Reclaim your sleep, like a rooster.
Part 2/6 of Farming for Gumption
Welcome to Part 2 of this year’s six-part special series ‘Farming for Gumption’. In each of the six essays, I cover a different area of health, share the best science I have found, and offer reflections from my new life as a Volunteer at the Point San Pablo Harbor and Farm.
This essay is about Sleep, and the other five cover Stress, Nutrition, Exercise, Addiction, and Relationships.
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👉🏽 Check out the latest science behind Stress in this compiled report.
👉🏽 You can read this online here, or listen to it on the substack app.
Let’s see what we can learn about sleep from nature today.
I expected sleep to be one of the notable improvements in my lifestyle on the farm (I had no wifi on the bus where I slept, the lighting was nice and soft, and I was exposed to a lot of sunshine during the day).
However, I soon realized that it will take some work to get good sleep on the farm.
As cool as it is to live on the bus, it comes with bright open windows, and is very conducive to sound and light (the combo kryptonite of sleep).
😩 My sleep cycle looked like this:
11:00 pm: Go to Bed
12.30 am: Wake up cold. Put on some layers. A cool gust tickles my exposed toes. I tuck them in.
I fall back to sleep
02:00 am: Pee break.
I fall back to sleep.
5am: The rooster crows its lung out interrupting my dreams.
I fall back to sleep.
5:30 am: The sun trickles through the window and beams over my forehead.
I fall back to sleep.
6:30 am: It gets warmer. I take off the blankets and layers.
I fall back to sleep.
7:30 am: I am up and trying to fall back to sleep because I feel tired,
but now I am wide awake.
8:00 am: Brush it off with a french press of freshly ground coffee,
Sugar and Nicotine cravings ensue
with hints of social isolation and avoidance.
12:00 pm: Dip in energy and low mood. More coffee instead of napping.
💡 As you will see in a second, science now shows us that these sleep interruptions impact different parts of the sleep architecture: The late night wake up interruptions impact the body’s regeneration, mood, memory formation and immune/cardio/metabolic systems, while the early morning ones impact creativity and social collaborative skills.
Welcome back to the farm
One of my responsibilities here is to tend to the chicken coops: Feeding them, changing their water, and of course, collecting their fresh eggs for a morning omelet! (It is quite strange to give food to them and then fry their unborn children, but I digress.)
I never thought of chickens as interesting creatures.
However the more I observe them, the more I realize their intelligence, agility and fascinating nature. Their precise social pecking order, the way they pick the corn meticulously out of the feed, the surprising speed at which they hop around. They’re quite impressive! (A goat is fast, but I can always catch one with effort. A run-away chicken on the other hand, is nearly impossible to catch.)
Most fascinating though, is how they sleep.
One day, I was feeding the chicken a little later than usual, and found none of them in the coop. Alarmed, I started looking around for them thinking they might have escaped, only to realize that they had all gone to sleep, and that their beds were all the way at the top of the coops making them invisible from the outside.
I am but a clueless city boy.
Chickens really know how to make a great sleeping environment for themselves:
They make it safe and manage their temperature: I learned that a rooster gets its name from the fact that it sleeps on a roost (horizontal pole that is placed high in the coop). This protects the chickens from predators at night, keeps them warm by clustering around each other, and protects their feet from frost bite and mice.
They keep it dark and quiet: In addition to that, chicken get a full eight hours of beauty sleep by matching their sleep schedule with daylight. This is why Roosters wake up at dawn and start their infamous crowing to wake up the clan, rally the hens for a day’s work, and ward off predators.
They get a full eight hours of NREM and REM: Yup, chickens sleep a full eight hours and experience dreams and rapid eye movements just like us. This may explain their strong sense of social cohesion and boundless energy throughout the day.
No wonder they have such tremendous energy and are so impossible to catch!
Here is why humans, chickens, and many creatures avolved to sleep for eight hours the way we do:
“When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities). “
Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
In fact, our ape ancestors used to sleep on trees as well, and one theory is that our discovery of fire has allowed us to sleep on the ground, and get much more REM sleep, which helped us further evolve beyond other mammals.
