As a pretty ambitious guy with a lot of ideas

and a to-do list about a million miles long

and nowhere near a thousand hours in Overwatch yet,

I get pretty frustrated every time I realize

that I have to spend a third of every single day asleep.

But, just like a car needs regular oil changes

to keep running smoothly, our bodies need

lots of good, high quality sleep to function properly.

Getting good sleep not only rebuilds muscle,

regulates metabolism, and helps you keep focused,

but it's also an integral part of the learning process.

So with that in mind today I want to give you some tips

that can help to improve the quality of your sleep

and help you fall asleep faster.

To start out we have to talk about one

of my absolute favorite substances in the world,

which is coffee, or more particularly

the caffeine in that coffee, because caffeine

can actually disrupt your sleep quite a bit.

And the important thing to note here is that caffeine

doesn't just disrupt your sleep

if you take it right before bed.

In fact, a 2013 study published in the Journal

of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that caffeine

can actually disrupt your sleep

even if it's taken six hours before bed.

So the take away here is if you're gonna drink caffeine,

whether it's coffee or whether it's tea,

if you drink those monster energy drinks

you should probably just quit those altogether,

but with coffee and tea, take those in the morning,

let them give you a little brain boost,

but then cut the caffeine well before your bedtime

if you want to sleep well.

Tip number two is to do your exercising a little earlier

in the day, and the reason you should do this

is that exercise both raises your core body temperature

and it places a mild amount of stress

on your central nervous system,

and both of these things can make it

a little more difficult to get to sleep.

So if you feel like it's taking you longer

to get to sleep at night than it should

and you happen to do your workouts

or some form of exercise near bedtime,

try shifting that to earlier in the day.

Alright, for the next tip

Here we're gonna talk about your phone and more specifically

the light that your phone emits.

Smartphone screens, computer screens, TV screens,

all these different screens that we spend

all hours of the day staring at,

all emit high concentrations of what's called

short wavelength enriched light, aka blue light.

And that can be a problem because that blue light

can actually play havoc with your sleep schedule

if you're seeing it late at night,

not during daylight hours.

And that is because your eyes contain what are called,

and brace yourself because this is a bit of a mouthful,

photosensitive retinal ganglion cells,

and when light hits these cells your body clamps down

on the secretion of a hormone called melatonin,

which is helpful in inducing sleep.

Now, this biological mechanism works great

during the daylight hours

because it keeps your sleep schedule

in sync with the day-night cycle.

But once the sun goes down and then you go inside

and keep looking at all these screens

and keep throwing tons of light in your face all night,

it can screw up your sleep cycle.

And blue light, in particular,

has an especially powerful effect

at clamping down on your body's melatonin secretion.

So what can you do about this problem?

Number one, the simplest solution

is to turn your screens off.

And this is something that I've been adopting in my own life

because at 9 p.m. every single night

I make sure that this computer behind me

is turned off for the night,

and that's about an hour and a half before bed.

Now, if you just don't want to turn your screens off

or if you quite reasonably want to watch a TV show

before going to bed, you want to check your phone,

there're some apps you can use

to cut down on that amount of blue light.

For both Mac and PC, as well as you Linux users,

there's an app called f.lux

that I've been using for quite a long time,

which basically just alters the color profile

of your computer screen to make it a lot warmer

and it makes it cut down a lot of that blue light.

If you have an iPhone there's actually a built-in feature

called Night Shift that does this exact same thing

and you can set it to turn on at a specific time at night

and then turn back off in the morning.

If you're an Android user you don't benefit

from having that built into the OS

but there is an app called Twilight

that basically does the exact same thing.

The other solution which I haven't personally tried myself,

but when I think about it,

it seems like it would be the best one,

is to buy yourself a pair of blue light blocking glasses.

Now, these look basically

like your average safety glasses,

you can get them off Amazon for about eight bucks,

but the benefit would be is that they block all blue light,

not just the blue light from your screens,

which is beneficial when you're looking

at lots of artificial lighting in your house at night.

Tip number four pertains to any of your guys

who have alarm clocks in your room

that you can see from your bed, and the tip is,

to turn those alarm clocks

away from yourself so you can't see the time.

