If You Want Better Sleep, Keep it D.A.R.K. an Introduction to Our Sleep System.
How would you like the freedom to wake up without an alarm clock!
FREEDOM!
Can freedom come simply from breaking away from the alarm clock?
I’ve had a very special hatred for my alarm clock for years. Hate is a strong word, but honestly, the alarm clock is a tie to a modern system of control in my mind. Many of us work for a system that makes a ton of money off our labor and hard work and pays us only a fraction of our true value while those at the top create wealth by investing money without needing to use their time for labor. We can go into this in so much depth but basically I felt like a wage slave or a modern day share cropper. While we did away with overt slavery, we never really got rid of the system, we just made it harder to detect via monetary policy, loans, and new systems of control. The alarm clock is something I associate with this system sucking up my time here on earth.
I made it my goal to never use an alarm clock again unless I wanted to wake up for a special event based on my OWN choice. Most days I wanted to wake up without an alarm.
I haven’t used an alarm to wake up for over 7 years. Ok, I’ll use an alarm if I have a pre 6am departure to the airport or if I’m in a totally new time zone with an important presentation in the morning. Otherwise, never. That’s real freedom to me.
I did it by combining four sleep hacking techniques that totally changed my quality of sleep and allowed me to wake up refreshed every morning. I wake up right when I want to by setting my intention to wake up at a certain time. Combined with getting true deep sleep at night, this works like a charm.
There are four IMPORTANT ways you can ensure you get high-quality sleep and wake up refreshed and maybe someday, maybe someday soon, do away with your alarm.
Welcome to our 4 part D.A.R.K. system for sleep
- Delete all Devices – remove devices and sources of EMF from your bedroom
- Absolute darkness – black is best
- Reduce Blue- eliminate blue light exposure
- Keep it kool- cool but not cold means better sleep
Wake up without a blaring alarm in your ear and remove a layer of control from your life.
Delete All Devices (D.A.R.K Part I)
The first way to ensure you get to sleep and get high-quality sleep is to keep your bedroom free of all devices.
This means cellphones, tablets, laptops and TVs.
The bedroom is for two things. Sleeping is one of them.
Devices distract you, keep you awake, stress you, and control your behavior in more ways than you can imagine.
Make your bedroom a device free zone. You can read books in there, real paper books, and that’s it.
If your phone is your alarm, put it in airplane mode you enter your bedroom and DO NOT take it out of airplane mode till you exit your bedroom.
You phone is NOT the first thing you will check in the morning except to turn off your alarm, which you won’t be using for much longer anyway!
Soon your phone will become a paperweight in your bedroom, wrapped in an EMF blocking pouch and there just for emergencies.
Our bedroom has a red light (discount code SLEEP), books piled on night stands, and an EMF blocking canopy from Shielded Healing. We keep just one phone in the bedroom, on airplane mode, in an EMF blocking cellphone pouch. This is for emergencies. Should we need a phone at night, it’s there. We no longer look at our phones when we enter the bedroom. We do not bring our laptops in there. It’s a tech free zone.
Devices ruin sleep, period. Get them out of the bedroom, now.
Absolute Darkness (D.A.R.K Part II)
When we say keep your bedroom dark, we don’t mean too dark to read a book. We mean too dark to see your hand in front of your face.
Trust me, that’s how dark your bedroom should be. After getting used to it, you’ll find that sleeping in total darkness is immensely helpful.
This is what walking outside at night may have looked like for most of human history:
This is what it looks like today:
Even your bedroom is not dark enough.
All those little blinky and glowing LED lights turned on all over the place, including the Smoke Detector and the charging light on the Macbook can impact your sleep.
A 2013 study published in the journal of Biological Rhythms showed that even 5 Lux of dim light at night, about the same as in a typical bedroom (with the lights turned out), but 5 times more than moonlight can disturb sleep.
In fact, another recent study showed that women with dim lighting about the intensity of a nightlight in their bedrooms during sleep gained more weight than women with no lights in their bedroom.
Get those lights out of there!
If you can’t remove them from the room completely then use this amazingly technical secret Biohacker trick:
Turn your phone over and place it face down on your nightstand so the light is not entering the room, then grab some black electrical tape (though I’ve been known to use blue too) and tape over the glowing lights that appear in your room (smoke detector light, etc). You’d be surprised how much light all those little LEDs give off.
