Five Easy Steps To Better Sleep

Is sleeping better really within your control?

Pictured: A fantastic snooze. Photo by Sabri Tuzcu on Unsplash

Everyone agrees that sleep is important for health. We’ve known for some time that the best health and longevity are associated with enough - but not too much - sleep. From high blood pressure to diabetes, pretty much any chronic disease is less likely if you’re getting the right amount of sleep each night. There’s no question that the healthiest people in the world are those getting 7-9 hours of proper rest each night, with 8 hours generally being the sweet spot for most adults.

You hear it from every corner: sleep better to feel better. There are entire books written about why you should be optimizing your sleep. It’s not just a useful way to avoid feeling tired during your workday, it’s vital for your continued existence on this world. Every health and wellbeing podcast has, at one point or another, recommended sleep as a way to improve your life.

The problem is that getting more sleep is really hard. Most of this health advice is sold to you on the basis that your sleep is entirely under your individual control, but the data suggests that the situation is much more complicated than that. So here are my top 5 tips for how to improve your sleep.

Tip 1: Don’t Have Children

Starting off nice and easy, we have the issue of kids. It turns out that children are terrible for your sleep. One study from 2012 estimated that each additional tiny person in your life reduced your sleep by 9-15 minutes per night, with younger kids having a much bigger impact. A 2022 study on caregivers in the US showed that people taking care of kids consistently had shorter sleep than people with no caregiving responsibilities. Another study from 2013 by the CDC showed a huge drop in sleep duration for single parents, while dual-parent households had a similar duration of sleep to adults living alone but felt far less rested when waking regardless.

Pictured: The Sleep Killer. Photo by Zoe Graham on Unsplash

As any parent will tell you, having kids interrupts your sleep. That’s just how it goes, whether it’s your 12 month old who has decided to babble loudly to her stuffed rabbit at 2am, the 8 year old who bursts into your room at 4am to ask if it’s nearly time to go to the airport, or your teenager who comes home smelling dubious at an ungodly hour of the morning and has to ring the doorbell because they forgot their keys.

If you want to optimize your sleep, you should really try not having any kids. While this may be difficult for parents, never fear - good sleep is around 18 years away (or more, depending on the local housing situation and how much you love your spawn).

Tip 2: Be Rich (Ideally Born Rich)

Tip two is if anything even simpler than the first one - be wealthy. There are a large number of studies showing that wealth is associated with having better sleep. This is entirely unsurprising, because having money protects you from many health harms. Sleep is just one of the many things that being more well-off can help with.

It’s also important to not just be rich, but to be born into some wealth. Data shows that children from families living in high-income neighborhoods tend to have much better sleep than kids in low-income areas. Ideally, you should arrange to be born into a family that’s at least upper-middle class, if not outright rich, to optimize sleep throughout your lifetime. This is the best road to perfect health.

Pictured: Good for sleep. Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

Tip 3: Don’t Be A Minority

In a similar vein, it turns out that being part of the majority ethnic group in a country is good for your sleep. In the US, white people generally get the best sleep, although in some studies Hispanic people also have relatively good sleeping patterns. You definitely don’t want to be part of a disadvantaged group, which is almost always associated with having worse sleep.

Of course, it may be hard to change your race and/or ethnicity, but perhaps with a time machine and/or Rick and Mortyesque portal gun you could find some way of doing so. Optimal sleep is worth the effort!

Tip 4: Don’t Get Sick

The thing about sleep and health is that it’s something of a bidirectional association. While improving sleep might help you on your way to good health, it’s definitely true that being unwell will make your sleep worse.

Pictured: Harder to do if you’ve got a strong genetic predisposition to cancer. Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

For example, this 2017 longitudinal study looking at 20 years of patient data found that people who reported poor health at baseline were more likely to have disturbed sleep patterns and were particularly likely to lose hours over the course of the study. A 2021 paper showed that people with asthma were likely to have worse sleep, and that almost everyone with uncontrolled asthma - i.e. asthma that wasn’t improved with medications - had sleep issues. Many forms of heart disease are well-known to cause sleep problems.

My recommendation to avoid this is just to never get sick. Again, this may be difficult to follow - I for one already have a chronic condition that impacts sleep - but if you want to optimize your life it’s clearly something that you need to do.

Tip 5: Don’t Worry

The final tip is arguably the most important - ideal sleep needs ideal mental health. Worries and anxiety are the most common reason for bad sleep that people report in surveys on the topic. General mental health issues are a known cause of sleep disturbances, with one Japanese study showing a substantial increase in poor sleep for people reporting poor mental health. Another Canadian study found that people with ADHD and mood disorders were much more likely to develop sleep issues in their life than those without these problems.

If you want to sleep the whole night through, there is abundant data showing that the best way to do so is to simply not suffer from anxiety or any other mental health issues. This also ties into many of the other tips - it’s much easier to get a good night’s sleep if you aren’t having anxiety-induced insomnia because you’ve just paid rent and have -$5 in your account.

Sleeping Better Is Complex

Obviously, this piece is a bit glib. These are all things that you basically can’t change. There are some actions you can take to reduce anxiety, there are some things that make sleep-damaging diseases less likely, but overall these “tips” are more about things that you can’t control.

But that’s precisely the point. Many of the biggest impacts on sleep - kids, income, mental health - are issues that are beyond your ability to change. Most people with children will eventually sleep better, but you have to wait for them to grow up first. Mental health often waxes and wanes, but there’s no question that having a diagnosed disorder will negatively impact your sleep on occasion if not all the time.

I think these are things to remember whenever you see a recommendation to improve your sleep. Yes, improving your sleep may improve your health, but many of the biggest factors in how well you’re sleeping are things that you have little to no control over. Aside from basic sleep hygiene recommendations - which can mostly be summed up as “no lights on when you’re trying to sleep, use your bed for sleep and sex and nothing else” - and the general health hacks of not smoking cigarettes and reducing alcohol intake, there’s not that much you can do that will target sleep specifically.

Good sleep is important. But it’s also important to be realistic about what you can control. If you see something arguing that good sleep is vital for good health, remember that it’s not nearly as simple a calculation as that.