A friend looked at me over dinner last night. She knew I’d had a couple of rough, busy weeks, and she asked if I sleep well. I told her I’m the master of sleeping and she burst out laughing because I said it so dry she thought I was joking.
Honestly, I don’t think I’d still have my life more or less together in this season of growth without good sleep. So many people need something from us as founders that taking care of ourselves slides to the bottom of the list. I still need to get better at doing nothing, I have a foot on the gas and a foot on the brake, but good sleep is my bare minimum.
So here are the non-negotiables I take with me wherever I go. Some are obvious and some might weird you out. My partner still laughs at a few of them (especially the feet washing!!).
I’ll go through my favorite products, routines, supplements etc and I’ll link all the products as I talk through them here below, take what you want. Please read until the end to realize you do not need all of them!
Health tracker: what my Oura Ring showed me
A few years ago I started wearing an Oura Ring, and the data showed me how much my sleep, and especially my deep sleep, mattered. It also showed me how bad alcohol was for my sleep. Partly because of that, I almost completely stopped drinking alcohol.
Full disclaimer: I love the product and software, but I’ve had battery issues a couple of times and am now on ring 4. Customer service fixed it every time though. Just want to state I’m not getting anything from promoting them – the opposite actually. Buy at own risk.
The bigger lesson my Oura ring taught me: if I can’t get MORE hours of sleep, I can at least improve the QUALITY of the hours I do get.
Alarm clock: my phone never comes into the bedroom
This one changed the most. I use the Opal app, which blocks my social and work apps until 9am. At night everything shuts down at 7pm right now, though I’ve had seasons where it was 9pm.
My alarm clock is a Philips Wake-up Light, so I’m never tempted to grab my phone first thing. When my partner and I travel, we literally pack a little alarm clock so the phone can stay out of the bedroom. Traveling is when my habits slip fastest, and it’s exactly when I’ll open my phone and see something that triggers me because I’m online in the wrong timezone.
For a long time I felt weak about this until my coach Sandra reminded me that app companies spend enormous amounts of money to make their products as addictive as they are. I’ve now accepted it’s just incredibly addicting and stopped blaming my willpower and have just accepted I sometimes need an app to protect me from my own phone.
Sleep rituals that convince my nervous system it’s time to sleep
Some people say your bedroom should only be for sleeping, but I personally like making my bedroom feel like a fun place to spend time (no, not that kind of fun – I mean, also…).
So what I do is instead of watching tv downstairs, I go upstairs to read. Fantasy, on my Kindle, sometimes for hours a day.
My normal evening looks like this:
- wash my hands and feet (they take so much impact during the day),
- apply skin care,
- then reading in bed on my Kindle.
In seasons where I need extra care,
- I add a hot shower or bath to calm my nervous system,
- and my partner brings me a heated cherry stone pillow for my belly, where I tend to hold a lot of tension.
- A client of mine makes red light masks, and when I put one on I can feel myself calming down.
When I travel without all of that, I still have some non-negotiables:
- I use earplugs (I put them in before I even start reading),
- a silk eye mask because I’m sensitive to light and sound,
- and mouth tape. I was so skeptical about mouth tape, but it’s one of the few health hacks where I felt the difference after only 1 night. Even if you breathe 1% to 10% better, imagine waking up with that much more energy in the same amount of time.
- At home I also sleep on grounding sheets. Again I was skeptical, but love them so much now even my parents have them.
Supplements and strength: the support my body craves
- I take magnesium and a multivitamin, and if I skip them a few nights in a row my legs get restless.
- I also notice I need strength training to sleep well, as I need to exhaust my muscles and not just my brain. If I skip it for a week, my sleep gets worse.
- Then there’s a caffeine-free chocolate drink with chamomile and lavender that calms me down, and I’ve seen my HRV go up when I drink it.
Also, pro tip: if you wake up often in the night to pee, try cutting sweet things late in the evening.
Zoom out before you add another hack
BE AWARE You don’t need to do all of this!
1. I’m not a sleep coach but 2. I’m convinced if people simply stopped taking their phone into the bedroom, a lot would change.
The bigger question is what you’re running away from at night. Many of us delay going to sleep because the evening is the only time that belongs to us, and we know we won’t get any of it in the morning. That’s a pattern worth breaking. Maybe your mornings need something fun in them. This summer my partner and I went for a lot of morning walks, and sometimes we swim together before work, instead of both of us flying straight into our laptops.
Have you ever thought about the fact we spend a third of our lives sleeping?
Once I realized that, I started taking my sleep so much more seriously.
I’ve recently decided to spend a bit more on hotel rooms when I travel so I can work somewhere other than my bed, because protecting my sleep is protecting the founder, who protects the business. You work too hard and care too much to not be rich in every possible meaning of the word, and that includes waking up rested and ready to be the best version of yourself.
Pick 1 thing from this list and start tonight. Listen to the full Fail to Win podcast episode above where I walk through all products, and find every product I use linked above throughout the article.
I’m building a Millionaire Body Code guide with everything I do for my health, my routines and my evenings. Get on the waitlist here: fastforwardamy.com/bodycode
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