The video comprehensively addresses common sleep issues and offers a science-based sleep routine aimed at improving overall energy, focus, and mood. It is divided into three main parts: shutting down, sleeping, and waking up, each designed to assist viewers in developing habits for optimal rest. It emphasizes controlling light, digestion, timing, and stress levels as vital components of a nightly shutdown routine, highlighting how modern artificial lighting disrupts natural sleep patterns.

The video further explores methods to enhance sleep quality by controlling environmental factors such as light, sound, and temperature in the sleep environment. It underscores the importance of complete darkness, utilizing sound masking techniques, and maintaining ideal sleeping temperatures to ensure restful and regenerative sleep. The significance of breathing techniques, as well as technological tools like sleep trackers, is also discussed to identify and counteract sleep disturbances like apnea.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. circadian rhythm [sɜrˈkeɪdiən ˈrɪðəm] - (noun) - A natural internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. - Synonyms: (biological clock, sleep-wake cycle, daily rhythm)

And as a result, our circadian rhythms are no longer tied to the cycle of the sun.

2. stimulating [ˈstɪmjəˌleɪtɪŋ] - (adjective) - Causing excitement or increased activity. - Synonyms: (invigorating, energizing, exciting)

Our screens, you know, your phones, your computer, your televisions, they all put out a particular wavelength of light that is highly stimulating to the brain.

3. ambiance [ˈɑːmbiəns] - (noun) - The character and atmosphere of a place. - Synonyms: (atmosphere, environment, mood)

And bonus points, this creates a nice cozy ambiance which helps you relax.

4. fluorescent [flɔˈrɛsənt] - (adjective) - Emitting light that is bright and sometimes harsh. - Synonyms: (glowing, luminous, radiant)

So instead of using harsh overhead fluorescent lights, get lamps and soft lights that are positioned at shoulder height or below to signal to your brain that it's time to shut down.

5. melatonin [ˌmɛləˈtoʊnɪn] - (noun) - A hormone that regulates sleep-wake cycles. - Synonyms: (sleep hormone, N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine)

melatonin is a powerful hormone that the brain produces in response to darkness.

6. affiliation [əˌfɪliˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - The state of being closely associated or connected. - Synonyms: (association, connection, membership)

I have no affiliation with this company, but I've had good experience with the product, so happy to recommend it.

7. dubious [ˈd(y)o͞obēəs] - (adjective) - Hesitating or doubting, not to be relied upon. - Synonyms: (doubtful, uncertain, questionable)

Often these supplements are filled with low quality ingredients that have dubious support in the scientific literature.

8. anxiety [æŋˈzaɪəti] - (noun) - A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease. - Synonyms: (worry, nervousness, unease)

And it alleviates a lot of the symptoms of anxiety.

9. apnea [ˈæpniə] - (noun) - Temporary cessation of breathing, especially during sleep. - Synonyms: (breathing interruption, breathlessness)

I am a mouth breather, and I have sleep apnea, which simply means I have a really hard time breathing in my sleep.

10. limbo [ˈlɪmboʊ] - (noun) - An uncertain or intermediate state or condition. - Synonyms: (uncertainty, in-between, transitional)

Our bodies are left in this weird sort of limbo.

This SLEEP routine made me a stupid amount of money

If you're tired of being tired all the time, of going through life with low energy and in a state of perpetual brain fog, then you have to get your sleep dialed in. For myself, it wasn't until very recently, like within the last three years, that I finally unlocked how to consistently get a great night's sleep. But since I have the quality of my days, of my energy, my focus, my mood, they've all improved exponentially. And in this video, I'm going to show you my science based sleep routine so that you can do the same. Now, I've broken this down into three parts. First, how to shut down. Second, how to sleep. And third, how to wake up.

All right, let's dive into part one, how to shut down. Listen, a great night's sleep begins in the hours before your head even hits the pillow. In particular, we need to control for four things in our nightly shutdown. Light, digestion, timing, and stress. All right, so let's start with light. Going to sleep is pretty straightforward for our ancestors. Once the sun went down, darkness started creeping in. The body naturally goes into shutdown mode. Unfortunately, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, artificial light, has completely screwed this up for us. And as a result, our circadian rhythms are no longer tied to the cycle of the sun. Because we can light up our homes like Christmas day around the clock if we want to use light to our advantage, or at least not severely handicap ourselves, theres three things to think about when it comes to light. That is, the intensity, the angle, and the quality of the light we're receiving in the hours before bed.

