Resetting Your Sleep Schedule for Better Health
Jan 21, 2024
Introduction
Getting a good night’s sleep is essential for both physical and mental health. But many of us struggle with falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up feeling refreshed. We all have an internal biological clock that regulates cycles of sleepiness and wakefulness within 24 hours. When our lifestyles - like irregular work schedules or frequently changing bedtimes - get out of sync with these natural circadian rhythms, our sleep suffers.
Resetting your sleep schedule refers to the process of getting your sleep-wake cycles back in line with your body’s natural preferences. In this blog post, we explore the benefits of an aligned sleep schedule and provide science-backed techniques for how to achieve it. We’ll share expert advice on good “sleep hygiene” like making both behavioral and environmental improvements. Things like establishing a soothing pre-bedtime routine, limiting exposure to blue light from screens, and optimizing temperature, sound, and lighting in your sleep space.
We’ll also tackle solutions for those suffering from insomnia and other sleep disturbances that prevent you from both falling and staying asleep at night. The goal will be to improve what experts call “sleep efficiency” - spending more time asleep when you are in bed trying to sleep. Getting on an aligned sleep schedule can have profound impacts on decreasing fatigue, improving work performance, supporting immune function, and even aiding weight management by balancing hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism.
Resetting your sleep schedule takes effort and commitment, but the long-term dividends for your physical and mental health make it worth it. This article will break down simple, step-by-step plans for assessing your current sleep health and slowly shifting your behaviors to achieve better sleep consistency and quality night after night. Sweet dreams ahead!
Assessing Your Current Sleep Health
Before beginning a sleep reset, track your current sleep patterns closely for a full week to establish a baseline. The key data points sleep experts recommend logging include:
- What time do you typically turn off lights to go to sleep each night? What time do you fall asleep?
- How long does it take you to fall asleep? More than 30 minutes suggests insomnia issues.
- How many times do you wake up and for how long during the night? Frequent or long awakenings impair sleep quality.
- What time do you naturally wake up without an alarm clock? Needing alarms regularly implies a mismatch with natural rhythm.
- How many total hours are you in bed trying to sleep versus the actual estimated sleep time? This calculates your sleep efficiency percentage.
- How restful or refreshing do you feel each morning and day after waking up? Low energy hints sleep didn’t adequately recharge you.
- What main disruptions interfere with your sleep? Noise, light, pets, stress, discomfort, electronics use?
Compile this baseline data to quantitatively identify your biggest sleep problem areas and priorities you want to solve. These might include difficulty initially falling asleep at bedtime, frequent awakenings preventing staying asleep, low sleep efficiency percentage, feeling unrested suggesting poor sleep quality, daytime fatigue indicating not enough sleep quantity, or needing to sleep later than ideal.
Defining these specific issues both in terms of timing and root causes will guide your customized sleep reset plan. For example, someone who takes 2+ hours to fall asleep with back pain keeping them awake would focus on pain relief and relaxation techniques before bed rather than sleep environment changes to solve loud neighbors that bother someone else.
You might discover you don’t allocate enough time for your biologically ideal sleep needs. Adults require 7-9 hours per night for optimal physical and mental health according to sleep scientists. If you frequently get less, extending your overall sleep opportunity by going to bed earlier is key, not just improving efficiency.
Analyzing these baseline sleep performance metrics pinpoints both simple tweaks like limiting pre-bed electronics use or major fixes like progressive schedule changes to realign with your natural circadian rhythm. Continuing to log data during your reset will help verify what adjustments are working or if further optimization is needed.
Optimizing Your Sleep Environment
How you outfit your sleep environment can have a profound impact on sleep quality. Things like temperature, sound, light, and bedding comfort should enable falling asleep quickly and sleeping soundly through the night.
Keep bedroom temperatures around 65° Fahrenheit. Body temperature naturally declines at night to initiate sleep. Room temperatures outside the 60-67° range can prevent this heat loss, making falling and staying asleep much harder. Even small differences matter.
Limit noisy disruptions with sound machines producing white noise or nature sounds, blackout curtains, choosing a quiet room away from televisions and heavy street traffic, and carpeted floors. Ear plugs are another option. Like Goldilocks, the sleep environment should be not too loud and not too quiet, but just right.
