Now I lay me down to sleep

Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés — Go the F**K to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés. Hearing it read by Samuel L. Jackson is delightful

My wife and I had our daughter when I was in the final year of my PhD. Before then, I remember going out lots with friends, gaming, watching TV and reading to all hours on top of trying to push my degree forward inch by inch. There was always more I wanted to fit into my day, so I would inevitably stay up later than intended, but I never seemed to pay for it. I’m sure I complained about being tired, but I don’t think I knew what that REALLY meant yet.

After our daughter was born, it was a BIG shift. So many of the things we could spend our time doing were now off the table, but it became obvious that there was so much less slack in our lives than there was before, even for the simple things. Our son was born 14 months later, just as I was wrapping up a post-doc and had signed a contract to start with a start-up. Little did we know that we were about to enter a period of our life where we would be fighting for every scrap of sleep we could get.

Our first son seemed to simply have colic. We spent a lot of time toughing it out through those first months, under the assumption that it would get better as colic usually only lasts the first 3-4 months. We were wrong. We spent a lot of time with the pediatricians as he stopped gaining weight. He was originally misdiagnosed with a severe food allergy and ended up having infant reflux. The poor kid basically had massive heartburn for the first year and a half of his life. This would result in 2-4 hours of screaming in the middle of the night with us oscillating between frustration at our inability to figure this out, broken hearted that we couldn’t make him feel better and anger with him as if he was willfully trying to ruin our lives. We had to get pretty creative to try and keep our sanity and still try to make something of this fledgling company.

Sleep takes up a third of your life. Also, getting sleep right is what enables you to have the energy to tackle the rest of your life. So optimizing sleep is more than just optimizing one third of your life, it helps you optimize your whole life.

There’s lots of fantastic work out there that talks about optimizing sleep. So some basic resources so I am not reinventing the wheel:

While it’s true for everyone, that getting sleep right is a keystone habit, it’s even more important when you are trying to do big things and even harder when you are a parent. All of my advice below assumes you are doing the basics (limit caffeine past 2pm, no devices in bedroom, cold dark room, attempting to get 8 hours, etc…).

How to get better sleep when you are doing anything high stress

Your mind is always going to be rushing a million miles a minute. When it’s time to crash, how can you do it without lying in bed trying to solve every problem and re-hashing every difficult conversation?

Work on the big rocks

Make sure you are continually asking yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” and “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?” If you are always focusing on the big rocks, you will know you’re not frittering away your time. You’ll likely have identified 10 big rocks you need to move and be frustrated you can’t work on all of them, but that’s part of the game (source: “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) )

Journal before bed

I have seen lots about journaling in the morning and I think that’s a great way to set your day. But I find that getting the churning, turbulent anxiety and restless thoughts out of my head and onto a page before bed is like a purge. You can ruminate on the same thought for an hour or you can write it down once and then not think about it again (source: Josh Waitzkin — How to Cram 2 Months of Learning into 1 Day – Youtube, main discussion is at 20:23).

Practice meditation

I’ve been using the Waking Up app, but I found that the Calm app had a specific sleep meditation that I found really helpful. It basically asked you to focus on each part of our body, starting at your toes and work upwards. For each body part, you thank it for what it did for you today, you appreciate that it wants to be ready to help you, but it’s no longer needed. That body part can go to sleep.

Practicing meditation when you are already sleep deprived is REALLY hard. But if you want to hit the game winning shot, you practice when the stakes are lower and build up to the big game. The same applies for meditation. Practicing meditation when the stakes are lower and your mind is less in a whirlwind will help lock in the skills better than only practicing when you need it, which will be too late. You’ll kick yourself for not practicing when you need to go to sleep and you can’t.

How to get a better sleep as a parent

Experiment with crazy schedules

When you’re in the thick of it with babies, I suggest you stagger your sleep with your partner. It seems logical that you should go to bed with your partner. It’s what you’ve always done! Well, if you have a kid who isn’t sleeping, going to bed 4 hours earlier than your partner can help you both protect the other’s sleep. My wife and I experimented with all kinds of adjusted sleep schedules, depending on the age of the kids and where they were at.

