4 Awesome Sleep Biohacks I Use Every Single Day

Let’s face it—getting great quality sleep is pretty important. Whether you’ve got a high endurance run the next day, or a powerlifting competition, or even just an average day at work, you want to wake up fully refreshed, energized, and ready to conquer the day.

Of course, sometimes life doesn’t allow this. In our ever-changing society, new inventions such as artificial lighting have thrown a massive monkey wrench into our 500 million year old sleep schedule. For eons, animals woke up when the sun rose, and went to sleep when it set.

Now however, this isn’t always the case. We have weird sleep schedules, with some of us trading Bitcoin into the wee hours of the night. Many of us can’t fall asleep for hours, despite the fact that it’s dark out. Here’s where “sleep hacking” comes in handy.

There’s a new and emerging branch of science called “bio-hacking,” which I find fascinating. The idea is to “hack” your biology to get a desired effect—in this case, better sleep. So with that in mind, here’s some of the top bio hacks I use to get rock solid sleep every night, without failure.

Blackout Curtains

Did you know that the second light hits your skin, your body starts producing cortisol? This is a stress hormone which causes you to remain awake and alert. So in other words, that light from your phone, computer, or even coming in through your blinds? It’s ruining your sleep.

As someone who literally spends his nights either trading Bitcoin or out clubbing into the early mornings, I really value my sleep. For the longest time though, I would always get woken up when the sun rose, and it’d take me HOURS to fall back asleep again.

This doesn’t happen anymore now that I’ve installed some high quality blackout curtains in my room. They basically block any and all light from coming in your window, so that even if it’s high noon and the sun is blazing hot, you can sleep like a little baby on Xanax.

Even if you only sleep until 10am or something, investing in a good pair of blackout curtains will benefit you. When your room is pitch black, it basically tricks your body into thinking it’s the middle of the night, so you won’t get any unnecessary stirring while you’re clocking those ZZZ’s. I recommend this brand right here.

As a side note, sometimes they won’t block all of the light from coming in. I was able to quickly and easily resolve this by simply taking some strong duct tape and taping the curtains shut, all around the perimeter of the window. I know it might look weird, but your sleep is worth it.

Light Therapy

Your body naturally times its circadian rhythms based off of the light outside—so when you’re waking up at 5pm, what’s a biohacker to do? It’s simple. Just buy yourself a nice little blue light therapy box, and turn it on for an hour or so when you first wake up.

These little devices emit blue wavelength light waves, which tells your body it’s time to wake up. While these aren’t necessary if you get a lot of sunlight outside during the day, for the times when I’m being a night owl they certain come in handy. I just turn it on for an hour, get some work done, and my body’s wide awake.

I was first introduced to this idea back in 2008 or so, when it was being used as a cutting edge piece of technology to help combat depression. I’ve been using light therapy ever since to help align my circadian rhythm, and I cannot recommend it enough.

This can be especially helpful if you travel, as well. It can be a huge pain in the ass traveling across the globe when you have to reset your circadian rhythm, but all I do is plug one of these light therapy devices into a timer, and set it to turn on whenever I want to wake up. Try going back to sleep with the light of a thousand suns blazing at you, then.

Acupressure Mat

Okay, bear with me on this one—it’s going to sound a little bit strange. Most people when they hear this have an immediate reaction of shock and awe, but I’ve found that using an acupressure mat has done absolute wonders for my sleep quality and ability to relax in the evenings.

This thing has got hundreds and hundreds of tiny little plastic points that poke into your skin, so what are you going to do? You’re going to take your shirt off and lie down on it, of course! It will hurt like hell for the first 3-5 minutes, but once you reach the 10 minute mark it’s like pure bliss.

Seriously—the only thing I can liken this thing to is like being on heroin (although I’ve never done it). After 10 minutes, your body will release a massive flood of endorphins, that make you feel like everything is alright. It feels like I’m in a warm, comfy blanket of happiness and joy.

I’ve been using an acupressure mat every single evening for at least 15 minutes, and without fail, I always get better sleep. Sometimes I have a hard time winding down in the evenings, so being able to use this thing has been a lifesaver—even if I do get some really weird looks from my girlfriend.

Binaural Beats

I’ve written about binaural beats before, but never mentioned how I use them for sleep hacking. In fact, I’m actually listening to them right now as I write this article—I find that they’re tremendously helpful for getting “in the zone” and focusing on work.

Funny enough however, these things can be used for not only work, but for rest. The idea is that listening to certain AI built frequencies can “hack” your brain into a certain frequency. There’s all kinds of frequency your brain gets into depending on the task you’re doing—and each frequency has a different effect.

For sleep, you want to aim for theta and delta brainwaves. These brainwaves are associated with relaxation, rejuvenation, recovery, REM sleep, and even deep, dreamless sleep. To accomplish this, I often listen to some Brain.FM tracks I’ve downloaded to help me fall asleep.

When I’m working (right now for example), I’ll listen to the “focus” beats. They’re built by some sort of algorithm that determines your own personal brain’s patterns based on how you rate different tracks. To me, it’s been nothing short of life-changing. I get work done faster, and get to sleep faster thanks to binaural beats.

How to Hack Your Sleep

In conclusion, these are some of the sleep hacking tricks and tools I use daily to help me fall asleep and stay asleep. While the concept of “sleep hacking” or even “biohacking” may be foreign to some, it’s important that awareness of this phenomena begins to spread.

The world we live in is evolving rapidly, and the people who don’t choose to take conscious control over their biology will get left behind. For years, man rose with the sun and retired along with it, but now things have changed. For the first time in history, we have the power to hack our own sleep schedules.

I believe that this article will be especially helpful to my readers, who have a tendency to spend late hours gaming women, trading Bitcoin, and probably trolling SJW crybabies on Twitter (I’m guilty of this). So if it helped you, feel free to give it a share with your friends.

Eventually maybe I’ll write an article on some of the supplements I take to help enhance my sleep, but for now, I urge you to try out some of these tools (the blackout curtains are probably most important). As always, I hope you guys enjoyed the article, and of course, I’ll see you next time!