My Top SLEEP Secrets for More Health, Wealth & Productivity

Makena: Hello, everyone. This is Makena Sage bringing you a solo podcast episode this week. Today, we’re going to talk about dialing in your sleep. This is one of my favorite topics personally. Sleep is something that is very, very important to me and hopefully important to you, too. If it hasn’t been at the top of your priority list, then maybe after listening today, you will reconsider that. We’re going to talk a little bit about why sleep is important and most importantly, what you can do to get more sleep, get better quality sleep, and really see the benefits of that in your life. So that is our topic for today.

First of all, I do want to have a brief kind of disclaimer that this is not medical advice. I’m going to be sharing my own experiences in the podcast today and what’s helped me personally. As always, please talk to your doctor about what’s right for you. Just use your own judgment. These are just my own experiences.

To me, sleep really isn’t a luxury. It is foundational. It is so, so key. It’s probably one of the number one—if I had to say life hacks, I’m not big on hacks, but if I had to say one of the things that you can shift or tweak or improve that will make the biggest difference across your entire life and your success, that would be sleep. Because when you get good sleep, everything in your life works better. Everything in your brain works better, in your body. It’s really, really core to everything. We’re going to go into why and how in just a moment.

If you find this episode helpful, please share it with someone in your life. Is there someone you know that could benefit from this or struggles with their sleep or said they want to get more sleep? We would be so honored if you would share this episode with them.

Going into why sleep is important: I’ve always loved sleep. As mentioned, when I was a kid I would sleep very deeply. I was one of those really great sleepers and in fact it was hard to wake me up a lot of the time, which I think was frustrating for my parents. I would sleep 10 or 12 hours a night a lot of the time. I don’t know about when I was a baby, but once I was a child and getting into adolescence, I loved sleep. It was pleasurable, enjoyable, restorative, something that I really just naturally slept well and prioritized. That’s not true for everyone, but I was really blessed in that regard.

Then as I got older, sleep quality started to decline a little bit, probably into my teens as I started staying up later at night and using more screens. Definitely once I got into college and university, I was just a huge overachiever. I was involved in not only a full course load at any given time, but involved in a lot of different activities and groups on campus. I worked multiple part-time jobs most of the time. I was an honors student. There were a lot of obligations on my time. Where could I sacrifice but in my sleep? I started sleeping fewer and fewer hours. My average week would be maybe four to six hours of sleep Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I would get to usually Thursday or Friday and have a huge emotional breakdown because I just was not functioning very well anymore. I was burning the candle at both ends and just exhausted.

This would start to hit me—the exhaustion and then the emotional component that came with that—by the latter part of the week. I just remember I would kind of fall apart. Then on the weekend, I would try to catch up on sleep, which research says isn’t really possible, but I would get deeper sleep, or get more sleep on the weekends, even though I went and partied, which probably meant my quality of sleep wasn’t that great because I was drinking alcohol a lot of the time. But I would crash out for, let’s say, ten hours a night on the weekend and then start all again on Monday.

So I went to the extremes with sleep, certainly with the way I slept when I was young and then the way I navigated sleep when I was in university. As a result of a lot of that, I dealt with a lot of health issues in those years after college—probably those next five to ten years. Even though I didn’t know it for a while what was going on, I had a lot of adrenal fatigue and hormone imbalance.

Because the way it works—there’s a lot of science to this and I’m not going to go deep into it—but if we’re continuously burning cortisol and adrenaline, that cortisol—we need it in order to live. If we are using a lot of it by not sleeping and by running on this go-go-go energy, then it actually starts to pull from other hormones in our body and transform those hormones into cortisol to make sure that we can survive. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s a very intelligent thing that our bodies do, but it leads to a lot of hormonal imbalance, or at least that was my experience. Over the years I had all kinds of challenges with that. One thing was being stuck in a state of fight or flight, which took a long time to wind myself out of. I had a lot of mood swings. I started having digestive issues. A lot of different stuff popped up in those years after college. Even though my sleep started to get better—better than it was then—I still was kind of like, the damage was done. There were other factors, of course, but I do think this was a big one.

