Some people don’t have a problem sleeping during the day, if you are one of the unlucky who do, this article is for you. This article will touch on many key things to get great quality sleep during the day and provide many tips and tricks to get hack your sleep cycles and get better quality sleep.
How to Sleep During the Day?
Whether you are on a polyphasic sleep schedule, sleep hacking, suffering jetlag, or simply a night shift worker, to fall asleep quickly and get healthy sleep during the day be difficult. This article will reveal a number of methods and ways to implement new habits to improve your sleep quality.
Light
The first and most important is light. When and how you are exposing yourself to light plays a pivotal role in the quality of sleep you are getting. The main reasons are due to blue light ray exposure. The blue spectrum light from the sun regulates your circadian rhythm, vitamin D levels, and melatonin hormone production. While your circadian rhythm dictates a host of cycles the body goes through, Vitamin D and melatonin impact immune system, metabolism, and testosterone levels. If you are the average person, you expose yourself to blue light primarily from two sources… the sun and your laptop/phone. Blue spectrum light rays stimulate the brain to function at a high level and be awake. This is the reason why it is recommended to avoid computer screens and LED lights at night. For a person trying to fix their sleep schedule, you want to be sure to get blue light exposure after waking and throughout the day and limit it 3 hours prior to sleep.
For a person with less-than-normal sleeping hours you can achieve this simply by purchasing a blue light and turning it on when you wake up if natural sunlight is not available. If you are going to work long periods in places without natural sunlight, setting up blue lights around your work station will guarantee your melatonin production is normalized. An odd thing about skin sensitivity to light is that the face, lower neck, back, and calves being exposed to blue light result in the most vitamin D and melatonin production during sleep. For this reason, if you can get away with it, get a number of blue lights and be sure to hit your calves.
To limit your blue light exposure before sleep, to queue your brain to fall asleep quickly start wearing blue blocking sun glasses at all times a few hours before bed. I always try and wear my blue blocking sunglasses when I am doing work on the computer past 6pm and if I plan to look at my iPhone for extended periods of time. It can be pitch black and the only source of light is your laptop, but because the laptop emits blue light, it signals your body to stay in a focused wakeful state.
Blue light therapy devices offer a wide range of health benefits and are used to treat acne, improve skin health overall, and are even used in places like Sweden where natural sunlight is virtually non-existent as a proven treatment for depression. Just to be clear, natural sunlight does all of this as well. Which begs the question of why people wear sunscreen anytime they go outside. Sun-bathers anonymous anyone?
The last point on light, when you sleep, sleep in the dark. Turn off all sources of light around your bed and be sure to have heavy curtains that block out all sunlight. For the frequent flyer and day time polyphasic sleeper who takes naps in the office, I recommend carrying around a sleep mask.
Noise
The brain processes sounds even during sleep. When the brain encounters unusual sounds it shifts to a more active state and causes sleep cycle fragmentation, ending a cycle before it is complete. The shifting between sleep and wakeful states results in junk sleep, a kind of sleep where the body isn’t allowed to fall into restorative REM or deep sleep for long periods of time.
My first recommendation comes directly from the front desk manager of the St. Francis hotel who has worked graveyard shifts in the hotel industry for the past 10 years. He told me that the most critical thing that has helped him adjust and sleep well was introducing a fan. Just a simple electric fan that buzzes. He claims that the humming from the fan drowns out many of the distracting noises while sleeping and has improved the quality of his sleep drastically.
The Zeo community agrees with his recommendation and suggests using a fan to buffer erratic sounds like traffic or house noises. They also recommend thick blinds and curtains because they double as sound buffers and for the more extreme, double pane windows. Soft earplugs are an uncomfortable but cheap solution… although they promote earwax buildup.
Sound machines and music loops of ambient noise have helped me personally. I would loop various sound tracks with frequency modulations that promote the brain to fall into the various stages of sleep. A series I found called brain mind voyages seem to work the best for me.
On the same note, there are multiple apps for the iPhone like Pzizz which I have used to great success. These combine alternating pulsing sounds with unique ambient music to help you fall asleep quickly. Pzizz has an odd option which allows you to listen to a world famous hypnotist who speaks to you until you fall asleep. His voice is calming, yet very unsettling… there should not be a man in my room talking to me at night. Thankfully you can turn that feature off. I used Pzizz exclusively when I was on a Everyman 3 sleep schedule to fall asleep during my lunch hour at work in conjunction with a sleep mask.
Ending Notes:
Hopefully this helps those trying to answer the question “How can I sleep better?” and gives some insight to how one can get healthy sleep, even for those with irregular sleep habits.
Other things I am meaning to cover, and will probably in the future…. Controlling temperature to influence sleep stages, nutrient timing to improve restorative sleep and how to time that with polyphasic sleep, various sleep supplements, restoring sleep debt quickly, various solutions to insomnia and jetlag, and how video games can actually improve REM sleep.