So let's break it down, starting with intensity. Now, it's helpful to remember that for the vast majority of humanity's existence on this planet, we've only had the ability to control one single source of light, and that's fire. And fire light has two unique characteristics. The first is that it's not very intense, which is important because bright light signals to the brain that it's time to be awake. Dim light has the opposite effect. It makes us sleepy. Now, the second characteristic of firelight, which is interesting to consider here, is the angle. Just imagine a bonfire for a second. Where is it? Is it directly above you? No, it's probably very close to the ground and in front of you. This means that the light hitting your eyes comes at a very low angle, which is fundamentally different from daytime light, which is, you know, coming from the sun directly overhead.

One of the coolest things to know about sleep is this. Your eye has particular cells whose only job is to detect this low angle light and then signal to the brain, hey, it's time to get sleepy. This is because the brain associates low angle light with the setting of the sun and the location of firelight, both of which correspond with nighttime. And this is absolutely wild if you really stop to think about it. But here's how to use this to your advantage. You have to change the angle and intensity of the light in your home a couple hours before bed. So instead of using harsh overhead fluorescent lights, get lamps and soft lights that are positioned at shoulder height or below to signal to your brain that it's time to shut down. And bonus points, this creates a nice cozy ambiance which helps you relax.

Seriously, of all the tips I'm going to recommend in this video, changing the intensity and the angle of light in your home, it's one of the few things that has made the biggest impact on my sleep. It's crazy how powerful it is and it's surprisingly easy to set up. All right, the last aspect of light that I want you to consider is the quality of your light. In particular, I want to draw your attention to the concept of blue light. Our screens, you know, your phones, your computer, your televisions, they all put out a particular wavelength of light that is highly stimulating to the brain. And you probably already know this, but you should limit your screen time in the hours before bed, not only because of the blue light, but also because these are highly stimulating devices and you want your brain to start shutting down.

But if you simply can't do without your screens, then at minimum get some blue light blocking glasses which can filter out this particular wavelength of harsh light. Personally, I didnt see a lot of benefit from the glasses when I tried them, but the feedback ive heard from others suggests that it can be very, very helpful. But with that said, I really think the bigger, more impactful tweak is to simply limit your screen exposure in the hours before bed. Lets transition from light to the next thing that we need to control in our shutdown routine, which is digestion. Digestion requires a surprising amount of energy from the body. Energy that could be disruptive to the active sleep, particularly in the early hours of the evening when your body is most likely to be in a state of deep sleep, which is key for muscular growth and cell regeneration.

You dont want to make this harder on your body than it needs to be, so you should aim to eat your last meal at least a couple hours before bed. Also, its probably a good idea to stop drinking water so youre not disturbed with middle of the night potty breaks. Now, depending on your schedule, timing youre eating so you get your last meal in at least 3 hours before sleep. It might not be feasible, so just do your best with this one. But with that said, it is absolutely critical that you do everything in your power to control for this third thing in our shutdown routine, which is timing. See, when you wake up is way less important to a good night's sleep than when you go to bed. Now, consistency is the name of the game here because we're trying to set our circadian rhythm so that we naturally get sleepy at the same time each night.

And there's a lot of studies showing that it's actually more important to set a timer telling you when to go to bed than it is to set an alarm telling you when to wake up. If you go to bed consistently at the right time, then waking up actually gets pretty easy. Now, the simplest way to determine your ideal bedtime is just to work backwards from when you want to wake up and how many hours of sleep you want to get. So if you want to wake up at 06:00 a.m. and get a full 8 hours of sleep, then you need to be unconscious no later than 10:00 p.m. which means you probably need to start your shutdown routine at least around 08:00 p.m. so you can be in bed by 930 at the latest. This might just be the most important aspect of your shutdown protocol. So don't ignore it. Set a bedtime and then keep it.

All right, let's turn our attention to the last aspect of our shutdown protocol, which is stress. The key to an effective shutdown protocol is that it's priming your body and your mind for deep relaxation so that sleep can naturally occur effortlessly. Sometimes in an attempt to optimize things, we end up just making them more complicated. But here's three really easy ways to induce physical relaxation in the hours before bed. Number one, you could take a hot shower. Number two, you could drink some hot chamomile tea. And number three, you could read a book or some other non stimulating activity. If you really want to get fancy, you could introduce some supplements.