😵💫 The irony is that we have evolved so much, that over the last century, we have lost a great portion of that sleep that allowed us to innovate, collaborate, and have the energy to evolve in the first place! 😵💫
Inspired by the chickens, I decided to start improving my humble abode into as much of a sleep haven as I could.
Perhaps to outrun them, I had to out-sleep them first.
Act I: Reclaiming Non-REM sleep: Blankets, night routine and Temperature control.
On my first two nights, I woke up several times during the early portion of the night, interrupting my Non-REM or deep sleep. This first phase of the night is crucial for the body’s physical and mental health.
Check out my fitbit below: These are the red interruptions around 11.30 pm. These are also the lighter red markers between 12 am and 2 am.
Ouch! That is a lot of NRem bleeding!
When we lose sleep early in the night (or go to bed late) we lose a lot of NREM sleep which is crucial for:
Memory formation and consolidation
Protective function for heart health, immune system, and mood.
Removes debris (alpha-amyloids) from the brain to protect against Alzheimers
💡 The land owners came to the rescue with two new blankets that ensured coziness in the coldest times of the night.
Another thing about temperature is this: Our bodies need to drop by 1 degree for the brain to fall into slumber.
💡This can be achieved by keeping the room cool, or taking a warm shower. (Taking a warm shower keeps us cool because it spreads the blood from our center to our extremities, helping us fall into sleep easier.) I also brought a kettle onto the bus to make night time tea alongside some relaxing incense.
This all helped me get through the first part of the night, where most of the Non-REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep happens.
💡 I also started drinking less water before bed and more when I wake up. That helped me avoid the damage caused by ‘pee break’. Late night food and drinks was another factor interrupting sleep. I tried to avoid that as well - albeit much harder and with less success. I am human after all.
I started feeling much better the next day, however I was still getting the early morning interruptions from all the light and sound coming into the bus at 5.30 am.
Act II: Saving my REM Dreams: Hello Darkness, my old friend!
If I were to reclaim my dreamtime, where my creativity and ability to collaborate come from, then I had to keep the sun out in the morning.
I ordered $20 customisable blackouts from amazon that use velcro stickers and attached them to windows. I also installed a table cloth as a curtain.
The 5.30 am wake up calls were now cancelled, and that improved my morning sleep dramatically.
REM Sleep, which happens mostly towards the end of an eight hour sleep period, is important for the following functions:
Creativity
Social Collaboration
Integration of learnings and synthesis of new ideas
Not a bad deal for $20 dollars, huh?
Here is something most of us do not realize:
“Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you may lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time.
It works both ways. If you wake up at ten a.m., but don’t go to bed until four a.m., then you will lose a significant amount of your normal deep NREM sleep. Similar to an unbalanced diet in which you only eat carbohydrates and are left malnourished by the absence of protein, short-changing the brain of either NREM or REM sleep—”
Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep
My sleep improved when I did all these changes in environment.
And then we got Wifi on the bus…and it all vanished into thin air! You see, I’m a night owl…
I was excited to be able to work from the bus now and be connected to the world, but it was as though the internet shone a bright light on all my compulsive behaviors.
I hacked my whole sleep environment, forgetting that the seeds of insomnia really live in my mind, personality, and the stories I tell myself!
I was now free to face the real problem behind my sleep:
My love for the night
and my natural desire
to stay up and..
do something with someone or
Anything alone !
I would find myself working, socializing, or determined to watch ‘just one more random youtube video’ before time vanishes like a thief into the night.
The next day I would normalize that sleep gap with a fresh cup of strong coffee, and rationalize it by repeating to myself that I am a “night owl”.
Sleep kept slipping. 2 am. 3 am. 4 am.
The reality was that I had become a “sleep-deprived owl” with a comfy nest that I barely use. Apparently, I am not alone. This is very easy to accomplish in our modern city life of devices, LED lighting and soaring stress levels.