I know life is full. You might have small children. I’m about to have a baby of my own, or maybe by the time this episode is airing, I may even have her here already. If that’s the case, your sleep is going to be impacted. You may have a very demanding job, but there are ways that we can still prioritize sleep, and that’s a lot of what I want to talk about. There are ways to optimize and prioritize sleep. Why not do as much as you can, even if your sleep is going to be interrupted or reduced, to improve the quality of your sleep?

I’ll tell you some of the reasons why you might want to take this seriously. These are just a few of the research-backed benefits of sleep. There are so many—you can just Google and you’ll find a huge list, or ask ChatGPT or whatever AI software you like—but some of the things that the research shows is that one night of poor sleep can reduce your mental sharpness by 30%. That’s a huge reduction. That’s almost one-third of your mental sharpness and capacity cut away just by having a night of poor sleep—not to mention emotional effects; we’re not even talking about the emotional side of things. This is just your ability to cognitively function, to think clearly, to work effectively.

This is one thing that when people say, “Well, I don’t have time to sleep more,” in my opinion—it actually costs you time. This is not just my opinion, it’s what the research shows. It actually costs you time not to sleep more, because we’re just not as effective. We can spend hours and hours on something that would take us a fraction of the time if we had gotten more sleep or better quality sleep. So this is something to consider if you’re one of those people that’s like, “Well, I just don’t have time to sleep more.” Think about how much more effective and productive you would be if you were sleeping longer and sleeping better quality.

Another statistic: chronic poor sleep is linked to a higher risk of certain cancers, especially breast and colon cancer. Now, this is just what the research currently shows. It’s probably linked to a whole lot more, not just cancers but other diseases. That’s another consideration. For your health, getting great sleep is one of the best things you can do.

Good sleep helps clear toxins in the brain that are actually linked to Alzheimer’s disease. If that’s a concern in your family or just something you’ve ever worried about, then getting good sleep is one of the biggest things you can do to prevent or reduce your chances of Alzheimer’s disease.

Good sleep regulates blood sugar. This is for people who struggle with weight, or if you have any kind of diabetes or pre-diabetes or anything like that. One of the biggest things is: can you dial in your sleep? If you dial in your sleep, you get enough sleep. Your blood sugar is so much more stable. You might just know this from the way you feel. I know if I get less sleep, I feel more hungry throughout the day, I eat more, it feels like my blood sugar is going up and down more. I just don’t feel as regulated. It can lower the risk of weight gain and also lower your risk of type 2 diabetes.

Getting good sleep is one of the best natural mood boosters. It actually has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression. And finally, it’s essential for memory, learning, and clear thinking.

This is just the very high level. I just wanted to give you a broad picture of some of the benefits of getting great sleep. But truly, there are so, so, so many more, and we’re only scratching the surface with the research on the impact of great sleep.

I did want to give one real-life example I heard on a recent podcast. LeBron James, who is an incredible basketball player (and also a billionaire, if you didn’t know that), really prioritizes sleep—at least eight hours a night. If he’s playing basketball, like when he is or was—I don’t even know if he’s actively playing—but he would sleep a lot more, like ten or more hours a night. He said it’s the best way he knows to re-energize his body and mind. He is just one example of someone who’s a very high performer, not only in sports but also in business, and he really credits sleep as one of the most important things that has helped him in his success. So take it from him if you’re an athlete or a business person. It’s one thing to hear the statistics; it’s another thing to hear that some of the world’s highest performers in a lot of different arenas know the power of really, really good sleep.

Let’s talk about—I want to call these “common sleep stealers.” What steals people’s sleep? These are things that many of us do without realizing that they’re making sleep harder. Or maybe we sort of know in the back of our minds, but we haven’t fully looked at it or admitted to ourselves that this is something we might want to change.