There were times that I would go to bed at 8pm, because I am useless in the evenings. I can remember at one point, My wife would handle anything to do with the kids until about 2am. Frequently, she would fall asleep on the couch at 10 so she would get some sleep then. Whenever there was a wake up after 1pm she would come down (our bedroom was in the basement and the kids were on the second floor) let me know I was up and I would sleep on the couch for the rest of the night. I would then get up with the kids as early as they woke up, trying to let my wife sleep until as late as possible (7 to 8am). Because I went to bed so early, I would frequently be wide awake at 4am, and I would take the time then to do work. During my PhD, I would sit in a recliner, with my laptop on a TV tray, and my 6 week old daughter nestled in my lap with her head on my thigh. I was trapped for 4 hours and got a lot of thesis writing done. Later when we had two kids, 14 months apart, I would write code or read. We experimented with a bunch of adjusted sleep schedules over the years. We were constantly evaluating what worked and what didn’t.

Focus on your strengths

Have your experiments focus on your strengths. I am a crazy early bird. I love getting up at 4am and heading down to my laptop. My wife is more flexible about early versus late, as long as she’s on a schedule. We would have experimented differently if either of us had been night owls.

Nap in order to be effective

There were lots of time in the early days where I would run home in the middle of the day and have a nap. I knew that trying to tough it out wasn’t effective when it came to my output. Four tired hours doesn’t compare at all to two hours of napping and two alert hours. Output matters more than hours, but you certainly need as many hours as you can for enormous output. If you are in a job where your output matters less than your presence, then I think there’s a bigger problem.

Sleep train as early as you can

We used the sleep-easy solution. It worked well for our oldest and youngest, but our middle child has always had issues with sleep, due to his reflux and his sensory issues. I’ve said before that you can choose between “Hard now and hard later”. For most things you need to teach your kids (potty training, dressing, weaning, etc…) it’s simply a trade-off. If other things are hard in your life, then handling potty training right now might be too much. But you WILL have to do it, so try and make sure you are working on a few hard things all the time because you don’t know when the shit is going to hit the fan later.

Despite that advice, I think sleep training is different. If you push forward and succeed at sleep training then this will make the rest of your life significantly easier. When I give this advice to parents, the response, 95% of the time is that they just can’t bear to hear their baby cry. You’re right that your baby cries when they are hurt, or scared or sick. It’s really the only tool they have. But they also cry when there’s just something they don’t like. If you set yourself up to have to solve every single thing that your child doesn’t like be prepared for a life of slavery. Much better, in my opinion, to make them self sufficient.

Suffering together is noble, but totally ineffective

We constantly had an extra mattress that we could lay out in the living room when we knew it was going to be a rough night. We never played “Let’s wait and see if tonight is going to be brutal.” We assumed it was and were proactive about protecting each others sleep.

We would swap spots sleeping in the living room with an eye mask and ear plugs to get to sleep. I remember talking to my wife about this and her feeling bad about me having to take my shift and I said to her, “When we get a chance to tap out, if we don’t do our job of getting the best sleep possible, then we are going to be useless tomorrow. Being useless for your partner tomorrow is WAY worse than whatever they are doing right now. Plus, when we switch, you don’t have someone coming in that’s rested. So don’t feel guilty about sleeping when the other is ‘on’. The best way we can support each other is handling the times when we are ‘on’ without disturbing the other and maximizing how rejuvenated we can get when we are ‘off’ so that we can both support the other, our families and our work tomorrow.”

