Why Attitude (and Earplugs) Changed My Sleep Forever
One of the pillars of physical health in my Fit over 40 project is sleep. Sleep has always been a problem for me. From a young age, I have had trouble sleeping. I remember being awake long past my bedtime when I was only 10 years old. As I grew older, I had times my sleep was ok, but most of my life, it’s been a problem. Not being able to fall asleep, waking up from every sound, waking up early and not being able to fall asleep again.
Sleeping well is very important for your health. Sleep restores and heals your body. It’s also needed for your memory, and hormonal balance. When you have long-time trouble with sleep, it makes you prone to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, shortens your lifespan, and puts you at risk for nasty things like Alzheimer’s. And I don’t want that! I want to live a healthy life, so sleep must become a priority. This is just one part of my broader Fit Over 40 exploration. Sleep is foundational to physical health, and I’m excited to see how these changes impact my overall well-being.
What I tried
Of course I have tried all kinds of things before:
Having a strict bedtime and wake-up time everyday, even on the weekends (still do,
Not using my phone before bed. Even stretched that to no screens 3 hours before bedtime
No coffee in the afternoon
No coffee at all (which is undoable!)
Not working out in the evening
Having a stroll before bedtime
Taking a shower before bedtime
Dimming the lights before bedtime (sometimes a challenge in summer)
Trying a sleepmask (I don’t know, they seem to disappear during the night)
All with suboptimal results. I still had periods with bad sleep. Waking up tired every day left me frustrated and wondering if I’d ever feel rested.
And then I got new neighbours. They have a dog. This dog lives in their yard. And loves to bark for hours, preferably at night. Couldn’t sleep at all. Every time I fell asleep, this dog started barking. Did you know this is considered torture? Well, according to international law, it is! The things you come up with when you lie awake at night… Ok, since nothing seemed to work, I thought to myself: what is it I have influence on? The answer: earplugs. Which made a HUGE difference.
But still, I had the idea in my head that I’m a bad sleeper. The gentleman scientist in me woke up, and asked: is that true? What evidence do you have to support this thesis? I didn’t have an answer, other than ‘I have always been’. So it was time to gather data. Using my Garmin Instinct 2.
And this was absolutely fascinating. The Garmin measures all sorts of things while you sleep, for instance:
Sleep stages
Light sleep (preparing for deeper sleep)
Deep sleep (helps with physical restoration)
REM sleep (linked to memory and emotional processing)
Awake periods
Sleep duration
Heart rate
Movement
Respiratory rate
Stress levels
Using this data, a sleep score is generated, indicating how well you slept that night. So every morning when I wake up, I try to score my sleep myself. After I’ve done that, I look at the Garmin data. This is when something interesting happened. In the first month or so, my own score of how I slept, didn’t match the score generated by Garmin. I thought it was bad, Garmin thought it was quite good.
Which made me think. What if I was just used to sleeping badly, and just assuming my sleep was always like that? It had become a habit, so to say. What if I ditch that? So I started to focus more on the data. Pretty soon my feeling of how I slept improved. I have done this for about 4 weeks now, and it seems to help! My sleep has been very good indeed.
Of course I have implemented all kinds of things to improve my sleep, with the earplugs as a gamechanger. But what I didn’t adjust, was my attitude towards my sleep. And that seemed to be the real gamechanger!
As I continue tracking my sleep, I’m curious to see if this positive trend holds—and how it affects my overall fitness and well-being. Have you ever questioned your sleep habits? If you’re tracking your sleep, I’d love to hear what works for you!