Intro to Changing your Sleep

Please read this section in its entirety.

Before we introduce our recommendations for improving sleep, let’s discuss helpful ways to think about making that change. As with all goals, improving sleep necessitates changes to your conscious behavior (choices), your unconscious behavior (habits), and your environment. Leaving out any of these things puts you at a disadvantage. Below, we discuss practical approaches to making these changes.

The important role of your choices

Most people who endeavor to improve their sleep focus only on their behavior, and they often do so in ways that are less than optimal. It’s important to approach any change in behavior with a growth mindset, task orientation, and cognitive flexibility.

Firstly, it’s easy to fall victim to a mindset known as perfectionism. When seeking to make changes in our lives, learn a new skill, or adopt a new daily habit or pattern, you may sometimes think in terms of “all-or-nothing” (Manning, 2017). You may tell yourself, “If I’m not perfect all at once, I have failed.”  If after some effort we see minimal or no progress, it’s tempting to get frustrated and give up. Having a growth mindset, on the other hand, is understanding that you have the ability to change and that with persistence, effort, and time, you can not only learn new skills but master them. 

When it comes to sleep, for example, you may feel that if you don’t immediately get the golden eight hours of sleep each night, or if the sleep you get is imperfect, you are failing. This is just not true. Having a growth mindset may look more like simply beginning to make small changes to your daily habits that can deeply impact your ability to get good quality sleep consistently. A growth mindset will allow you to think of the changes that you make to your sleep as a series of small but gradual improvements over time. You don't have to be perfect, and you don't have to make every change immediately. Most of all, your sleep struggles don't have to be miraculously cured all at once. You simply have to stay committed to growing and allow improvements to your sleep to occur over time.

Secondly, it can also be beneficial to be task-oriented rather than outcome-oriented. Being outcome-oriented in your pursuit of better sleep may lead you to believe that if you don’t sleep well one night, your behavior change did not work. It may also strengthen your association between effort and good sleep, which, by nature, are contradictory. As you endeavor to improve your sleep, letting go of outcomes and being task-oriented will allow you to meet setbacks with patience and with the assurance that your changes will lead to better sleep over time. It will also allow you to find success in progress, not perfection. For example, if you make a goal to stop drinking caffeine after 3:00 pm, simply completing your goal will be rewarding enough. Whether or not your sleep is noticeably better, you’ve taken an important step toward better sleep that will pay dividends over time.

Last of all, when growth comes slower than you’d like, or when the tasks that you do to improve your sleep don’t seem to be working, it may be tempting to feel like you’re a lost cause. You may tell yourself: “This will never get better,” “I’m just bad at sleeping,” or “I’m not capable of making these changes.” These self-judgmental thoughts reflect cognitive rigidity, a fixed way of thinking that can make challenges feel permanent and unchangeable. Cognitive flexibility, on the other hand, means being able to change the way you think or approach a problem when things aren’t working (e.g., “It’s not that I can’t do this--I just need to keep adjusting.”). It allows you to approach challenges with curiosity rather than self-judgment. Any attitude that promotes willingness, flexibility, persistence, and allows you to adapt and try new strategies is cognitive flexibility. With cognitive flexibility, one night or even one week of bad sleep doesn’t mean that hope is gone or that improving sleep is a lost cause. Instead, it encourages you to see these challenges as temporary setbacks that can be addressed with patience and continued adjustment.

These mindsets encourage patience and persistence, reducing the pressure and stress that often come with trying to “fix” sleep problems quickly. By staying open to changes and trusting in gradual improvement, you can foster healthier long-term sleep habits without becoming trapped in a cycle of anxiety or disappointment. Whatever your sleep journey may look like, we implore you to approach it with a growth mindset, task orientation, and cognitive flexibility. 

The important role of your habits

Each of us has patterns or habits in our lives that are so automatic that we can be doing something complex, like driving a car, without even thinking about it. One example of this can be when you drive from your home to work, school, or to a best friend’s house. You know every turn, every stop sign, and even the potholes along the way so well that you may wonder how you even got to your destination in the first place. Researcher Wendy Wood believes that habits can make up to 43% of the activities you participate in daily (Wood, 2021). Think of that! 

As you go on to improving your sleep, bear in mind that sleeping well isn’t about uncovering a secret hack or miracle fix. It’s not about summoning enough willpower to finally get to bed on time. In this module, we have educated you on how sleep works and why you should get good sleep, but it’s not all about that either. It’s all about habits--things you do or avoid doing regularly--that facilitate good sleep. As Wendy Wood explains in the video below, successful people accomplish their goals because their unconscious selves (habits and rituals) are in alignment with their conscious selves (goals, motivation, and choices). You can align your conscious and unconscious selves through time and repetition. Don’t count on improving your sleep without those two things. Through time and consistent effort, you will be rewiring your brain to make sleep just as automatic as your drive to work in the morning.

