How I Ease My Brain to Sleep Faster

How do I relax so I can fall asleep? I'll tell you.

I was an avid video game player growing up. Luckily this was before online gaming, so I would play a game (similar to a short story), beat it and move on. Moving on either meant another game or just going outside to play.

As the online gaming scene progressed, Halo 2 came in. Then World of Warcraft. Then DotA. The DotA 2. That was my history at least.

Right before I quit playing DotA, there were nights when I'd try to go to bed right after a game. Good luck with that. The game is so super stimulating that there's nothing about your brain that's relaxed after the game is done. You're also probably angry if you lost.

I'd do my best to get in bed so that I'm in bed for around 7-8 hours, but I later learned that just time in bed doesn't mean time sleeping. We need more than we realize.

We see a ton of videos on sleep hacks.

"No food before bed." Solid advice.

"Take a warm shower." Good one.

"Meditate. Dark room. White noise." Also good.

But there's a problem, and it's connected to the hardest piece of advice in this list.

"Avoid blue light before bed."

Ironically, all of this input of information on "how to improve your sleep" is usually on a device (unless you have a physical book about sleeping).

I guarantee sleep quality has gone down since TV, internet and now smartphones have entered our lives.

We need a way to reduce the noise on the outside world.

The goal is to have a calm mind that's ready to sleep.

All we have to do is pretend it's 100 years ago.

The Culprit: Electricity

I have been in chats/Discord channels where people will jokingly say something to the effect of..

"I can't fall asleep guys lol."

"Here comes my insomnia again lol."

Let's do some thinking here.

People are complaining that they can't sleep…while using a device that prevents them from sleeping. It should be obvious, but I guess not.

Let's go back in time for a second. Let's pretend you live on a farm with your family. Your closest neighbors are about a 20 minute walk away. There's no internet and your only light source is candles. Once it starts getting dark, what is there left to do? Nothing. You can't even see anything. Your brain is getting hit with that all that darkness, getting you nice and sleepy for night night time. Then you went to bed at sun down and woke up with the sun.

Today? It's the opposite.

As great as technology is, it's making our sleep worse. Let's dissect each technological advancement at a time in the order they came in.

Artificial Light

• The sun used to be our only source of light. Then came fire and candles. Enter the light bulb and we can push the night further back. We can see and work on more stuff. Work is great, but we need rest too. Thanks Edison.

TV

• Since humans crave novelty and have negativity bias, 24/7 TV is giving us all the dopamine we could ask for. The news is the worst. It's sad that bad things happen around the world, but do you need to be notified every night as soon as it happens? No. Doesn't that mess up your brain? Yes.

Internet

• Oh boy it's ramping up. We now have access to (too much) information at the end of our fingertips. We can read article after article, watch video after video and never run out of content. Yay!

Smart Phones

• What's better than internet on a computer? Internet in your hands! No longer do you have to sit at those pesky desks. You can bring your phone and internet everywhere you want to be. You can check your social circle every hour, every minute, keeping up with friends 24/7 that you haven't talked to since high school. (While ignoring your family at dinner. Shame on you.)

Again, as great as technology is, our brains are still relatively primitive. If the internet has only been around for about 30 years, do we not see that our much older brains aren't adapted to get so much information at once?

Look at animals in nature. When it gets dark, they have nothing else to do. They sleep like champions. They also move around all day in the sun so that helps their sleep at night.

What about kids? If they don't have smartphones yet (goodness, please not yet), their days are full of activity, then they have a bedtime routine: dinner, bath, reading, and sleep like a rock. Sounds like a good routine for adults too.

Getting Bored = Getting Sleepy

When I quit DotA, I was bored. My only rule was "quit DotA 2." However my dopamine was so fried that the other games I allowed myself to play or shows I allowed myself to watch weren't as exciting, so I ended up playing or watching nothing. What happened then? I started getting sleepy earlier in the night. I suppose my brain was catching up on all the sleep debt.

Recently I've been cutting off social media at 8pm. This has been hard, because we always want to check "one more thing!" But trust me, the world won't collapse if you don't check your phone for another 2 hours before bed. And "one more check" can lead to one more hour.

What happens when you have nothing to stimulate your brain at night?

You get bored and…you get sleepy.

This is how it's meant to be.

This is the path to good sleep.

The Blue Light Traps

We have to shut the world out.

Every activity that adults deem "fun" at home usually have to do with some form of blue light nonsense. Blue light is supposed to mean "the sun is out, time to be active" not some artificial stuff keeping your from hitting the hay at a decent hour.

Let's learn how to reduce the culprits.

TV/Video Games

• I'm going to quickly touch on TV and video games because I don't think those are as bad as dealing with the smart phone. You shouldn't have a TV in your bedroom anyway, and we all know at some point we should turn those off when it's time for bed. So since you know that, turn them off when it's time for bed!

Phone or No Phone?

• The smartphone is another animal. It can come with us anywhere. Where else to people bring it? To their beds. That shouldn't be allowed. To be more specific, I'm going to deal with social media or any other form of content that has endless content (YouTube shorts and Reddit as examples).

• Before we begin, not all phone usage is evil just as not all blue light is evil. You can turn the brightness down on your phone (same with a Kindle) and use it to read. Long form YouTube videos that you can listen to or audiobooks are good well. That's about the only scenario where you can use your phone. Long form anything forces your brain to concentrate for long periods of time. It's a lot less stimulating than regular social media. Speaking of that…

• Avoid regular social media. Avoid short form stuff. Short form stuff or recommended pages (like on Instagram) are the opposite of what your brain should be doing at night. Things around you should be slowing down so your thoughts can wind down. The Instagram page can have 20+ pieces of unrelated content, including a couple of videos playing.

