Sleep Optimization: Understanding What Hurts & Helps to Gain a Professional Edge

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on Blue Sky Mind , a holistic lifestyle blog about positive psychology.

Sleep is a fascinating, magical elixir that improves every aspect of your life when prioritized and wrecks havoc on it when it’s not. And work is a huge aspect of our lives, one that we invest a boatload of time and money into improving. Consider all of the coffees, coaching, happy hours, certifications, books, conferences, courses, and beyond you invest in today. We pour so much into becoming better at our jobs, so that we can advance faster, make more money, and claim higher titles or achievements.?

Yet, so few people invest in their sleep as a source of professional strength.?

Improving your sleep will make you more alert and focused, a better decision maker, able to memorize and learn things more quickly. It improves your mood, so you get along with colleagues better. It strengthens your immune system, so you miss less work calling in sick or going to doctor's appointments. All of this makes you a more present and productive employee your boss loves, someone your partners love to work with, and a generally more positive state of mind while weathering the ups and downs of work-life.?

These are critical attributes for success in the modern world of work, making good sleep unequivocally tied to your career success and earning power.?

Why sleep optimization matters to me

I started my sleep optimization journey in 2021, because I couldn’t seem to stop getting sick. The connection between sleep and the immune system has been well-established in my life. My mom, never one to lay out strict rules, forbade me from more than one sleepover per weekend while growing up, because I would unfailingly return home on Sunday morning with a cold. My immune system couldn’t seem to handle more than one night of poor sleep in a row, more than a few hours of close proximity to another’s germs.?

Post-COVID, I was getting sick constantly - every three months, like clockwork - since re-entering the social world. And as a highly sensitive person with a variety of auto-immune irregularities, my experience can only be described as borderline traumatic. I am prone to a full-blown panic attack at the thought of a mere cold coming on, because it means I’ll be missing work, canceling plans, and physically suffering for two or more weeks.?

Fed up, I started getting serious about investigating anything that would help bolster my struggling immune system. Given the stories of my childhood, optimizing my sleep seemed like a good place to start.?

Introducing WHOOP?

In 2021, my partner acquired a new fitness tracker, called the WHOOP. The WHOOP is a fitness and sleep tracker for “athletes,” whether professional or fancied. Ty gifted me his old one a month after I came down with my second monster cold of the year. These two things in tandem put me on a 6-month quest to understand and improve my sleep with a granularity that I’d never once thought to explore.?

What does it mean to get “good sleep?”

Part of this journey toward optimizing my sleep has been 1) re-familiarizing myself with the basics of sleep hygiene and then 2) going deep into the science. I’ve been loving Whoop, Dr. Mark Hyman & Huberman Lab podcasts on the topic for a balanced POV. Between the three, you’ll get an athletic, functional medicine, and neuroscience POV on sleep.?

Let’s start with the basics and answer for ourselves, “what does it even mean to sleep well?” Dr. Marishka Brown, a sleep expert at NIH , summarizes the answer to this question succinctly. In her definition, good sleep is comprised of:

• Quantity of sleep (e.g. how much sleep you get)
• Quality of sleep (e.g. how “uninterrupted & refreshing” it is)
• A consistent sleep schedule (e.g. going to bed & waking up at the same time)

For quantity, most adults aged 18 to 64 need at least seven to eight hours of sleep per night . For quality, we need about 25% of that to be in REM , which translates to about two hours of dreaming per night. For consistency, we just need to go to bed and wake up around the same time each day.?

Unfortunately, at least a third of all Americans report getting less than seven hours of sleep per night, and “women have a lifetime risk of insomnia that is as much as 40% higher than that of men.” Not everyone is prioritizing sleep, and even those that do can struggle with it.?

Why is good sleep important??

Likely, the answer to this question strikes you as obvious. Without sleep, you’ll feel tired and crappy. “When we sleep, the brain totally changes function,” explains Dr. Brown. “It becomes almost like a kidney, removing waste from the system.” But what most don't realize is how little it takes to make a basic, everyday function a true superpower.?

The all-encompassing positive effects of sleep on the body can only be likened to those of water or breath. Not only is it essential to sustain life, but there is almost no one in the world who can’t benefit from a little more of it. There is surely an upper bound to the max amount of sleep that’s helpful to an individual, but most people are not even beginning to capitalize on the positive effects up to that threshold.?

Here are some of the most important factors to me:?