Prioritize complete darkness for maximum melatonin release to facilitate sleep. Install blackout window coverings and place tape over device chargers and other unwanted light sources. At night keep overhead lights off and use a dim, red 25-watt bulb or bedside lamp instead since red spectrum light doesn't suppress melatonin like blue light. The mantra is to keep it boring, keep it dark.
Comfortable, supportive mattresses and clean bed linens make staying in bed appealing all night rather than getting up. Replace mattresses older than 7 years. Allergy-proof bedding keeps irritants at bay for uninterrupted breathing.
Creating an environment with these science-optimized conditions essentially trains your brain that the bedroom is reserved strictly for sleeping and intimacy rather than wakeful work, watching television, or scrolling on your phone in bed. Over time this strong place-function association aids in falling back asleep quicker if you do happen to briefly wake up at night without getting frustrated about inability to sleep.
Fine-tuning your sleep space serves as the physical foundation upon which all other sleep hygiene efforts can build - things like implementing a relaxing pre-bed routine, restricting food and liquid intake too close to bedtime, following progressive sleep scheduling adjustments, and limiting stimulating blue light exposure. Do the bedroom setup piece right and the rest get much easier.
Shifting Your Sleep Schedule Gradually
Sleep experts universally recommend incremental, gradual shifts when aiming to reset your sleep schedule rather than attempting to change your sleep and wake times suddenly all at once overnight. This gradual approach aligns better with how our internal circadian master clock functions.
The body prefers to transition slowly into new sleep-wake cycles, adjusting its intricate cascade of hormones, physiological processes, and energy regulation to align with the later or earlier schedule over many days. An abrupt overnight switch disrupts these nested systems before they can synchronize to the new times, resulting in a low sleep drive at the earlier bedtime. You simply aren’t tired, making falling asleep very difficult even when going to bed much earlier than desired.
So employ incremental “chronotherapy” adjustments, moving your target bedtime 15 to 30 minutes earlier every 3 days and your wake time the same interval later. This steady, incremental progress better allows your body clock to reset in pace with the new schedule window as you build consistent earlier sleep and wake cues.
You may not feel significantly sleepier with each incremental step, but avoiding trying to force a premature big change prevents feeling painfully unfatigued at an unsustainably early bedtime. Eventually, those small, regular shifts add up to the 1-3 hour total realignment to achieve your sleep goals.
Within a few weeks of this steady drift earlier, your hormone levels, digestive cycles, body temperature drops, and drowsiness will start occurring coordinated with the new earlier bed and rise times. The key is consistency - sticking to the new intermediate bedtimes regularly rather than later on weekends for example. Follow this steady pace and your body systems will reset their programming together with the shifted schedule.
Combining chronotherapy time changes with proper sleep hygiene habits cements and accelerates adaptation to the new sleep times. Things like avoiding caffeine late in the day, establishing a consistent relaxing pre-bed routine, exercising earlier, and limiting light and electronics exposure build strong sleep drive predictably at the new earlier bedtime. Incorporate these other sleep optimization strategies as you progress your schedule 15 minutes earlier to hit your sleep reset goals faster.
Limiting Light and Screens Before Bed
Blue light exposure from phones, TVs, laptops, and other electronics delays the release of the sleep hormone melatonin and makes falling asleep very difficult. Blue light wavelengths at night fool your brain into thinking it's still daytime, suppressing melatonin for up to 3 hours longer. This keeps you feeling awake and alert when you want to unwind for bed.
Dim home lighting starting 1-2 hours before target bedtime to encourage melatonin release on schedule. Turn off bright overhead lights and install warm 2700K bulbs or amber/red night lights. Use lamps with smart bulbs on the lowest brightness and most orange hue. The darker and more boring, the better.
Block blue light from reaching your eyes if using screens at night. At a minimum, you can enable Night Shift mode on Apple devices or Blue Light Filter settings on Android. But you might also consider wearing protective blue light-blocking glasses prescribed for computer use 1-2 hours before bed. These orange-tinted lenses filter 50-90% of sleep-disrupting blue-violet emission from displays. If wearing normal glasses, consider blue-blocking lens replacements.