One that is commonly cited—and you are probably aware of on some level—is using screens or scrolling on social media at night. We’re talking especially once the sun goes down, because what happens here is it disrupts our brain chemistry. Throughout history and millennia, we developed as human beings to have the light of the sun, which starts out more bright and blue in the early part of the day and the middle of the day, and then actually becomes more orange and red as we get closer to sunset. Then, we have no light or very little light—maybe candlelight or fires. This was, for most of human history, the way our bodies were working.

Now, with screens, they produce a large amount of blue light. Blue light is typically more in the morning or the early part of the day. What’s happening here is it’s actually coming into our eyes and it disrupts things like melatonin, which is a hormone that is essential for good sleep. We naturally produce melatonin, but when you’re getting a lot of blue light in your eyes later into the evening or the night, it’s actually stimulating your brain, telling it that it’s earlier than it is, and it makes it very hard to go to sleep.

If you’re using screens past sunset or you’re scrolling on your phone late at night, there are some things you can do to help mitigate this. One thing is there are often blue light filters. I used to use an app for this. Now my computer has a filter—it’s not as dark as the app used to be, but it’s helpful. My phone also has it. I use Mac products, so I have a button I can push, a “night shift” feature, that makes the light on my computer more orange and cuts out more of the blue light. Same thing on my phone. If I click on the little sun in the settings and hold that down, I see “Night Shift off until sunset.” You can just Google “night shift,” or ask an AI to help you with this—make sure you know how to access the night shift feature on your computer and/or your phone.

I have mine set automatically on my phone to go on at a certain time and off at a certain time each day, so from sundown to sunrise, the night shift features on. It’s filtering more of that blue light and helping reduce that impact for me because it’s more orange light that’s coming through.

That’s one thing. If you don’t use Apple products or if you want another solution that’s even more effective, there is a software I used to use, I believe it was free, called f.lux—F-L-U-X. You download it to your computer and set that up to filter out the light for you.

The other thing you can use (and you may have seen some people doing this) is blue light blocking glasses. One thing I want to share is that not all blue light blocking glasses are created equal. There’s a lot of glasses companies that will say, “Oh, do you want to get the blue light blocking feature and add that to your glasses?” There’s nothing wrong with that—they help a little bit. But if your glasses are clear, meaning they don’t look orange, there’s a good chance they’re not blocking that much blue light. You might think you’re wearing blue light blockers, but find that it’s not really reducing the blue light all that much. Just do some research. If this is something you’re looking into, ask how much blue light does this particular set of glasses block. Most of the time, to block enough blue light to really make a difference, they would have to be orange tinted. Not maybe the most fashionable, but you can find some really cool ones these days. There are a lot of companies out there. You can look on Amazon or Google to find different kinds of blue light blocking glasses.

You would just put those on, especially at night after sunset. Wear them around your house, because there’s lots of blue light coming in—not just from your screens, but also from lights in your house. If you watch TV in the evenings, that’s another source.

You may want to set an alarm to remind you if you want to reduce your use of screens in the evenings. I set an alarm on my phone that is my wind down alarm. We’ll talk more about that later, but it goes off at 8:30 p.m. every night and that just tells me, “Hey, it’s getting late into the evening.” This is a good time to be off screens or to start to wind down and read a book. Some of these other things we’re going to talk about, that’s a great tip as well—try reading a book in the evenings instead of being on screens; that could be a really big, powerful switch.

Screens and scrolling at night is one of the most common sleep stealers. You may not believe me that it makes a huge impact, but I promise you it does and there’s a lot of research behind this. You’ll just have to test it out for yourself for a while. Just give it a shot—really reduce that blue light at night and ideally reduce your use of screens and scrolling. There’s more to it than just the blue light. Scrolling also activates a lot of areas of the brain and that can really disrupt your sleep.