• Immune system. Sleep plays a profound role in strengthening your immune system and preventing colds. An article in Nature Reviews Immunology concludes “that sleep deprivation has detrimental effects on immune-cell number, function and cytokine production.”
• Mood. Even an hour less sleep than normal can begin to affect your experience of well-being and also impact your relationship with others if you’re grumpy/moody/snappy. I personally feel very cranky and cynical with less than seven hours of sleep.?
• Healthy body. Lack of sleep leads to a whole host of physical and psychological effects that are thought to be leading factors in the world’s obesity crisis. An article in Scientific American points out that “when you get too little sleep, normal levels of appetite hormones are altered in a way that could lead to increased food consumption and weight gain.”?
• Work performance. Getting too little sleep leads to a lack of alertness and focus, as well as reduced quality of decision-making. As someone building my career in corporate, focus and quality decision-making are tentpoles of my success. On the flip side, more sleep leads to enhanced learning and memory, which serves as a competitive edge in a fast-paced and rapidly changing business world.

What factors affect my sleep the most, according to WHOOP?

Similar to a Fitbit or Oura Ring, WHOOP measures your daily energy output and your sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you get what’s known as your “recovery score,” which combines resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and time slept. After collecting six months of data, here’s what I now know about what influences my recovery scores the most:

Helpful behaviors

• Spending more than 4 hours outside. This link became clear while my partner and I were in Costa Rica for two weeks. We were outside for almost 8 hours a day. Despite some travel anxiety and vacation drinks, my recovery scores were through the roof. There’s scientific evidence for the link, demonstrated in a very small study in Environmental Research . It showed that “human interactions with nature (i.e., nature-based green environments) have been linked to numerous positive physiological health outcomes. In a recent systematic review and meta-analysis, interactions with nature were associated with improved HRV, lower cortisol production, and decreased risk of type 2 diabetes.”?
• Stretching before bed. After building this into my regular bedtime routine, it’s obvious in my recovery data when I skip it. Optimizing my sleep can be as simple as taking 5 to 10 minutes before getting into bed to do some side stretches, child pose, various folds, and legs-up-the-wall (more pre-bedtime stretches here ). I make sure to breath and connect with my body in this time, which is likely the true sleep accelerant.?
• Journaling before bed. Speaking of the bedtime routine, this comes right after stretching, and I’ll spend about 10 minutes with my daily ritual of three prompts . They never fail to help me reframe my experiences and emotions in a more positive light.?
• Wearing earplugs to bed. I only do this while traveling, so it’s interesting that the positive effect of earplugs is material enough to outweigh the negative affects of sleeping in a different bed and the general stimulation of traveling. Try my favorite earplugs .??
• Eating dairy-free. As someone who’s recently concluded that they’re definitely lactose intolerant, this makes a lot of sense. Eating that which is inflammatory for your body leads to poor sleep.?

Harmful behaviors

• Consuming any alcohol. In my February 2022 report, Whoop found the following correlation: when I had 1-4 drinks, my sleep took an 11% hit. When I had 4-8 drinks, my sleep took a 28% hit (the highest of any behavior by a factor of at least five).??
• Being sick. Seems obvious. That’s why we’re optimizing!?
• Hard workout/high strain. When you physically exhaust yourself during the day, it’s likely that your body is still hard at work making repairs in the middle of the night. Often, it won't be able to repair itself in full by daybreak, and you’ll need to give yourself more downtime the next day. This seems to be the data to support the idea of a “rest day” after a tough workout.?
• Socializing for more than 5 hours. As a psych amateur, this data fascinates me. I’ve developed a rough theory for it: When I’m around anyone but my closest friends and family, socializing acts as a stimulant in my body. Basically, it riles up my nerves. I’m certainly someone who seeks approval, and though I love to socialize, there is an unconscious anxiety that arises from social situations: Did I say the right thing? Do they like me? Are we good??

Surprisingly neutral behaviors

The following behaviors either never or rarely show up as an influential factor to my sleep:?

• Meditation
• Having a late meal
• Eating gluten-free
• Eating meat

Despite loads of internet content touting these ideas, they aren’t important to my sleep optimization needs. It goes to show that sleep is a personalized experience. Certain factors will influence my sleep more than yours and vice versa. It’s powerful to know your own factors with a degree of clarity.?

If you’re interested in optimizing your sleep, I’ve rounded up the specific products and routines I’ve adopted. If you’d like to get more content about how to optimize your life for wellbeing, consider subscribing to Blue Sky Mind.