Finish yesterday in the right way — Tip #2
Sleep cycles are one of the most underrated hacks you can leverage 💤
Welcome to all the new folks who have joined recently! The fam is growing strong, thanks everyone for the word of mouth 🫶.
As one reader pointed out, a successful day starts the night before. There is so much to be discussed about sleep and how to optimize it, but I promised these newsletters would be short and contain only one tip at a time.
I decided to pick something that is not intuitive but really changed the quality of my mornings: sleep cycles.
As your consciousness leaves the steering wheel, after what’s called sleep latency, your brain goes through four stages:
Non-REM Stage 1 (N1): Light sleep, transition between wakefulness and sleep.
Non-REM Stage 2 (N2): Deeper light sleep, body temperature drops, heart rate slows.
Non-REM Stage 3 (N3): Deep sleep, also called slow-wave sleep, important for physical restoration.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep: Brain activity increases, dreaming occurs, important for memory and learning.
These four stages form one sleep cycle. Each cycle lasts between 90 - 120 min.
Have you ever woken up feeling groggy for no clear reason? It’s likely you woke up before your sleep cycle completed. To draw an analogy: it’s like starting to clean your house, finishing one room, then interrupting halfway through the hallway, leaving dust and clutter behind. Would you do that? Probably better not to clean the hallway at all!
To get quality sleep, you need between 4 - 6 sleep cycles (which is where the recommendation of 7 - 9 hours of sleep comes from).
Personally, I was skeptical at first, but life forced me to give it a shot. I usually go to bed at 11PM (with about 15 min of sleep latency) and wake up at 6:15AM giving me 7 hours of sleep about 4.6 cycles. I never thought this was a problem because I was feeling “okay” when I woke up.
Then, due to my personal trainer’s change of schedule, I had to wake up at 5:15 AM which gave me 4 cycles. I was mind-blown. It took some adjustment to my routine but I was waking up feeling fresh and energetic compared to usual. Even my gym sessions improved. To test the theory, I tried waking up at 6:45AM which gave me 5 complete sleep cycles: same result, I felt great!
One important caveat: everyone is different. For me the 90-min sleep cycle works well but for you it might be closer to 120-min. Experiment to figure what works best for you, don’t just copy and paste.
Your weekly tip: instead of counting sleep by hours try calculating your wake-up time based on sleep cycles. Aim to 4 - 6 sleep cycles and make sure you finish them!
Don’t forget to send this tip to a friend or someone that you care about 🫰
See you next week, until then…
Don’t Panic 😱
What a great read!