My daily God time has been the most important part of my spiritual formation journey. A key part of enabling myself to do that was modifying my sleep routine to ensure I could get up that extra hour earlier for my God time. Good sleep hygiene has helped me here. Here’s my thoughts and experiences with getting better sleep.
Consistent Sleep Schedule
As the sleep experts say, and I agree, the most important thing is having a consistent go-to-bed time and wake-up time that you stick to every day. That means no staying up late Friday night or sleeping in late Saturday morning. Ever. Well, almost never. Maybe once a month is about all I allow myself, and of course there are times you cannot avoid it, like coming home late from a wedding that’s a long drive away. (Update: OK, to be honest, I probably do sleep in a little bit a on Saturday or Sunday and my sleep the other days of the week doesn’t seem to be disrupted. But it’s still always my goal to be consistent every day.)
Obviously, you need to pick times that allow your body to get adequate quality sleep. It’s no good sticking to a schedule that keeps you tired all the time because it doesn’t allow enough sleep. That might mean losing some of the awake time you’re used to now. But I’ve found the benefits of feeling rested and normal all day long far outweigh that sacrifice.
The main thing the consistent times did for me was keep me from being so groggy when I got up in the morning. Your body has two natural rhythms that affect when it wants to sleep. And those rhythms stay the same. Changing your sleep times constantly is fighting against those rhythms and so your body feels crappy when you do it.
To know the best go-to-bed and get-up time for you, you may need to keep a diary for a little bit and do a little experimentation to find what works well. The books I reference below have more details and processes on how you can work out your sleep schedule. If that idea stresses you out, don’t worry about it. Just pick some reasonable times and try them out for a while. See if you need to adjust up or down. The consistency will help make any needed changes more apparent. If, after a while, you find you’re still wide awake at your go-to-bed time, then move back a half-hour or hour. If you’re having trouble staying awake until then, move it a bit earlier. If you are groggy when you wake up, you’ll need to adjust the wake-up time. I find waking up to the alarm means I’m usually in the middle of a sleep cycle and the body doesn’t like that – I feel really groggy if I have to wake up out of a dream. I’ve found with a consistent and tuned sleep schedule my body will normally wake up on its own a little before the alarm. If you find yourself consistently waking up, let’s say, 45 minutes before your alarm goes off, and you feel pretty good at that point when you wake up, it’s probably better to not go back to sleep and instead perhaps move your wake-up time earlier. It can be really hard to decide to give yourself “less sleep” but your body might not actually need it. It knows when to wake up when it’s fully rested. Forcing it go back to sleep after that usually means waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle and feeling crappy because of that. This is why it’s so important to work out a good schedule and then stick to it.
Quiet
Second most important thing for me was quiet at night. I’m a pretty light sleeper but my bedroom tends to have more than one source of low-level noise at night (my wife likes to have a fan running, etc.). So I invested $300 is custom molded earplugs. Normal generic earplugs never seemed to fit my ears right. I got them from the local Miracle-Ear office. They make molds for your ear by shooting this silicon goo into your ears and then sending that off to a lab. It’s made a world of difference to me. There are lots of other options on the market for earplug-like things. But if cheap regular foam earplugs don’t work very well for you – likely because they don’t fit well – most of the other options probably won’t work well either. They can be fairly pricey. My ear plugs did cost $300 but I knew they would fit me perfectly.
Exercise
I’ve found that exercise also helps me to sleep better and not be so tired during the day. For me it’s just an “exercise walk” (so, fairly brisk walking) every day for about 20-30 minutes. Nothing very intense. If you can do more intense stuff safely, then good for you. But you don’t need super intense to get benefits here. Just make sure it’s not too late in the day. Stimulating things late in the day can make it hard to fall asleep (see below).
Trouble Falling Asleep
Two other things that are important if you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. (“The Sleep Prescription”, see below, has a lot of good stuff on this.)
First, have a good wind down routine. Depending on what works for you it could be 30 minutes to two hours. During that time you want to switch to low-stress, low-mind-activating activities. Understanding what gets your mind going is key here. Crocheting is relaxing to my wife, but it gets your mind going thinking about the various creative things involved. That revving-up of the mind is not good for going to bed. You’ll see lots of other advice around this, like avoiding screens, dimming lights, etc. We have a wind down time that starts 30 minutes before bed.
Related to that is: don’t do your wind down in bed. The only thing you should do in bed is sleep and make love. If you read books or watch TV in bed, your brain will associate your bed with those awake, possibly stimulating activities and may actually wake itself up when you get into bed. If you only sleep in bed, you brain will associate your bed with sleep and that should help you fall asleep faster.
Second (or fifth?), when you’re in bed and cannot sleep, DO NOT STAY IN BED. If you’re still awake after about 20 minutes get out of bed and do something else. Trying to force yourself to sleep is only going to hurt you. Your brain will start to associate your bed with anxiety rather than sleep. When this happens to me, I get up and go to the craft room next door to our bedroom and I read my relaxing book for a while until I start to feel a little sleepy again.
Other Miscellaneous Bits
Caffeine is bad for sleep, obviously. Ten hours after you’ve taken it, half the caffeine you ingested is still active in your brain! So caffeine in the afternoon is not good. I moved my usual afternoon caffeine time up about two hours and it has helped in falling asleep at night.
There are a number of other sleep hygiene bits that I referenced in the stuff I link to below. Some of those may be very beneficial to you so don’t skip looking at them. The ones I have not mentioned here have not had a big impact for me, but they might for you.
One final lecture from the old man: Don’t keep your phone in your bedroom!!!!! Or at least do not keep it within reach of your bed. Really, I mean it. Having your phone near your bed means using your phone in bed which means you’re doing something other than sleeping in bed. That’s bad – see above. At night it can also keep you from going to sleep at your designated time. It might be hard but you need to make a commitment to keeping your phone out of your way.
Web Links
Page 20 here are bullet points for Sleep Hygiene and page 21 is a sample sleep diary.
https://magazine.medlineplus.gov/pdf/MLP_Summer2012web.pdf
This web page has a good overview of Sleep Hygiene with a bit more info than the one above.
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene
50ish page PDF you can download about various sleep things. If you want to read more but don’t want a whole book this might be good. I have not read it myself.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/resources/your-guide-healthy-sleep
Books
If you want to read up on sleep I recommend all three of these books. Don’t feel like you gotta read all of them of course! And I believe you can get audio book versions of all of them. I believe I got all of the at the Kent Library.
Hello Sleep by Jade Wu
The most approachable of the books and the lightest read. It focuses on insomnia but you can skip some of the really insomnia-specific bits if that’s not your concern. Still had all of the info you’d need.
https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sleep-Overcoming-Insomnia-Medications/dp/1250828406/
The Sleep Prescription by Aric Prather
The shorted of the books I’ve read. Each chapter has a summary-ish section at the end so you could just read that.
https://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Prescription-Seven-Days-Unlocking/dp/0143136658
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
If you want all the details on sleep this is the book. Can be dense but it covers everything.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324
Amos 5:6 
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