There’s some really interesting research on this—I shared a podcast episode on another recent episode of this podcast from the Mel Robbins podcast, I believe it’s called “Before You Waste Time, Listen to This,” with a Harvard researcher who specializes in understanding the impact of social media on the brain. He talked about how basically, social media and stuff like that kind of numbs us out. We’re numbing, and then we go off social media and there’s this natural process that used to happen before we were on screens all the time, where we were processing our thoughts and emotions from the day in any open windows, like before we’re going to sleep at night or while we’re making dinner. But now we’re so activated all the time, and then we’re numbing out with these devices that we’re not getting that time, that open time we need to process mentally and emotionally what we went through that day or whatever it might be.

What happens is we can’t sleep because we stop scrolling, put our phones down, and we try to go to sleep. Not only is the blue light activating us, but all those thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we haven’t had time to process are flooding through our system. We can’t wind down—do you ever get that feeling? So then what most people do is they pick up their phone and start scrolling again, or they start working or whatever it might be, and we get into this cycle of “I can’t sleep,” but then we’re just filling our time and our brain with devices all the time. We end up in this loop that is hard to get out of. It’s not just about the blue light; it’s also about having open times where you’re not stimulated, especially as you get into the later part of the evening.

The second sleep stealer is not having a wind down routine. If you’re going straight from working—or even exercising in the evening—or putting your kids to sleep, or doing a whole bunch of different stuff, and you’re kind of wired up and then try to go straight to sleep, it’s tough to get your body to shift gears. Instead, create a routine, even if it’s ten minutes, that helps you mentally know that it’s time to shift and go into rest mode. For me, I take a bath almost every night. I love Epsom salt baths. I don’t always put salts in, but that can be very relaxing with the magnesium. Reading at night can be really great. That evening alarm I talked about is usually to cue me to start thinking about winding down and not just being busy or on screens. I’d recommend avoiding late night workouts, because if you work out too late into the evening it just wakes your body and brain up. For most people, unless it’s something like restorative yoga, you don’t want to be working out super late.

The third sleep stealer I want to talk about is ignoring your circadian rhythm. You may have no idea what a circadian rhythm is—that’s easy to look up—but it’s basically the natural rhythm of our bodies as it aligns to the clock, not the modern clock but more so the sun and seasons. We have this biological clock in our body that has developed over millennia to understand what time it is, what season it is, these kinds of things, based on our experience of light coming into our eyes and skin from the sun.

What’s happened as we’ve evolved as humans, especially in the last hundred or 150 years, is that we’re inside a lot more, not outside with our eyes getting exposed to the sun and our skin. By the way, this works even through the clouds to some degree. We’re out of connection to our natural biological clock, our internal circadian rhythm. More and more research is coming out about this and how challenging that is, how much that is impacting different systems of the body that have relied on that to know how to function optimally. Now we’re in this position of waking up, staying inside or driving in our car, going to work, being indoors there, and missing this whole connection to our circadian rhythms.

This can have an impact on a lot of different things, on our melatonin production, as mentioned, which helps us sleep, even on digestion. There’s a big link between irritable bowel syndrome or different digestive issues and not having connection to this circadian rhythm.

Let me tell you some things you can do that are very simple and very quick to help you start to realign your circadian rhythms. The biggest thing is getting your eyes in the sun first thing in the morning. As soon as you wake up—I have a dog, Chloe, so what I’ve started to do is, before I would just let her out in the morning and feed her, but now I actually step outside with her, and all I do is look toward the sun, whether there’s clouds or not. I look toward the sun with no sunglasses on, and try to get my eyeballs in the sun. It’s not too bright at that time, and just look at it for a couple minutes; you don’t have to look directly at it, but in the direction. That is really, really important because you’re telling your body what time it is, orienting to morning, whatever time it is. Ideally you do this a couple more times throughout the day, if possible. You want to get outside and get your actual eyes in the sun and even your skin, which has a lot of receptors, exposed to natural light.