The important role of your environment

Your environment has an extremely large impact on the decisions you make regularly. In your life, you are surrounded by a million different people, places, things, or circumstances that affect your thoughts and behavior. As a result of this, it is important to be mindful of the different cues that are around you and what those cues urge you to do. Let’s say, for example, that you have a goal to eat out less. However, your affinity for Taco Bell competes fiercely with this goal, and you find your resolve tested regularly by the local Taco Bell that you pass by every day on your drive home from work. The very sight of the Bell fills your head with thoughts of Cheesy Gordita Crunches and cool Baja Blasts. Instead of summoning up enough willpower to just keep driving, the key may be an environmental change--or, in other words--a change in the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations that you are exposed to. In our example, choosing a new route to drive home may be the best way to keep your goal. By directly changing your environment, you can indirectly accomplish your goals. Watch this video with renowned writer James Clear on the importance of changing your surroundings.

The principle of focusing on your system rather than your goals also applies to sleep. Here are some helpful examples: Let’s say you find yourself scrolling on your phone for an hour before bed every night. So, you move your charging block to an outlet that leaves your phone out of reach when you’re in bed. Perhaps you notice that you get woken up at 5:00 am every morning by your neighbor’s car lights as they leave for work. So, you install blackout curtains. Maybe getting to bed on time is a struggle because of how long it takes to get your kids to bed. So, you give your kids an earlier bedtime. To better follow your bedtime routine, perhaps you turn off all notifications on your phone after a certain hour. All in all, when we seek to make changes to the cues that surround us, our behaviors and habits are likely to change as well (Carden & Wood, 2018). Whatever your situation may be, ask yourself, In what ways are my systems/surroundings preventing me from getting the sleep I need? How can I change my environment in order to eliminate those obstacles? The possibilities are endless, but the solutions tend to be simple. 

Some final thoughts

There are two key principles that we want to reiterate before you move on:

1. Most recurring sleep problems result from mental or behavioral habits that damage sleep. You need to learn new habits and remove old habits to improve your sleep. Habit formation takes time, so even if you don’t see immediate results, hang in there!

2. As sleep researcher Michael Grandner said, nobody ever got better sleep by simply “trying harder.” Always remember that sleep isn’t something you do; it’s something that happens to you under the right conditions. True sleep improvements come from creating the right conditions through small, consistent changes to your behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and environment. 

With a basic understanding of sleep, its impact on your life, and the factors hindering optimal sleep, you can now explore the best research-based practices for improving your nightly sleep. The remainder of this section will cover three key areas:  

1. Selecting the right activities or interventions to address your specific sleep challenges.

2. Tracking your goals effectively to maximize long-term improvements.

3. Providing general guidance on the most effective and sustainable approaches to enhancing your sleep.

Choosing your personal goals

In the next section of the module (Personal Growth Experiment), you’ll find a list of practices designed to help you achieve your sleep goals. Before that, we want to show you how to choose the practices that are best for you. It’s important to understand that everyone is different, so certain practices may be more or less effective for you than others. This can make selecting the right ones seem overwhelming. To help with that, we’ve included a guide to help match your specific struggles with the practices that are likely to benefit you the most. 

The guide consists of three columns:

• The first column lists common and specific sleep struggles. This list will help you identify which struggles apply to you personally.

• The second column pairs each specific sleep struggle with its underlying general concern, based on the seven categories we discussed earlier: Insufficient sleep, sleep hygiene, conditioned arousal, sleep beliefs, pre-sleep mental state, sleep disorders, and sleep value/prioritization.

• The final column lists the activities from the Personal Growth Experiment section that are designed to address these specific struggles by targeting their underlying causes. These activities are ordered by their likelihood of effectively addressing the corresponding sleep struggle.

Goal Tracker

We know that one of the best ways for you to make lasting changes to your habits is by setting goals and monitoring your progress in keeping them. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you use a goal tracker as you begin making changes to the way you sleep. Check out the following example of what a complete goal tracker may look like.

For clarification, this is an example of what a filled-out goal tracker may look like after you’re done filling it out. For blank goal trackers, check out the options below.

How to use the goal tracker

Now that you have the tools to help you choose your goals and monitor your progress in keeping them, it’s time for you to plan your own personalized sleep program! After using the Sleep Activity Selection Tool to determine which activities you’ll try, write them into your goal tracker. Whether they be goals that you do consistently (e.g., maintain a sleep schedule), goals that you only do when needed (e.g., using a sleep meditation when you can’t fall asleep), or goals that you only do once (e.g., install blackout curtains), only make enough goals to be confident you will be able to complete them without getting overwhelmed. Whether you choose to print the goal tracker or keep it on your phone, be consistent in using it to monitor your progress. 

When filling out the sleep diary, remember that your total scores are subjective and relative totals that will give you an indication of your progress when compared with other weeks. They don’t necessarily measure your “total sleep quality” for that week. To get the best use from your sleep diary, look for patterns in your sleep scores. Do you sleep less on certain days of the week? Does your sleep quality go down on days when you are stressed? Do you sleep better during the weeks when you adhere closely to your goals? When kept consistently, your sleep diary can give important insight into the bigger picture of your sleep health and can help you determine which activities are or are not helping your sleep.

A final consideration

Even though this module is a great starting point, it is not intended to be a “perfect cure” for all sleep problems. Studies have found that self-help interventions for disorders such as insomnia work best for those with symptoms that are mild or moderate (Pull, 2006; van Straten & Cuijpers, 2009). If you give these practices a go and you still don’t feel satisfied with your sleep health, you may want to consider seeking professional help. Consult the resources section of the module to see where you can find proper care.

Contributors: Tommy Rowan & Bryce Klingonsmith