Dr. Matt Walker

Because part of that signal of regularity going into your brain in terms of that repeated behavior night after night, sleep, in other words, helps train that central 24-hour circadian clock that we also spoke about in the first episode.

So that's the first piece of advice.

Try to keep it as regular as you possibly can.

The second piece of advice is darkness.

In my view, we are a dark, deprived society in this modern era, and we need darkness at night, as well you've spoken about, to release a hormone called melatonin.

And melatonin will help time the regular onset of your sleep.

So that sounds great, but boots on the ground, Matt, what does that mean?

I would suggest the following.

In the last hour before bed, try to dim down 50%, if not more, of your lights in your home.

And you will be quite surprised at how sleepy and soporific that will make you feel.

I will do this in a regimented way.

A little reminder that pops up and tells me now is the time to dim the lights based on your bedtime.

And I'll go around and I'll shut lights down.

In my bedroom, I will actually have a smart light bulb, and it is way down to probably as little as maybe five lux.

And lux is just a metric of the light.

It's way down there, and it's also very deep orange, sort of red, and we can come on to why that's the case.

So that's the first thing.

Even before you're thinking about sleep, start to decrease the light.

For example, if you were there at, let's say, for a standard sleep schedule at 10 p.m., and normally you are getting into bed at 10.30 p.m., but you feel pretty wide awake, if there was an electrical blackout and you lost your phone, magnetic too, phone goes down, lights go down, total blackout.

My suspicion is that fairly soon you'd say, gosh, I actually feel quite sleepy.