The best way to optimize your sleep is to optimize your kids sleep

We have used sound machines with our kids for a very long time as we found the white noise to be a good trigger for them (we use ocean waves). It also lets you take the sound machine with you when you stay at the grandparents and it makes the place they are staying feel more like their sleep environment. We bought spares, even during times when the budget was tight in case one broke.
We avoided co-sleeping. That always felt like making things easier now but setting up a habit that would be much harder later to break.
We’ve tried to slowly get night lights off to get darker and darker rooms for the kids, but we have found that it sometimes makes them more anxious. This felt like something that would be easier to break when they were much older and it’s not really hurting anything right now.
We’ve always made sure our kids bedrooms had proper air conditioning in the summer even when our rooms didn’t have it.
We read to our kids every night to try to calm them down more. We don’t have any tablets yet (for ages 8, 7 and 3) but sometimes they do watch TV much later than they should.
We have used lavender and clary sage to try to add more calming triggers. I think it helped a bit, but that’s just anecdotal.
Our middle child has always had poor sleep. We tried staying with him in his room on his wake ups to try to train going back to sleep, but he would get so anxious that we were going to leave that he kept on waking back up. You could see the adrenaline hit he would get each time when he would suddenly pop up to check. Now, we’ve set up a mattress permanently on our bedroom floor for him and he’s currently using it every night. We are at least at the point where he wakes up, stumbles in and just crawls into his bed. Most nights I think he’s sleep walking or he’s been triggered by some kind of anxious reflex that causes him to jump up and come in. It’s taken a while to get him to do it as quietly as possible and we are still working on getting him to sleep in later in the mornings without talking, especially on the weekends.
We are currently experimenting with a compression blanket, weighted blankets and a chilipad for our middle child. My wife and I have been using a chilipad for about two years now and it’s worth the (large) investment. We wanted to experiment with weighted blankets for the middle child, but he complains about being hot before bed every single night (most nights he strips off all his pajamas) and I was really worried that the pressure would be good, but the temperature would be bad. No concrete results yet.
Final thought regarding kids and sleep: Sleep is required to lay down long term memory. So if you do this poorly enough, you’ll completely forget what having babies is like and think another is a great idea. 😉

Current Experiments

Other than what I listed above for the kids, here are some other thing I am experimenting with

Sleep tracking round 2

I tried using a fitbit in the past for sleep tracking, but I didn’t find it all that helpful at the time. Mostly, it just told me I was getting a terrible sleep. This was when our middle was still young and I didn’t really need a piece of technology to tell me that.

Despite that initial failure, I recently purchased an Oura ring. I had a friend show me the app and I was really impressed by the “readiness” metric, which is a combination of sleep across a number of nights and exercise across a couple of days. It seems like optimizing that could be worth a lot of juice! More on that in the future I am sure. Preliminary results though: It says my sleep is still sucks.

Black and white screens

I have been using f.lux on my laptops for ages to reduce the amount of blue light in the evenings. It has a greyscale mode as well. My hope is that by reducing the screen brightness I can mimic a kindle, which doesn’t seem to disrupt sleep like TV/laptop screens. I have been doing black and white screens on my iPhone for a while to reduce the amount of my attention it captures (see Also). This might be wrong though, because white light still has a lot of blue in it (along with all the other colours). I recently heard about how modern materials and lighting have had a massive impact on our psyche and it makes me wonder if introducing more red is a better idea (like a camp fire or a candle).

No alcohol

Peter Attia talked about his observations using the Oura ring (I think it starts at 2:00:35) and you can see, in the measurements, the difference one drink and two drinks can make. One drink causes an effect that can be seen, two will tank your numbers.

Reading poetry or “beautiful” things in the evening

In the past, I have devoured the books by Brian Andreas (E.g. Bittersweet or Wish List). I’ve been going through a lot of Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings. I’ve been reading them on my phone while waiting for the middle child to fall soundly asleep. I have debated printing them so I don’t have a screen, but I love the links she has to other things and I pop open 2-5 new links per article. Here are some favorites:

Things are certainly much better than they were when the kids were babies. Our oldest is consistently a good sleeper, our youngest usually has 1-2 small wake-ups a night as we are transitioning him from naps and from night time diapers. Those are manageable as we know he will grow out of them at some point.

Our middle child is still a conundrum. He’s like an exposed nerve and we’re working hard to try to figure out what helps ground him and what stimulates him to be over-sensitive to almost everything. I guess the worst case scenario is that someday he’ll be a teenager and we’ll never be able to wake him up.