Next, draw your curtains. Ideally put in blackout curtains. Get rid of all that light pollution from streetlights, headlights, the Jimmy John Neon sign blaring in the window all night making it light enough after sunset to read a book with not lights on in the apartment (There’s an AirBNB I stayed in once that has a bedroom where the wall doesn’t go all the way up to the ceiling and the front facing window, the one facing Jimmy John’s, doesn’t have shades at the top of the window. I will never sleep there again!!).
You can also put a towel up against the bottom of your door if someone is awake and light is leaking through the bottom of your door. Just roll up a towel and place it against the bottom of the door where the gap is letting in light.
Here’s a recent picture of my hotel room in Michigan with all the lights turned off. It’s still SOOOO bright in here!
See that light coming in under the door, from the microwave, this is isn’t even showing the alarm clock, because I unplugged it.
Here’s another picture of a hotel room in California.
ANNNND the curtains NEVER block out all the light. This is at 9pm in the winter, it’s supposed to be DARK, but it looks like the middle of the day out there and it’s shining into my room and messing with my biology.
Here’s my room after I used electrical tape and put a rolled up bath towel in front of the door. I also took the coat hanger from the closet, the one with the clips on it to hold pants, and I clipped the curtains closed.
What? You can’t see anything? Exactly.
You can see I missed the eye hole in the door. I took care of that with tape later on but wanted you to know this was the same California hotel room I showed a picture of earlier, totally light hacked.
Check out this video on how to black out your own hotel room showing you step by step how to do it, you can use the exact same tricks in your bedroom at home.
These steps will set you on the path to an alarm free life.
Don’t think that just because you CAN fall asleep with lights on that you are fine. Lights destroy your production of melatonin and this will have a biological cost to you. Never underestimate the power of light!
Reduce All Blue (D.A.R.K Part III)
Reduce all exposure to BLUE light!
Chronic exposure to blue light is one of the most overlooked health hazards in our modern life.
68% of Americans report not getting enough sleep during the week.
Blue Light from artificial indoor lighting and devices is going to be one of the main causes and is the next health danger of this decade!
Sitting is not the new smoking, it’s blue light!
We call blue light processed junk light. Because it’s been designed for visual benefit but not designed for health or biological compatibility.
Some experts think the change to LED and CFL in our homes and offices will cause an entire generation of blindness. It's not just harming us, it's harming the next generation as well!
We spend over 90% of our time indoors. As we strive for energy efficiency and begin to outlaw halogen and incandescent lighting, we are moving toward LED and CFL lights as our sole source of lighting.
Processed light from LED and CFL along with computer and phone screens have a large spike of blue frequency light as compared to other lighting sources such as incandescent, sunlight, and firelight.
Because we spend so much time indoors we're exposed more than ever to just this narrow band of blue frequency light without other frequencies we’d experience under natural sunlight.
Exposure to Blue Light like that energy efficient LED light you just installed, your iPad, phone, TV, or your beloved Netflix:
- Causes the brain to stop producing melatonin in 99% of adults, making it difficult to fall asleep.
- Doubles our chances for poor sleep making us tired in the morning.
- Even if you “fall asleep” while watching TV, your brain doesn’t produce melatonin for 90 extra minutes, causing you to get the equivalent rest of only 6 hours per night!
- Disrupts circadian rhythm and is associated with everything from cancer to heart diseases to obesity.
Damn. After learning all this, I had to go back and take out those expensive LED recessed lights and put the halogens back in. Health is worth more to me than saving some money.
Remember, I want you to wake up every single morning FREE of any alarms.
You really have two choices here and I fully support both of them.
- You can live in the woods, away from any light pollution and literally shut off your power at night. I really do know people who do this. They turn off the power to the entire house. Then use candles to read books.
- Or, you can continue to live in the modern world and find a way to block all that blue light.
The #1 best way to do this is just to put on a pair of blue light blocking glasses. There are many brands available now that this information is becoming more well known.
We’re partial to our own brand because they are affordable and they work, plus you look really good wearing them.
By wearing blue blocking glasses at night you can:
- Still watch TV and not ruin your sleep.
