Sharing with you, one of my healthy tools. I have always enjoyed learning a lot about my body. For a long, long time, I’ve wanted to find out how my sleeping habits were affecting my body because I’ve heard many experts talk about the fact that you need to sleep more than seven to eight hours a day. I’ve always struggled to sleep that much for probably 20 years of my life.
I used to sleep 4 hours at night and I felt fine. And I’ve always said, but I feel fine. I don’t feel that I need to sleep more. Lately, I would say that as I’m getting older, I do feel a little tired when I do four hours. So those four hour nights are pretty much gone. I need at least five hours of sleep and I sleep six hours. I definitely feel that I get enough sleep.
More than that for me is hard. So I was introduced to this watch called the WHOP (w, h, o,p). What this watch does is that throughout the night when you’re sleeping, it monitors the weight that you’re sleeping. Are you waking up without interruptions? Because we all wake up. We have interruptions throughout the night. They call it “disturbance” throughout the night. If you have too many of them, obviously, that is affecting your deep sleep.
The idea is to really understand your heart rate. How many times do you wake up during the night without realizing it? How much time do you spend on light sleep vs. REM sleep in deep sleep? And how your habits before you go to sleep, actually affect you. All of those factors are quite interesting. One thing that I have learned is, number one, from what I see, I don’t require seven hours of sleep because I spend most of my sleep time in REM sleep, in deep sleep.
I know other people that are actually using the watch and they sleep seven to eight hours. But ironically, they spend more time in light sleep than deep sleep. To me, that explains why I actually feel that my body recovers and that I’m not tired at night. But one thing that I also notice is that if I had drinks before I go to sleep, if I have two drinks, two glasses of wine, I don’t sleep as well.
My deep sleep is affected. My heart rate is affected and my disturbance is affected. So the power of knowledge, the power of getting this information, at least for me, is that I sometimes enjoy a glass of wine or two. But what I’m doing is I’m actually having it as early as possible. The other thing is that if you, and this is a habit that I haven’t been able to really change, go to sleep and there is a lot you’re doing, you know, your e-mails, spending time on your phone or your computer, it affects your deep sleep as well.
That is one that I’ve been working on. But it is hard. It is hard to change the habit. I definitely spend less time doing my e-mails, which is something that I would do or just going over messages in my social media. I’m trying to change that, which is difficult. But what I’ve done has definitely changed the way I drink. When I haven’t had a drink or even coffee or tea, I try to have it at least three hours or four hours before I go to sleep, because I have definitely seen the effects through this WHOOP.
I’ve seen the effect these habits have had on my sleep and when you wake up in the morning. You get the data from when you’re sleeping. Powerful. You see how your body has recovered. I actually utilized this data when I was training with my trainer for the body fitness competition, which I had to stop, as you know, because of COVID-19. But I will use this data to see how much I would force my body training. How if my body would not recover from the night, I will maybe lift lighter than lift heavy.
It’s powerful data. The last thing I want to share with you about this is that I started to go to sleep meditating. The power of meditation. It’s crazy. God, I have to tell you. It is incredible how you feel the next day, even though sometimes I’m sleeping less. Maybe I’ll get, you know, five hours of sleep instead of six. But I still see that my body has recovered to 80 percent.
I monitored this already for one week. And I know that the thing that I’ve changed was meditation. It is evident that it works. I urge you to get this app or any other app that has the same modality where you can get this data to analyze your sleep. I hope you find this information valuable to you.
