Brian Johnson shares five curfews to fix your sleep: caffeine by 2pm, exercise three hours before bed, your last meal two hours before, screens an hour before, and work shutdown at 5pm. Caffeine's half-life is five to six hours; late exercise raises your core temperature; digestion keeps you awake.
Questions this video answers
Five to six hours.
No later than 2pm (or noon for the ambitious).
At least three hours before bedtime.
At least two hours before bedtime (the speaker notes testing a 4-hour glymph-stimulating plan).
90%.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. Continuing our second trip through Sleep Optimizing, let's talk about some important curfews. Remember our top 10 sleep Kryptonites? Well, several of them can be resolved with some pretty straightforward curfews. We briefly touched on some of them in that recent plus one. But these are some super important, potentially easy optimizing wins. So let's chat about them real quick, shall we? We'll focus on curfews for these five things. Caffeine, exercise, eating, screens, and work. First, caffeine. As we've discussed, caffeine works by masking your fatigue. It basically plugs up the little connectors where adenosine usually tells your brain that you're tired. Boom. Borrowed energy. It also has a half life of five to six hours. So half of that cup of coffee or tea or whatever you have at 4:00pm is still bouncing around in your brain at 10:00pm enter caffeine curfew. Have your last jolt of caffeine no later than 2pm or noon. For the ambitious. Then we have exercise. Exercise is of course awesome, but if we work out too late, we drive our core temperature up, which makes it harder for us to get the deep restorative sleep we're looking for. Plus, very importantly, we miss out on the 12 hour mood boost we could be getting if we worked out earlier in the day. So we've got our exercise curfew. Work out at least three hours before you want to go to bed. Then we have eating. Eating is pretty important too, but if your body is digesting a jumbo meal when it should be doing its cleanup thing, our sleep will take a hit. Enter eating curfews. Have your last meal at least two hours before bedtime. I'm still shocked by how much my sleep has improved by testing out the whole glymph stimulating four hour before bedtime eating plan. Then we have screens. Have I mentioned that 90% of people use their electronic gadgets within an hour of going to sleep? I have. Great. Are you still acting like everyone else? Digital sunset people. Enter screen curfew. Turn off your electronics at least an hour before bedtime. Give your brain a chance to chill out. Two plus hours for the ambitious optimizers among us. And then finally work. Too many of us work all the time. One more time. We need a good shutdown. Complete ritual. Enter a work curfew. You tell me when it'd be great to shut down. It's 5pm for me. Done how about you? Sleep? Curfews, five of them. Anything jump out at you as an obvious oh yeah, that needs work. I can do this kind of thing. Fantastic. What will you do today to make tonight even more restorative so tomorrow is even more awesome? High fives, moonwalks, etc.