- Work long into the night on your computer, no problem!
- Not have to replace those energy and life-sapping LED lights you (ahem..I) just installed.
- Live in this wonderful modern 24/7 world, without messing up your sleep!
Most people try to fix their sleep by spending $3,000 on a bed ($20,000 if you want a top of the line Samina bed), however that is such a small part of the equation. It’s what you do BEFORE bed that counts.
Blueblocking sunglasses will block blue light before you sleep for only $49….which is only 2.1% the cost of buying a new bed.
You can buy a pair here today –> RIGHT HERE
The absolute most affordable pair are these Uvex off of Amazon, but you won’t find me going out to dinner wearing them. They do block blue light, so get them for home.
Yup, sexy, I know.
Pick the pair that you feel is best, but GET A PAIR of blue blocking glasses to block the dangerous blue blocking light at night and save your health and your sleep.
Keep it Kool (D.A.R.K Part IV)
Have you ever taken a warm bath or shower before bed?
It feels so good to get under the covers when everything is just all warmed up. Especially in the winter.
Sometimes, you might even curl up in some warm pajamas under a nice heavy blanket.
What if I told you that the shower and pajamas could be affecting your sleep and making it harder for you to function the next day?
Sorry, pajama lovers.
- Keep it Kool - keep your sleeping environment cool
Today we’re talking about the Kool part….which means keeping your environment cool.
Our bodies naturally drop in temperature before sleep and keeping your room cool will help that process and make it easier to fall asleep.
The body’s circadian rhythm causes our core temperature to drop to it’s lowest point at night during sleep. Sleep is more likely to occur when the body is cooler than warmer. It’s true, the temperature of your sleeping environment impacts the quality of your sleep. There is a specific temperature range that has been shown ideal for the highest quality sleep.
So what’s the ideal temperature range for sleep?
60-67 Fahrenheit.
What can you do?
1. Set your thermostat to lower the temperature at bedtime to 60-67 degrees. Personally, I found that 64 degrees in the winter is as low as my wife will let me go.
2. Sleep Naked - this article discusses why sleeping naked is better for you and might just lead to more sex too :). What do you think, did men do all the research for this article?
3. Wear socks. Wearing socks can help your body stay at an ideal temperature while feeling warmer, since the rest of you is naked, of course.
4. If you shower or bathe before bed, turn the water to cold for a minute before getting out. That seems like a lot to ask, but it really, really works. If that’s a stretch for you, cool off after stepping out of the bath by stepping outdoors before you dry (especially awesome in the cold of winter). If even that isn’t going to happen then letting your body cool down significantly before you get dressed or get into bed will help.
5. Get a Chili Pad. If your partner wants the bed, and room, hotter than you like, here’s a great tool you can put under your sheet to keep you cool while you sleep. You can set the temperature of that pad, cooler or warmer depending on what you need without changing the room temperature. Tim Ferriss swears by it.
6. Get a box fan. Any fan will do, but I love old school box fans. The white noise cancels out nighttime noises of your house or apartment and the breeze keeps your room and body cooler. I use mine all year round, but in the summer they are especially nice.
7. Cotton sheets are best. Cotton is lightweight and breathable.
8. Sleep in the basement. As long as your basement is clean and free of mold, it’s usually cooler than any other part of your home. I have a bedroom in my basement that gets lots of use. It stays about 60 degrees, and feels cold at first, but I always sleep like a baby down there.
9. When I travel, I can’t always set the hotel thermostat to cool. In that case I usually just set the temperature to 65, knowing it won’t cool because the adjacent rooms are keeping it too warm. I then open a window, even in the winter. The fresh air is wonderful and the heat kicks on if it cools below 65.
Summary
Go D.A.R.K.
- Delete all Devices – remove devices and sources of EMF from your bedroom
- Absolute darkness – black is best
- Reduce Blue- eliminate blue light exposure
- Keep it kool- cool but not cold means better sleep
Resources
Blue Light Blocking Glasses for Night
Daytime Blue Light Blocking Glasses
Replace your LED and CFL Lights with THESE
Advanced – Use THESE red lights at night
Natural – use Candles and Lamps at night
Iris software to remove blue light from screens
EMF protective cellphone pouch
Airtube earbuds