I was advising a client based in Brooklyn on how to be a more effective, productive sleeper. Critical but straightforward things like:
- Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day, including weekends and vacations.
- Never watch television, read, or use your phone while in bed.
- Sleep with white noise or a white noise substitute.
These and other strategies will help most people fall asleep faster, sleep through the night more often, achieve a deeper, more restorative sleep, and awaken most mornings without the alarm clock, which is by far the best way to start the day for many reasons.
When you apply the strategies required to sleep better with relentless fidelity, you can often spend less time sleeping, which means more time to do the things you love.
Not true for everyone, of course, but for many, many people.
Most people’s sleep routines are atrocious.
“What about blackout curtains?” he asked. “Don’t you use blackout curtains to block out the sun?”
“I wake up between 4:00 and 4:30 every morning,” I told him.
“Yeah?” he said. “So what?”
I laughed. “The earliest the sun ever rises is after 5:00 AM. The sky might be a little lighter at 4:30 AM, but the sun isn’t even on the horizon yet.”
“Really?” he said. “I thought the sun rose around 4:00 in the morning every day.”
“Even in the winter?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The sun’s always up when I wake up, so I don’t know when it rises.”
It turns out he can’t ever remember being awake before 8:00 AM, so for all of his life, he has assumed that the sun was up around 4:00 in the morning, which is weird.
Or perhaps I’m completely normal. Maybe I’m suffering from the Curse of Knowledge — the cognitive bias in which individuals overestimate how much others understand something they know, often because they forget what it’s like not to know that information.
There are days—many of them—when I’ve set out breakfast for the kids, written a blog post, responded to emails, completed Wordle, done my pushups and situps, eaten breakfast, and played a round of golf before this guy has ever been awake.
It doesn’t mean my client needs to wake up before the crack of dawn to be successful, and waking up so early certainly doesn’t make me better than him, but it does make me feel better than him, and that’s something.
It’s also why I don’t need blackout curtains, but he probably does.
