Now it’s time to kick my sleep hacking up a notch. As I’ve shown, my current sleep quality is very low – averaging just 4-6 hours of turbulent sleep each night.
So today on May 1st, 2023, I’m starting Dave Asprey’s 14-Day Sleep Challenge.
Dave is one of my health superheroes. I’ve followed him for many years by listening to his podcasts, reading his books and doing my best to incorporate biohacks I’ve learned from him that have been possible for me to incorporate into my life.
Truth is, Dave is one of the original and most sophisticated sleep hackers of our era?? and this very website and my journey of starting sleephacker.net would probably never have happened without him.
If you really want to improve your sleep, I believe Dave’s 14-Day Sleep Challenge is a great place to start.
What I’ll be doing over the next 14 days as I ?go through this challenge is to report on what I learn and apply along the way and share the results I am getting with my own sleep.
While I ?have never officially gone through this 14-day challenge, because I ?have been following Dave for a number of years I am familiar with many of the strategies and tools that he incorporates into his teaching.
I’ve signed up and once inside Dave provides a welcome video that introduces you to the journey ahead and the members area is nicely organized so that you can start going through the video training right away. I will go through one video per day and make my best effort to incorporate what makes sense and is doable for me at this time.
In the welcome and Day 1 videos, Dave introduces and recommends the following resources to start improving your sleep:
Sleep Space – He recommends installing the Sleep Space app and using the progressive wake up alarm.
TrueDark Glasses – I own a pair of these already so I’ll be using them during my sleep challenge period.
He also offers a private Facebook group for the 14-Day Sleep Challenge which I’ve joined.
In Day 1, Dave encourages you to start a gratitude practice by finding 3 things you are thankful for and to share them, write them down or to think about them and ultimately just to have the awareness of what you are grateful for before going to bed.
He also wants you to know that even though there is a shopping list of possible tools you can use to improve your sleep, these things are not required to start getting better sleep.
Above all, he recommends being excited about getting a good night’s sleep, to make your bedroom as dark as possible and to be active sharing your daily results with the Facebook community.
Here are the things that I’m planning to incorporate tonight and I ?will share my results in the journal here tomorrow:
I’ll put on my TrueDark glasses at 9pm. I usually like to work online until 9 or 10 in the evening, but I’m going to shut it down at 9pm and spend the rest of my evening in my home wearing my TrueDark glasses. I don’t like to work with them on the computer as I find it difficult to see clearly. I ?do however use Iris on my computer so that helps me regulate my evening blue light exposure.
I’m going to drink a glass of psyllium fiber around 8:30, and then at 9:30 take my current sleep stack supplements which include CALM magnesium, magnesium threonate, apigenin, tryptophan and a teaspoon of Manuka honey. I ?change it up a bit each night as it is as I certainly don’t have a go-to that I ?can count on for amazing sleep yet.
I’ll post an update on how things go for me tomorrow.
