hemp oil before I go to bed too. So it's like a CBD pill from Thorn. I find that if I use it too much, I think my body starts to get used to it and it doesn't help as much. But whenever I stop using it for a while and then use it again, I sleep like a baby. And then one thing I'm actually testing right now, so this is kind of a bonus. This would be like 11. I started taking magnesium. So my friend Andrew Wilkinson recommended on Twitter, he's like, dude, it looks like you're tossing and turning too much. Well, try taking magnesium. I'm testing it right now. The jury's out on that one. But again, disclaimer, I'm not a— I'm not a sleep scientist. This is just what's worked for me, and these are the things that I'm testing out, and my sleep's gotten a lot better. So feel free to play around these things and let me know in the comments what you think I might have missed. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button and hit the like if you enjoyed this video. And we'll catch you in the next video.
