Guide to more efficient sleep from a busy entrepreneur in 2020 with my top 10 hacks for better sleep

Hey everyone, I'm Vivek, the founder of MindHome, and today I'm super excited about talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is sleep, and 10 of the most powerful tips I have for getting great sleep. So these 10 tips are things that I've tried in my own life and have accumulated from other sleep experts. And I think about sleep quite a bit because, A, we spend a quarter of our life approximately sleeping, if you think about it. So every day, if you sleep somewhere between 7 to 8 hours, that's a quarter of each day, and that equals a quarter of your life. So I think about sleep a lot for that reason. And secondly, sleep is— getting good sleep or getting actually bad sleep has been linked to a lot of diseases like Alzheimer's, memory loss issues, immune system issues, and much more. So sleep to me is super important, and that's why doctors and scientists and many others have put a lot of energy into researching sleep more and more these days than they had in the past because of its super big impact on our lives daily and over the course of our entire life. And so today I decided to break down my 10 favorite tips While there's dozens of tips out there on YouTube or on the internet or in books, I think these are the most impactful that I've found from my own research and talking to others. So I broke these tips down into settings and practices. Settings being like what you can do to change your environment when you sleep, and then practices being things that you would do every day or every time you go to bed to get the most out of your sleep. I would recommend trying a little bit of both as you are trying to improve your sleep. And see what works for you and what doesn't work. So let's get into it. So the first 4 tips I'm going to give are all about setting. And the very first one is about keeping your bedroom primarily for sleep. Um, if you ever have walked into your bedroom and started feeling drowsy, uh, it's because your mind associates your bedroom with sleep. So I would highly recommend keeping your activities in regards to your bedroom limited to sleep. If you can avoid watching TV in your bedroom, reading books, exercising, so forth, the more you associate— your mind associates your bedroom with sleep, the better. That way, when you enter your bedroom, you're going to automatically start feeling sleepy. So my second tip in regards to settings is bedroom temperature. While most experts recommend keeping your bedroom a bit cooler, and you For me personally, I actually prefer a bit more cool. If you're shivering, you're not going to be able to sleep. So what I recommend doing is trying to find a temperature that works for you, experiment with it for a couple days or a couple weeks and see what works. And once you find out the temperature that's ideal, try to sleep at that temperature and you'll get better sleep. So number 3 is investing in a great bed. While this may seem obvious, for various reasons, perhaps cost reasons, perhaps because you're sleeping and you're not like actually engaged in it, people don't, for whatever reason, invest in a good bed. But if you think about it, you actually spend a quarter of your life on this single object. So if there's anything that seems worthwhile investing into above, you know, clothes or fancy houses or whatever, whatever, probably investing in a great bed is a smart decision. And there's lots of ways to get, um, good recommendations on beds. Uh, you can look at Best Reviews, Wirecutter, Sleep Junkies, ask friends on Facebook. Uh, there's a bunch of different resources. Actually, I'll list the 3 that I mentioned in the description below. But, uh, investing in a good bed, that seems like a logical one. So number 4 is keeping your room extremely dark. Biologically, darkness is a signal to our minds that we should be going to sleep. So if there's any light in your room or outside your room, or maybe outside your window, this can cause your brain not to be sure that we— you should be sleeping. And because of electricity, because of modern technology, this is a thing that we actually have to deal with now. You know, in olden days, this wasn't an issue because there wasn't electricity, or, or fires would be put out at night so people would be able to sleep when it goes— when it becomes dark. But now for us, this is more of an issue. So I highly recommend investing into blackout curtains or very dark shades so that there isn't much light coming into your room when you sleep. So now I'm going to get into the practices you can do to improve your sleep. So number 5 is stop drinking coffee too late. While this may seem obvious, but if you're not aware, actually caffeine stays into your bloodstream somewhere between 7 to 12 hours after you drink your last cup of coffee. So scientists and doctors often recommend stop drinking coffee around 2:00 PM. And unfortunately, in our very caffeinated culture that we have, especially here in the West, sometimes we can forget and not be mindful of this action. So if you're having trouble sleeping at night and you're still drinking coffee later in the afternoon, you might wanna consider cutting it off after around 2:00 PM. So number 6 is to sleep on a regular schedule. As I mentioned before, we are designed to sleep when it gets dark, but because of modern lives, because of light bulbs and electricity, this has changed. And because of a culture of work, work, work, we've gotten into this habit of trying to sleep as little as possible or and sleep whenever we feel like it. But unfortunately, this doesn't go along with our biology of how we should be sleeping. So trying to sleep on a regular schedule will help you get more efficient and better quality sleep. So we're more than halfway there. I got 4 more great tips that are super practical and very handy. Plus actually one more bonus that I have been doing for the last 60 days has been a huge game changer for me. Including actually helping me reduce my snoring to no more snoring. Number 7 is exercise. So exercise can be helpful in terms of tiring us out and helping us relieve