One of the weird kinda counterintuitive facts about sleep

is that we actually wake up several times during the night,

at least to a degree.

Due to the nature of how the sleep cycle works

we go through different stages of deep and shallow sleep

and at that first stage, a lot of us actually

briefly wake up or are in a semi-awoken state,

but some people wake up fully.

And if you're one of those people who finds themselves

awake in the middle of the night

and having trouble getting back to sleep,

seeing the time you have remaining before you actually

have to wake up for work or class or whatever

can cause a lot of stress

which makes it even harder to go back to sleep.

The last thing we have to talk about

is improving your sleep environment,

and that involves your bed itself,

the amount of light in your room, the sounds, the odors,

the temperature, a lot of different factors.

So we're gonna briefly go through a few of them here

and while we do that for each one ask yourself

if you could be making any improvements.

So first up let's talk about your pillow.

A couple of things about pillows.

Number one, you want to replace yours every couple of years,

both because it breaks down overtime

and gets less supportive, but also because every night

you're sleeping on it you're kind of injecting that pillow

with lots of dirt and germs and body odor

and stuff that makes it gross,

which can make it hard to fall asleep.

Secondly, and this was news to me until just recently,

there're different kinds of pillows

for different kinds of sleepers.

For example, I am a side sleeper and for years

I was just using like the most non-supportive awful pillows

until I learned that a side sleeper probably is gonna need

a firmer pillow that has these gussets on the side of it

instead of just the two pieces of fabric

that are stapled directly together.

And after sleeping on this thing for about a week now

I can tell you it is a lot better

than the stuff I was using before.

When it comes to the temperature in your room

cooler is better,

and according to the National Sleep Foundation,

the optimal temperature range for sleeping

is somewhere between 60 degrees Fahrenheit

and 67 degrees Fahrenheit.

The amount of light in your room,

or should I say lack of light, plays a big role as well

because pitch darkness actually plays a big role

in melatonin secretion.

So, if you have a lot of ambient light coming into your room

from like a street light outside your apartment,

you can pick up a blackout curtain

which will basically eliminate that light altogether.

I've actually got one there that I use for filming.

Also, if you happen to fall asleep with the TV on,

you should probably try to break that habit

because well, blue light.

Now, if you're one of those people

who thinks that the TV is soothing

and they just can't fall asleep without it,

there're some sound-based alternatives.

And actually silence really isn't the optimal solution

for all people because silence is so often inconsistent.

There's a bump in the night,

there's a voice in the other room,

or there's somebody snoring in the same room as you,

so having some sound that can block out

those inconsistencies can really help you fall asleep.

One option you can check out is ambient noise generators

which can generate both white noise,

which is basically just consistent noise

that sounds a little bit like an air-conditioner,

and ambient noises, like rain and thunder,

and for me, my favorite one is Noisli,

because you can add as many as you want,

you can change the volume of each one

and basically create the perfect mix for you.

There's also lots of music out there

that's good for falling asleep too.

I've made a playlist of my own and found several on Spotify

and I'll link to those down below,

but my favorite way to fall asleep is with audiobooks.

For me at least, there is nothing better to fall asleep to

than spoken word, and in fact, even since I discovered

audiobooks back when I was probably 12 or 13,

all the way up until I graduated high school

and got a roommate in college, I would fall asleep

every single night to either Ender's Game

by Orson Scott Card

or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

And as a result I have huge swaps

of both those books basically memorized.

Now, if you'd like to listen to those books yourself

the absolute best place to get them is Audible.

Audible has an unmatched library of audiobooks

spanning just about every genre you could think of,

and they also have an excellent app

that does include a sleep timer.

I've been using Audible

ever since I was a high school student

and I don't just use it for sleep,

I also use it when I'm driving, when I'm cooking,

when I'm folding laundry.

Basically anytime when I'm doing a task

that doesn't involve a whole lot of mental activity

I like to listen to an audiobook

because it basically lets me double

my productivity during those times.

Now, if you'd like to give Audible a try,

you can get a free 30-day trial

by going to audible.com/thomas,

which is linked in the description down below,

and that trial includes a free audiobook of your choosing

that's yours to keep forever

whether you decide to subscribe or not.

If you're looking for a recommendation

one of the best books that I finished recently