Now, I'm not a doctor, nor do I even play one on tv, so you're going to want to take my thoughts on this with a massive grain of salt. But first, I believe that supplements both for sleeping and day to day nutrition are a 20% solution that you should only bother with once you focus on the foundational things which are going to drive 80% of your results. If you want to tinker with supplements, just make sure you've already controlled the fundamentals of light digestion and timing. If you have, then here's three supplements you might consider. You got melatonin, magnesium and multipurpose. Now melatonin is a powerful hormone that the brain produces in response to darkness. In some ways, it's the sleepy molecule. So if you're having trouble falling asleep, it only makes sense to take something like melatonin to give you a quick dose of sleepy time. Right? No, wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Like I said before, melatonin is a hormone and as such you should be very careful introducing it artificially into your body. Personally, I don't think it's worth the potential downsides and I would steer clear. Only play with melatonin after consulting with your doctor. Now, magnesium on the other hand, it's another compound that people commonly use to induce feelings of sleepiness, and it alleviates a lot of the symptoms of anxiety. This is a much better option than melatonin for most people. Now with that said, while magnesium is generally widely accepted as a supplement, just be aware that some people like myself have adverse reactions to magnesium in too large a quantity. So just be careful with it. For myself though, I never really noticed magnesium making much of a difference on the quality of my sleep, so I personally dont bother with it.

The third supplement is what I call multipurpose and these are especially formulated concoctions designed to facilitate relaxation and sleep. And theres a lot of these out there on the market and I have noticed some positive effects with some of them, but just be careful because you don't really know what sort of scientific engineering is actually happening behind the scenes with a lot of these. Often these supplements are filled with low quality ingredients that have dubious support in the scientific literature. Now the company I personally get my supplements from is momentous, which is recommended by doctor Andrew Huberman. I have no affiliation with this company, but I've had good experience with the product, so happy to recommend it. But again, supplements aren't going to make or break your sleep. Focus on the fundamentals weve already discussed.

Now with that said, up to this point weve primed our body for sleep by inducing relaxation and trying to reduce stress. But now we need to relax our mind, and for many of us, this is actually the hardest part. In the quiet hours leading up to sleep, our thoughts often only seem to grow louder and louder. I call these open cognitive loops, which is your brain's way of trying not to forget something and trying to find resolution to something. And you can solve for your open cognitive loops by simply keeping a nighttime journal where you brain dump all the thoughts swirling through your chaotic mind right before you go to bed.

This simple five minute practice is a great way of clearing your mental slate right before bed, so you're not just going around and around in your mind's eye as you lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. All right, now that you have your shutdown protocol that's going to prime your body and your mind for sleep, let's talk about how to sleep. Now, sleep is a really fascinating thing. It's simultaneously a physical and mental process as well as a conscious and subconscious process. And one of the things that makes sleep so frustrating is that you can't actually control it. It's not like blinking your eyes or taking a breath. All we can do is manipulate ourselves and our environment in a way that encourages us to sleep and stay asleep.

So the question is, what are the things in our environment we need to control for? Well, as I see it, there's really three things in particular. They're going to pay the biggest dividends. You have light, sound and. And temperature. Let's kick it off with light once again. Now, we've already touched on the importance of light in our shutdown protocol, but we're not done with it quite yet. One of the most important signals for falling and staying asleep is darkness. And I mean darkness with a capital d. Most of us are sleeping in rooms with a surprising amount of light pollution coming off our phones, the clock, the smoke alarm, and coming through the windows. If you can easily navigate from your bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night without any assistance, your room is probably too bright. First thing you're gonna wanna do is to cover or remove all the ambient sources of light in your room.

But the biggest culprit will most likely be the light coming through your windows. And there's two things you can do to solve for this. First, you can get blackout curtains. These can be a little expensive and a little finicky, but if you get them just right, they work pretty great. But there's one big problem with blackout curtains that I found. Namely that your midnight potty break is going to be a terrifying, toe stubbing experience. The second solution is the one I personally use, a sleeping mask. This is like a personal blackout device, and it is very effective. Bonus points for the fact that I can travel with this, and I can ensure that I always get a really dark night's sleep, even if I'm staying in like a brightly lit motel, which I don't do frequently. But, you know, if I did, it's nice to know that I got my mask.

Alright. Now, the second thing in our environment to control for while sleeping is sound. Our ancestors needed to be light sleepers that woke at anything going bump into the night, because that bump could be a lion. Waking up to sounds is a survival mechanism, but there's probably not an existential threat lurking in the other room when you hear the floorboards creaking. It's not a lion. It's just my cat, Sparta, who wants to be let in the room so he can sleep on my face. I should go without saying, but that doesn't help me sleep well. So he stays in the other room. But he's a noisy little guy and so it's important to drown him out along with all the other sounds that naturally occur in the night. To do this, I play white noise or binaural music on a speaker next to the bed. The source that I use for that is a software called Brain FM. Love it. Been using it for a long time.