Install blackout curtains and put black tape over any unwanted light sources like phone chargers. Even tiny blinking lights can inhibit melatonin and keep you stimulated. The master switch should eliminate all possible light interference.
At night after dinner, strictly limit the use of phones, tablets, computers, television, and other light-emitting devices as much as possible. Light of any kind sends alerting signals to the brain making it hard to wind down, but blue wavelengths especially impair sleep. Read an actual paper book or listen to relaxing audio instead.
Creating an ultra-dark, ultra-boring pre-sleep environment trains your brain that when the lights dim, melatonin surges on schedule and it’s time to get drowsy. Be militant after sundown about allowing zero bright lights if you want your hormone cycle properly aligned for consistent sleep. Follow this nightly routine to optimize the probability of quickly falling and staying asleep.
Conclusion
Resetting your sleep schedule takes diligence, but pays long-lasting dividends for both physical and mental wellbeing. Follow core healthy sleep hygiene habits like limiting light and electronics before bed, establishing a relaxing pre-sleep routine, setting an earlier, consistent wake time, and making your sleep environment boring, cool, quiet, and ultra-dark. Then use chronotherapy techniques to gradually shift bed and rise times earlier in 15-30 minute increments every few days until reaching your sleep goals.
Stick to the new intermediate schedule seven days a week instead of reverting later on weekends which confuses your body clock. Logging your sleep data hours, efficiency, and quality throughout the process verifies which adjustments work best for your body. Be consistent in transforming your spaces, mindsets, and schedules - not overnight, but in incremental steps over weeks. Soon falling asleep and waking up refreshed precisely when you intend becomes an automatic habit leading to better performance, mood, focus, and vitality all day.
Action Steps
- Log current sleep patterns for a week to ID your top issues
- Upgrade bedroom into an ultra-dark, quiet sleep sanctuary
- Dim lights across your home and ban electronics 2 hrs before bed nightly
- Begin gradually shifting bed and rise times 15 mins earlier every 3 days
- Stick tightly to new intermediate sleep times (no weekend shifts)
- Establish a relaxing 20-min pre-sleep routine each night
- Continue logging sleep hours, efficiency, and restfulness
- Notice positive impacts on energy, focus, and well-being over time
- Reach target sleep schedule in under 3 weeks through consistency
- Wake up recharged at your new optimal wake-up time!
Further Reading
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
- Irish, L. A., Kline, C. E., Gunn, H. E., Buysse, D. J., & Hall, M. H. (2015). The role of sleep hygiene in promoting public health: A review of empirical evidence. Sleep medicine reviews, 22, 23-36. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079214000752
- Burke, T. M., Scheer, F. A., Ronda, J. M., Czeisler, C. A., & Wright, K. P. (2015). Sleep inertia, sleep homeostatic and circadian influences on higher-order cognitive functions. Journal of sleep research, 24(4), 364-371. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12291
- Baron, K. G., Reid, K. J., Kern, A. S., & Zee, P. C. (2011). Role of sleep timing in caloric intake and BMI. Obesity, 19(7), 1374-1381. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2011.100
- AlGhanim, N., Comondore, V. R., Fleetham, J., Marra, C. A., & Ayas, N. T. (2008). The economic impact of obstructive sleep apnea. Lung, 186(1), 7-12. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00408-007-9055-0
- Leger, D., Bayon, V., Elbaz, M., Philip, P., & Choudat, D. (2011). Underexposure to light at work and its association to insomnia and sleepiness: A cross-sectional study of 13,296 workers of one transportation company. Journal of psychosomatic research, 70(1), 29-36. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399910001050
Medical Sites:
- Mayo Clinic - Changing Your Sleep Habits https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/sleep/art-20048379
- Cleveland Clinic - How to Reset Your Sleep Schedule https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-to-reset-your-sleep-schedule-overnight/
- Johns Hopkins Medicine - Tips on Reseting Your Sleep Schedule https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/tips-on-resetting-your-sleep-schedule
- WebMD - Reset Your Sleep Cycle in 7 Days https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/reset-sleep-cycle
- Medline Plus - Getting Enough Sleep https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000871.htm
