Transcript excerpt of a Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast episode featuring Craig Ballantyne describing his 12310 sleep-optimization formula: stop caffeine 10 hours before bed, stop alcohol 3 hours before bed, stop heavy meals 2 hours before bed, and stop work/screens 1 hour before bed. They discuss blue-light effects on sleep and mitigation options (iOS "nighttime"/Night Shift, Flux app, and blue-blocking glasses).
Questions this video answers
10 hours before bed.
3 hours before bed.
2 hours before bed.
1 hour before bed.
Chapters
So one of the things you talk about in the book is the 12310 formula, the 102310 formula. Can you fill us in on what exactly that formula is?
Yeah, so we've covered a little bit of it already with the. The caffeine is 10 hours before bed, so we're going to cut that out. The alcohol is three hours before bed, so we're going to cut that out. And this is all to get a great night's sleep. And then two hours before bed, you want to stop eating, you want to stop eating heavy meals before bed, about two hours again, because the digestive system, if you have a heavy meal to digest, it's going to impact your sleep cycles as well. And again, your mileage will vary with all of these things. So take a look at your own sleep tracking to see if that impacts things. And then an hour before bed, stop, stop working on work stuff and getting stressed out and also start to eliminate and cut down on the screen time because the blue light emission from the screen is something that is research proven to impact arousal levels and stop you from falling asleep. Pretty easy, right?
Although everybody on the planet now has this. Has. Well, I don't know if people have heard of this actually, but Apple just introduced in its new iOS the nighttime version of the iPhone. Or if you go into your settings and you click on display and brightness, you can actually now press that nighttime setting on on your iPhone and it will automatically dim your iPhone. Kind of like that Flux app that everyone is talking about on the computer. But Apple has apparently become aware of the blue light problem.
Oh, very cool. And then from Ari Mainzel, I read that you can actually buy. I don't know if they look like blue blockers, but there's glasses that will block the blue light. So you can sit and read your Kindle in bed with these glasses on and you won't be affected by the blue light. So there's also that way to cut back on the blue light emission which will otherwise.
Yeah, I own those. The problem with them is you also get, not get laid by your significant other because you look like a creature creepy stalker with most, most models of those glasses while you're in bed.
So there's fantastic.
Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a little bit of a downer component to those.