I have no affiliation. Again, just a great product. Go check it out. All right. Now, the third thing to control for in the environment is temperature. Now, I don't know about you, but I love crawling into a toasty bed. It feels great, especially in the winter. However, that cozy bed is probably compromising your ability to stay in deep sleep. The reason for this, again, it goes back to our evolutionary history. See, it gets cold when the sun goes down, and it only gets colder through the deep hours of the night before eventually starting to warm up in the early hours leading to sunrise. Our bodies mirror this temperature graph because our bodies take the cue that cold means nighttime, thus sleeping time. And warm means it's time to be awake.

So what do you suppose happens if you're sleeping beneath a heavy pile of blankets in a warm room? That's right. You struggle to really sink into the deep states of sleep where muscular and cellular regeneration occurs. The optimum sleeping temperature is probably somewhere in the sixties. And from what I've found, there's really only two ways to accomplish this. First is to cool the room via ac. But this is not a perfect solution because the truth is, your modern bed is designed to trap heat inside of it. So even if the air temperature is cool, the mattress beneath you and all those blankets, they're heating up and they're going above your ideal threshold. The second solution is to buy a cooling mattress.

These mattresses are things that use, like, cold water or air pressure to keep the temperature at a preset range. Honestly, it's game changing. It's amazing. Now, full disclosure, these things are kind of pricey, but I'm not going to lie. Buying one was the single greatest investment that I've made over the past three years. We went with the topper from eight sleep and just fitted it onto our current mattress, and it's worked wonders. Again, I have no affiliation with this company. I just love the product. So I encourage you to go grab one if getting a great night's sleep is a high priority to you. Okay, so now that we've created an environment conducive to sleep, there's one more thing I want to mention here that I found important for staying asleep and improving the quality of that sleep.

Its breathing. Now, I am a mouth breather, and I have sleep apnea, which simply means I have a really hard time breathing in my sleep. I didnt realize how negatively this was impacting my health, my mental clarity, and the quality of my sleep, until I started tracking my sleep with an oura ring and a whoop band. Looking at that data was pretty damn surprising. It turns out the reason I would often wake up exhausted after a solid eight, 9 hours in bed izejdehe was because I was waking up 20 to 30 times in the middle of the night, and I had no clue because these micro wakeups, they're happening below the level of consciousness. But once I became aware of it, I started experimenting with some solutions, and I found two things in particular that helped drastically reduce the number of times I'd wake up in the middle of the night.

Mouth tape and no strips. The mouth tape makes it so that you have to breathe through your nose, which is the ideal way to breathe. And the nose strips opens up my nasal passages so I don't suffocate trying to get enough air in. Introducing these two tools into my sleep routine has been a game changer. I couldn't recommend them more highly. All right, now let's turn our attention to the last piece of the sleep puzzle, how to wake up. One of the most interesting things I discovered in all my research around sleep is that how you wake up actually plays a very large role in how you ultimately fall asleep again later that night. In particular, the thing that seems to matter most is getting natural sunlight in your eyes first thing upon waking. Now, we've already discussed the importance of light in getting a good night's sleep multiple times.

But here it crops up yet again. See, for millennia, our ancestors woke up with the rising sun. And so that initial burst of light had a regulatory effect on our circadian rhythm. Here's an overly simplified way of thinking about it. That first dose of sun, it sets a timer in your brain that says, in x number of hours, it'll probably be time to start winding down and get ready for bed again. Now, the problem for modern man is that for many of us, we don't really go out into the sunlight first thing upon waking. In fact, it might be a few hours until we finally go outside. So our circadian rhythm, it really never gets the priming dose of sunlight, which sets our internal clock.

And as a result, our bodies are left in this weird sort of limbo. Now, the solution is actually pretty simple. The first thing you should do when you wake up is go and get some sunlight in your eyes for at least 15 minutes. All right? Now, that's a simple solution, but not necessarily easy, especially if you live in a winter state like I do, where the sun really doesn't come up till noon for four months out of the year. For that, I recommend you get a happy lamp or a red light therapy panel. And this has been truly a game changer for me. Personally, I struggle with seasonal affective disorder, which just means I go into depressive cycles in the deep winter months of the year when I'm not getting enough sunlight.

So if that's you, no excuses. Go get a lamp and then just sit in front of it for 20 to 30 minutes first thing in the morning while sipping on your coffee. And boom, just like that, you now have all the tools you need to go and get an incredible night's sleep.

Health, Science, Technology, Energy, Relaxation, Sleep Improvement, Anthony Vicino