Ever since I’ve been working from home, and gotten my Whoop, I’ve been trying to get better sleep. If you’ve never used a tool like Whoop, or the Oura ring, they are tools used to help you get proper rest and provides feedback on your recovery progress. The better quality your sleep, the better your recovery score. When all you do is live your life, good recovery scores are easy to come by. But when you workout. You have a life that competes against your need for sleep. It becomes a challenge. So having the extra two hours a day from working at home certainly helps a lot.

Sleep is comprised of three components: REM sleep, deep sleep and light sleep. Light sleep is effectively just sleeping when not in the other two sleeping modes. The goal is to get as much of the first two as possible. Assuming your sleep as optimum, the body will go into as much REM and deep sleep as needed.

As it happens, the body loves predictability. It depends on it in order to control hormone cycles from cortisol upon waking to growth hormones during sleep. But it takes time for the body to learn a routine and adapt to it. So in the last five months, as I’ve been working to keep a consistent bed time, my REM and deep sleep have steadily improved. It’s not always consistent as life isn’t consistent. Sometimes I workout late, sometimes I eat late; all of it affects my sleep quality.

Currently, I wake up in the morning without an alarm. And I consistently feel great when I do get enough sleep. I have cats that I’ve locked out of the bedroom, but their meows gently wake me up between sleep cycles. When I used to wake up to an alarm, I often felt like crap. I always wondered what it felt like to not be struggling in the morning.

At this point I’m trying to extend my sleep. I can usually sleep longer in the mornings, if I can out-sleep the cats. Going to bed earlier is a challenge. But lately, most probably because the gyms have reopened, my body seems to be open to going to bed earlier. Of course, I have to convince my brain.

I have experimented with a few things to try to improve my sleep quality. From using CBD, eating a banana before bedtime, wearing a blackout mask and ear plugs. Some work. Some work intermittently. And some not at all. But one thing is certainly clear, going to bed at an appropriate time does work.