The other best time, other than morning, is around sunset, because again, that red light starts to come in. If you look at a sunset or are outside walking around sunset, that’s going to cue your body that the sun is going down and that helps set your circadian rhythm. Morning sunlight exposure in the eyes and on the skin, and evening around sunset—those are the two most important times, but honestly the more you can do it throughout the day, the better. I don’t know the research around how long, but I just do a couple of minutes or maybe more if I’m walking. It doesn’t need to be a ton, and it can be really, really helpful for so many things—your health and your sleep.

Now sunglasses—let’s talk about those. I love sunglasses; I wear them frequently. But after learning about this, I started to question: do I need them all the time? Do I need them early in the morning, or in the evening if it’s sunset and I’m going for a walk? Or can I reduce my use of sunglasses, which block out a lot of that natural light we want hitting our eyes? That’s what I’ve done. In the middle of the day, I still wear them most of the time, but if I’m going for an evening walk with my husband, I put the sunglasses away. If I’m doing that couple minutes in the morning standing outside, I’m not wearing my sunglasses.

Everything else we’ve been talking about in terms of reducing blue light at night, wearing blue light blocking glasses, all of that is going to help your circadian rhythm. It’s going to support natural melatonin production and even digestion.

A couple other pro tips around this: We are very impacted by light as human beings, even if you think you’re not—even if you think, “Whatever, I can sleep in the middle of a bright room in the middle of the day”—that may be true, but there are often impacts to your quality of sleep that you may or may not be aware of. There’s a lot of research behind this: even a tiny light in your room at night can be disruptive, especially anything other than a red light. If it’s more like a red-hued light, it’s less likely to disrupt your sleep. If it’s green or blue or white or anything else, research has shown that it can really impact sleep, even if you’re wearing an eye mask and your eyes are covered. We have receptors on our skin, in different parts of our bodies. If you really want to optimize sleep, check for hidden lights at night in your room. 

All you do is turn off all your lights at night like normal, and after your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, maybe after lying there with your eyes closed, open them up and do a little scan around your room. Notice: “Wait, my clock has a light,” or “there’s this light on the wall that’s shining,” or “there’s a little light here off my power adapter,” or whatever it might be. See if you can eliminate or reduce some of those lights. I just had to put blue tape over something on my wall—a little alarm system that had a light blinking off it at night. I noticed when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, that light was hitting my eyes. If you can reduce these hidden lights in your room, that can be really helpful. Wearing an eye mask can also help. I sleep with an eye mask, even though it’s quite dark in my room. I’ve also trained myself to sleep with an eye mask, which is helpful when traveling. I have a really cushy, comfy one, and that helps reduce exposure to light as well. Blackout curtains are my other favorite thing—really making sure your room is as dark as possible at night helps the body sleep better.

A few other tips—I’ll go through these quickly. We have a sleep guide with some of my favorite products. If you don’t know what kind of eye mask to get or some things we’re talking about, we have a free guide I created because so many people were asking. You can get that at wayofthemuse.com/sleep. It’s a little PDF guide, and it has product recommendations and links to everything.

Other tips: we’ve talked about light a lot, so the next one is sound. If your partner snores or there’s ambient sound from outside, or you live in the city, sound can really disrupt sleep. I sleep with earplugs—my partner does as well. He likes the cheap ones from Amazon. Those don’t really work for my ears, so I get a nicer set that I reuse, the same pair every night. The brand I use is called Loop, and it’s their Dream earplugs—small, squishy, and comfy. I like those. That’s in the sleep guide as well.

A noise machine—I’ve slept with a noise machine for many years. We’ll see how this goes with a baby; there might be a period where that’s not possible, but a lot of people use noise machines for their kids now as well. You can get a noise machine or use an app—like Better Sleep—that plays ambient white noise or brown noise or pink noise. It’s non-repeating, static-like noise that drowns out other sounds. These two things are great—when we have guests, we’re like, “You don’t have to worry about making noise at night unless you’re yelling and screaming. We’re not going to hear you,” because we both sleep with earplugs and a noise machine.