stress. One of the main drivers for poor sleep is stress. So if you can exercise and let go of that stressful energy, it can be a huge help. But I would recommend exercising in the morning versus the evening because Oftentimes that adrenaline rush that we get from exercise can cause us to have a hard time getting to bed. Number 8, read a book before going to bed. Reading a book before sleeping is a super easy activity, and it's been shown to help lower stress and help people get to sleep many times. But if you're going to do it, I would highly recommend getting an old-fashioned, you know, text, physical page book. Using a Kindle device to read versus reading on your iPhone or tablet. Your iPhones or Android devices or tablets have a blue backlight that triggers your eyes and your mind to think that you're actually looking at the sun, which would then trigger you to think that you're in during the day and would cause you not to be able to sleep well. So if you're going to read before going to bed, like I said, try to read from an old-fashioned physical book or Kindle device. Number 9, this is a little bit of a trickier one to do, but highly recommend doing it. Get a sleep study. So if you're sleeping, you probably don't know actually how well you are sleeping. So if you feel like you're not getting restful sleep and a lot of other things are not working in terms of helping you get good sleep, investing into a sleep study is highly recommended. Having someone actually analyze How you're sleeping can be very, very insightful. My only warning and advice about getting a sleep study is oftentimes our insurance companies, uh, try to avoid us getting a sleep study done, and they inform doctors to try to dissuade their patients from doing it. So if you want to get a sleep study done, you might have to really push your doctor if they try to dissuade you from doing it. Number 10, meditation. One of my favorite activities. So one of the major reasons people have a hard time getting sleep is because of a racing mind, stress, anxiety, all these things. And meditation fortunately is well documented to help calm us, lower our anxiety or stress, help calm the mind. So developing a regular meditation routine can be very helpful in these ways. And if you're the type of person that prefers to exercise in the evening versus the morning, meditation can be a nice way to wrap up your routine, not only to help calm your mind but also to help calm you down physically. And as promised, my bonus number 11. This has been a huge game changer in terms of the quality of my sleep. I was doing all these other activities but still having issues with my own sleep, and for the last 90 days, my sleep is dramatically improved. And not only has my sleep improved, the pains in my physical body, my snoring, all these things have gone away. And it's because of mouth tape. I'm not talking about some crazy dominatrix thing. I'm talking about something really, really simple to do and apply to your face. It's a, it's a little bit of this mouth tape you can put over your mouth. Well, mouth tape might sound totally crazy, and it did for me when I first heard about it, there's actually a lot of logic behind it. And it's because we're actually designed to be breathing through our nose when we sleep. But because of surgical births, eating processed foods as a child, the lack of or decrease in breastfeeding, and various other reasons, our jaw structure and nasal passages have changed over the last few decades and centuries and so forth, and where we're caused to be breathing through our mouths more when we're sleeping at night. And breathing through our mouths can have some really negative consequences. So what ends up happening is when we are breathing through our mouth, our tongues become very relaxed when we're sleeping. And when that happens, it cuts off the oxygen that we're getting through our mouths when we're breathing through our mouth. And when that happens, it kicks off a survival mechanism and all types of chemical reactions are occurring in our body. And these reactions aren't usually supposed to be happening when you're sleeping. You're supposed to, your body's supposed to be totally relaxed and calm. But when these survival mechanisms are turned on, they can cause all types of trouble like aches and pains, not restful sleep, and other issues. So for the last 90 days or so, I've been experimenting with mouth tape and it's been a huge, huge game changer. I actually got some specialized mouth tape. I'll put a link in the description below to the brand I've been using that I found very good and helpful. And it's pretty simple to do. All you have to do is actually just put this tape, you know, just above your lip and below your bottom lip and keep it on. And it actually stays on pretty simply and easily. Even if I turn on my stomach or my back, it usually stays throughout the night. But if this is something you don't want to get, you can get all-natural tape and put it on. But I would recommend something like this. The adhesive is not too strong where it's hard to break off if you're having a hard time breathing through your nose, and it's also strong enough that it can stay on if you toss and turn. And the benefits have been amazing. Stuff from no more snoring, which my girlfriend is super thankful about, decreased morning breath issues and bad breath issues, no more aches and pains when I wake up, which would often occur. And lastly, I'm just generally more energized throughout my day and when I wake up. Well, that's it. Hopefully that was helpful. The one last thing I would recommend is giving all these different recommendations a couple days try because you never know if you ate something or had a stressful day or whatever that might cause your efforts in trying these things not to work on that given day or to work on that given day but not the next day. So try to give yourself a couple days to experiment with all these different ideas. Oh, sorry. And no, just kidding. But the links to everything I mentioned in the description below. Hopefully you enjoyed the video. If you did, please give us a thumbs up, subscribe, and don't forget to get some sleep.