• Don't check your email at night, even if it's for work. Protect your brain so you can protect your sleep because it's the same as protecting your health and your life.

Dopamine Intermittent Fasting: The Real "Lights Out"

There's a fancy term out there on the internet amongst the self-improvement and productivity people: Dopamine Detoxing. Without getting too technical, dopamine is the excitement chemical in your brain. People will say "you can't remove it completely!" OK fair enough. So let's call it "don't do activities that give you more of a hit of dopamine than would naturally occur in nature." Doesn't really roll off the tongue as well, but it's the same thing.

As a small example, a cake is more stimulating than a steak, but the steak is more fulfilling. The lesson here is that if you want the real stuff in life, the stuff that makes you progress (aka hard work, reading, etc) to feel good, you need to reduce the cheap stuff so your brain can acclimate to the "boring" things.

So people will go on days of no social media, try to delete the app completely, or not use it on specific days like Sundays. Another path I've thought of is doing dopamine "intermittent fasting." Fasting, like with food, means not consuming something. Intermittent means just for a little bit of time. The food intermittent fasters will not eat for the first few hours of the day or have a small window of time when they're allowed to eat versus when they don't eat. Something like not eating for 16 hours and only eating within 8 hours.

That sounds like a nice way to schedule our social media time.

If we need to stop eating at a decent hour in the night so that our bodies have enough time to digest the food and relax before bed, then wouldn't it help our minds to stop "consuming" so much at night so that they too can relax before bed?

The answer is yes.

I'm a huge fan of waking up early and working out. For you it could be anything productive. The time is quiet and sacred. It might be the only "you" time you get. Your brain is nice and sharp from a night of sleep.

What should you not do?

Interrupt that time with scrolling first thing in the morning.

We can do the same thing at night, bringing our screen time down.

Wake up and be productive in the morning, ignoring your phone

Wind down, get ready for bed and do other boring stuff, ignoring your phone.

A good rule of thumb is to stop using social media 1 hour before bed.

For some people this is going to feel like an eternity.

It's going to feel like you've been grounded for a week.

But your great-grandfather didn't have social media and he was alright.

You'll live.

I'm bored. Now what?

I thought you'd never ask.

I feel like people have forgotten what it's like to not have a smartphone. To not have a little "boredom box" that they pick up any time there's quiet time in the air. (There's a way to track how many times you pick up your phone. If you check it, it'll be a wake up call.)

This isn't extreme. This is the baseline for humans. We need to learn how to get back to this baseline. We need to figure out what activities we can do without being mentally stimulated every 10 seconds.

Since I don't want to leave you in a void, I'll give you some options.

Get ready for bed

• Do I need to say this? I guess so. Take a shower. Brush your teeth. Tidy your room or house a bit so it's not a mess for the morning. Do all the night routine stuff you know you should be doing. Do this early enough instead of pushing it further into the night and thinking "oh man I still need to take a shower."

Read

• I like reading non-fiction, but literally anything is better than scrolling. If you don't know what to read, read something related to your goals. Learn and plan. Read a fiction series you've always wanted to get into that's collecting dust in your house. Go walk around in a bookstore until you see something that catches your eye.

• This is by far the best way to slow your brain down because it's the opposite of social media. You have to concentrate on one subject, with words, for a long period of time. You have to use your imagination to turn the words on the page into images in your head. It's good for you.

Plan tomorrow today

• You have goals right? If anything, think about things bothering you or what you have to do tomorrow. Jot them down. It'll ease your mind a lot. As you write this down, you're doing a mini visualization about the following day. When you wake up, your brain is ready to work and maybe even has some ideas on how to execute things better. It's a lot better to your future self than scrambling around the house in the morning like a maniac.

Think about life

• I'm serious. Modern people don't spend enough time just thinking. Just being. People will argue that "thinking isn't doing," but your subconscious mind is still in there and it's powerful. This is why you get ideas as you're waking up in the morning or get "shower thoughts." The only way to activate it is to give your brain space to breathe. Stop the inputs and just be. Meditate, pray, think, stretch. If you come up with an idea, write it down and try it out tomorrow.

Just go to bed. Boring works.

Of all the health things people try, whether it's eating better, getting stronger or working on cardio, poor little sleep is the one thing that people throw by the wayside. We joke about how tired we are. We see working and not sleeping as a badge of honor.

Your body doesn't think that.

Little kids sleep like rocks.

"They're just kids!" you may argue, but why do they sleep so well? They play outside. They learn new things. They don't sit still.

Most importantly: they have a night routine.

What if you treated a child like you do yourself when it comes to sleeping? Would you let them watch TV right up until 9pm when they should be sleeping? Would you sometimes give them a bath? Would you give them cookies while they watch TV? I hope not.

Then why are you doing that to yourself?

They need all that sleeping recovery time because they're engaging in life.

Maximum engagement makes you so tired that you have to have deep sleep. There's a lesson in there about being more productive during your day, but as far as the night is concerned, productivity requires rest. Lots of rest.

I don't know what you want out of life, but if the answer is "more," know that you are best positioned to attack the next day if you get well tonight.

Just go to bed.

Thanks for reading!

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