Temperature is another big piece. Typically for most people, being on the cooler side at night, or having a warm blanket but a cool room, is best for sleep. We actually have a cooling and heating system for our bed—a mattress pad with coils that uses distilled water. Sunny’s got a control for his side of the bed, I have a control for mine, and we can each set it to our preferred temperature. In the summer, I like to set mine for cool—so does he. That keeps my side at whatever temperature—I do like 72 most nights, Sunny does even colder. We can heat or cool the bed as we want. In the winter I don’t use it as much, but our system can wake you up in the morning not with an alarm, but with heat—slowly getting hotter until you wake up, which is nicer than jolting awake to an alarm. We have recommendations in our sleep guide.

Sleep tracking can be really helpful to understand what’s affecting your sleep. If you’ve ever used an Oura ring—it tracks your sleep quality, time spent in REM versus deep sleep. It’s one of the best uses for the Oura ring, which tracks a lot of things, but I like it as a sleep tracker. There are other ones out there. People say, “Wow, I notice how much having a glass of wine at night impacts my sleep,” or “working out late into the evening,” or whatever. Some people have found, “I’m not getting any REM sleep at night—what’s that about?” Then they might talk to their doctor and address it. Tracking your sleep can be powerful to understand how much sleep you’re actually getting, and what factors impact sleep.

Mouth taping is something else I want to talk about. It sounds crazy, but it’s a trend—taping your mouth shut at night (not with scotch tape or strong tape, but with strips made for your mouth). They’re gentle, and keep your mouth from opening so you don’t mouth breathe. If you’re not a mouth breather, it may not be an issue, but I typically am. When I discovered mouth taping, it really helped me train myself to breathe more through my nose at night versus my mouth. There are so many health benefits—not only did it help my teeth, I got way fewer cavities and less bacteria building up at night, but often people who try it sleep deeper. It can even prevent snoring for some. Research it if you want, but know that it’s worth looking into. There’s a brand of mouth tape I really like in our sleep guide.

Sublingual melatonin is something I want to talk about. I am not a big fan of using a lot of melatonin. I think people overuse it—you become adjusted, and need more and more to get the result. I don’t think it’s great to put a ton of a hormone into our body. Ideally, we want to support natural production. I use it very sparingly. When I do, the two things that really work are: use a sublingual type (it hits your bloodstream through your mouth, not your digestive system, so you need much less); and use a specific brand I like (in our sleep guide). I use their 1mg chewable tablets (most people are like, “1mg, that’s nothing”), but believe it or not I use an eighth to a quarter of a pill—I’m microdosing melatonin. There are benefits to microdosing. You’re not putting a ton into your system. My husband does the same and finds he doesn’t need more than a quarter of a pill for deeper sleep. If you take higher amounts, some research shows it’s not great for sleep patterns—it can cycle you in a certain way that isn’t helpful. If you microdose, it’s just a gentle support. That’s my recommendation—do your own research, but I really like both the microdosing and not using it every night; I tend to do it maybe two to four times a week, cycling on and off.

All of these resources and more are in the sleep guide. I’ll give you that link again: wayofthemuse.com/sleep.

That was a lot of information! I feel like I bombard you sometimes, but I have so many tips and tricks and things I’ve researched over the years. This is one of my favorite topics. Hopefully you can take one or two things and apply them—maybe try something else next month and see how it goes.

So, what is one thing you could try this week? Think about that. Out of all we’ve talked about, what’s one thing you could do to optimize your sleep a little more?

Thank you again for listening, for being here, for prioritizing yourself. If you found this helpful, please share with someone in your life who would get value from it. It means the world to us. We’ll see you on the next episode. Bye.