TJ Walker argues you should test what actually works for your sleep and health instead of following generic advice. He tried earplugs, blackout shades, white noise, and exercise, then spent two weeks doing 10-15 minute hot-tub sessions daily and slept better than he had in years.
Chapters
Are you in the habit of experimenting on yourself for solutions to give you a more fulfilling life? You are the biggest expert in the world on you. You are unique. You are different from other people. I'm different. And yes, on the one hand, we're all the same, all human beings are the same and that they don't really operate well if you give them nothing but junk food, sugar, candy and soda pop all day long. That's kind of a universal. But beyond that, there's many, many things that are different about you that make you tick, that make you more productive, that make you happier, that make you feel better. And it is up to you, I believe, to constantly experiment. Now I experiment on myself on a regular basis. Unlike Tim Ferriss, whom I have a lot of respect for and a lot of other personal development experts. I'm not on the more wildly adventurous side. I'm not dropping acid, okay? That makes me an old fuddy duddy. So be it. I'm not jumping out of airplanes and doing cryogenics and things like that. But I do believe in experimenting to figure out how can I do things better, how can I make myself healthier, how can I feel better every day so I can live life more fully? I happen to be someone who was lucky enough throughout almost my entire life to get a good night's sleep. I could always fall asleep quickly, get a good night's sleep and wake up fully rested. Never had any problems as a child, teenager, somebody in my 20s, 30s or even 40s. But you hit the five zero, the big five zero, 50 years of age, things do change. You can no longer sleep late. It's much, much easier. And I say you. I do speak for a lot of people my age and older, not everyone. It gets a lot harder to get a good night's sleep. So that's why you see on pop culture and movies and TV shows the old person saying, oh yeah, it's so late, I gotta go home and go to bed and it's 7:30 at night. And that's why they make fun of the senior citizens in Florida eating the early bird specials at 4:30 in the afternoon because they're going to sleep at 8:00 clock sometimes. So yes, some stereotypes and caricatures are unfair. Some are based on reality. And one reality is for many people, myself included, it gets harder to sleep. So I've gone through a whole series of tests to help me sleep. Now I still to this day have an easy time falling asleep. About half a dozen years or so. I found it ago, it Found it much harder to sleep as long as I wanted. I would wake up too early. That's a type of insomnia when you wake up earlier than you need, before you are fully rested, before you get your eight hours of sleep. I am completely normal. Much as everyone likes to think they're superior and better and have great physical powers. I'm completely average when it comes to my sleep needs. I need eight hours of sleep to really feel rested. And what I found out half a dozen years ago or so is if I woke up, it was harder to fall back asleep. If I did something out of the ordinary, had a couple extra glasses of water, glasses of wine, late, that would wake me up, a big meal late at night, harder to fall asleep, more sensitive to noises. So what I did is I constantly experimented. First I did things like get earplugs. I now have a pair of earplugs I really like sleeping with. It just minimizes distractions, minimizes the chance of getting woken up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep. Everybody is light sensitive to a certain degree. I sleep with a sleep mask on to block out lights. I have blackout shades in my bedroom. All of these things did help some. They were all little pieces of the puzzle. I sleep with a white noise machine on in my room. That way if there's a squirrel on the roof or we have these giant walnut trees and walnuts fall on our flat roof, very noisy, it sounds like a bowling ball is falling on the roof. I don't hear that now because I use a white noise machine. I try to exercise every single day. In part because I want to exercise and be healthy, but also because I've been led to believe from research you sleep better if you are fully exercised. And I do believe that's true. So experimenting with exercising different ways. I've also experimented with things like not drinking any liquids at all past 7pm and I'm pretty rigorous about following that. That helps a lot by being able to sleep longer, not having to get up in the middle of the night sort of thing. All of these things add up. But what I found even couple of months ago is still quite often I could wake up at say 3:30 in the morning, 4 in the morning and not be able to get back to sleep. Now I could get up, I could read books about habits and do research for you and make online courses and read other books and it was a nice quiet use of time, productive use of time. But I'd much rather have a great eight hours of sleep. Now, certainly something I did going back several years was follow all the protocol, all the habits for what most sleeping experts say you should do, which is don't look at any cell phones an hour before you go to sleep. Don't look at any screen, any TV an hour before you go to sleep. Have a set routine of reading, reading paper, a book, not an iPad, not even a Kindle, nothing electronic reading paper one hour before going to bed. Those things help a lot because in the past, there would be times I might get an email. I'm just about to go to sleep, I get an email and some client in Asia is upset about something and I've got to think about how to respond to them. That can mess up your sleep. I don't do that anymore because I shut the phone down. It's not that I don't look at it. I will turn it off and it's in another room. It doesn't get into my bedroom. I go to my bedroom an hour before I plan on sleeping so that I can read typically. So all of these things helped a little. But still one, two nights a week, often I would still wake up way too early. And then you are tired. The rest of it. When you're tired, you're not as productive, you're not as energetic, you're not biting into the things you really need to do. So I continue to experiment, continue to experiment. And just in the last 10 days or so, I've been experimenting with it sounds a bit ridiculous and pretentious, but I'll go ahead and say it. Hot tub therapy. For 10 to 15 minutes a day, I get in a giant hot tub and I turn the bubbles on full blast. I turn the heat on to full blast. Typically, I don't like a hot tub more than 98 degrees, but I turn it up to 104. Now I'm not in for more than typically 14 minutes. And that way it's almost like a workout. It's like a massage. The bubbles are going, the heat is going to. I have no music on, no distractions whatsoever, and I don't particularly even enjoy that. But what I like is I feel so relaxed after the fact. And what I've noticed in the last 10 days or so that I've been doing this particular therapy, I've had virtually a perfect night's sleep every single night. Still early. It could be correlation and not causation. You have to be careful of that. Anytime you're trying some new remedy, some new solution, some way of making you feel better but it doesn't cost me anything. It's certainly not dangerous because I'm not staying in too long and it's not putting a pill in my body or anything artificial like that. So I continue to experiment and now I've been getting a great night's sleep. Even though I had followed all the other tips and I'd read other books on how to get great sleep and I followed all the standard blog tips on how to get a good night's sleep, still I wasn't there one to two nights every single week. By continuing to experiment, I found something that works for me. Now, you might try getting into a hot tub and you might not sleep for two days. So I'm not a doctor. I'm not recommending hot tub therapy. I'm not a spokesperson for the jacuzzi company. It may be horrible for everyone else in the world but me. All I can tell you is I've been experimenting and it works for me. My challenge to you is where are you experimenting? Where are you trying to improve some specific element of your health, your productivity, your creativity, your financial health, your relationships? What is it you.