On a global scale, we are losing more and more of our sleep:
Matthew Walker further details how one out of every two adults in the developed world, do not get their necessary sleep every week. (35% in America, 39% in the UK and a whopping 66% in Japan).
Sleep deprivation costs companies between $2000 and $3500 per insomniac employee per year, netting $54 Million dollars for large companies.
On the GDP level, lack of sleep costs developed countries about 2% of their GDP. This comes to a total of $411 Billion for America, and $138 Billion for Japan.
Unlike financial debt, “slept debt” can’t be paid off. Instead we compensate with sleep aids, which do not offer any of the benefits of regular sleep. To be blunt, the science shows that there -sadly- is no shortcut when it comes to regular sleep.
“ regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost. This is true for total sleep time, just as it is for NREM sleep and for REM sleep. That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book”.
Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep
I knew the answer but I did not want to address it.I was spending too much time at night catching up on work, hanging out, or enjoying wifi when I had it.
It was that compulsive part of mine that wanted me to stay up. It did not have any reason to go to sleep. Instead, it wanted to be out and play. The morning meant being serious and working.
The last piece of the puzzle was all about structure and what we call in behavioral change “A Bigger Better Offer”.
Act III: Enter the 7.30 am Club
I have never been enthused by groups that want to wake up and 5 am and do things together. My normal sleep rhythm is from 11.30pm-7.30am. I know that because that is what my body does when I don’t set an alarm or use any sleep aids.
Inspired by the rooster’s ability to bring social cohesion around sleep, and how that creates purpose for the rest of the coop, I started a 7.30 am club with a couple of my new friends at the harbor.
Early enough to be before work, but late enough not to lose normal sleep over. All I had to do now was get out of bed at my normal wake up time.
The idea was to be up and meet for a 30 minute activity together the go about our day. We set up a gym in the harbor clubhouse.
It is now a thing. This could be a workout, meditation, or friendly check in. I’ll share more about this on the next part of this series on exercise, but the 7.30 am club really transformed my psychological barriers I had sleeping early.
Suddenly, there was something that I was excited to do in the morning and the more well rested I am, the more I will be able to enjoy it. (Hence a bigger, better, offer than a youtube shorts binge).
Moreover, there are two other people that will show up and expect me to be there. I had some trepidation over this the first few weeks, but it soon became second nature to sleep and wake up at the same time. My body’s rhythm now clicked my brain back into shape.
It is not perfect, but I in much better shape when it comes to sleep, then when I was a month ago. That is all that matters.
The 7.30 am club have me the anchor I needed in the morning, along with the endorphins that go with both exercise and socialization, that it was sufficient for me to start sleeping earlier again.
Now that I have sorted out my stress and sleep, I am now ready to focus on getting regular exercise again. Let’s see if the 7.30 am club holds up.
I’ll tell you all about it on Part III of this series on movement and exercise!
I want to hear from you:
❓What are some breakthrough realizations you have had about sleep?
❓How do you roost? What kind of sleep environment have you set up?
❓What pieces of technology do you use with sleep? What do you track? What have you learned?
❓ What questions do you have for me?
❓ What aspects of sleep do you want to learn more about?
❓ What is somethings that is keeping you going this week?
Sweet dreams and Long uninterrupted Zzzs,
Omar
Interested in 1:1 health coaching? Fill this out and book yourself a time to chat with me.
Great read! The organization of your writing in this was captivating from start to finish!
Sleep !!! It’s such a sensual pleasure to fall into a restful and safe sleep. Thanks for your writing on this m, Omar.
I’m remembering falling into a deep cycle of if restful luscious sleep when I was a guest in a beautiful home in New Mexico. So silent. Nothing digital therefore no electromagnetic pollution. The restful sleeping continued for days. Like my being was savoring a lost nutrient.
That was years ago and still it sings in my heart.
My sleep hygiene today is truly compromised. I do wear a sleep mask for the black out quality of light in my apartment. However. I want to now experiment with stopping digital stimulation 2 hours before sleep. That’s tricky. But I’m setting my sites for it! And falling into sleep at a regular repeatable time.
Your article encourages me!
~ Kate