Our Ancestors Slept Better And We Are Losing Sleep Today
I want to talk to you guys a little bit about sleep, and I’m going to share with you first, some really actually pretty shocking information that you maybe have never heard about sleep.
About 100 years ago something very drastic happened to humans as a species in their sleep. We’ve actually over the last 100 years as a species, as a whole species combined on this planet, we have lost an average of two hours of sleep.
Our ancestors 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 1000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, they used to sleep two more hours than we did. What happened, you may ask? Well, I’m going to tell you it’s linked to something very specific: the invention of electricity, specifically, lights and light bulbs. So what happened to our ancestors prior to the invention of lights is that it used to get dark when the sun went down and we actually have all these sensors throughout our body, particularly in our eye, that when it gets dark, we start to release certain chemicals in our brain. And those chemicals are the chemicals that put your brain in the right state to go to sleep.
Guess what? We now have a thing called artificial light. And most of us, when the sun goes down, we’re still walking around in artificial light. And what that’s doing is it’s messing with our brains, literally, chemicals in our brains that’s not allowing us to go to sleep. What makes us probably even worse is that you are more than likely looking at different devices at night, too. Whether it’s your smartphone that you’re looking at, putting light right into your eyes, whether it’s the television set, whether it’s your computer because you’re working late, most of us are looking at devices at night and that is also now even making our sleep even worse as a species.
There are some things you can be doing to improve upon this. One is when it gets dark out, you can start dimming lights in your house.
They’re actually now are specific light bulbs that are designed to put off the right type of rays that are less harsh on your eyes, less harsh on your body, it’s going to allow you to improve your sleep cycles. A really cool hack that you can do is buy some blue blocking glasses, the blue blocking glasses block out the blue spectrum of light. That’s the one that particularly is going to mess with your sleep cycles. There are some easy hacks you can start doing there.
The more you can cut out and I mean, cut out, screen time prior to you going to bed, the better you’re going to be. Most of the leading sleep experts in the world recommend, two hours before you’re planning to go to sleep, no devices. That means no TV, no phone, no computer. That might be kind of harsh.
I always recommend to people, if we’re going to start looking at that, and you should start looking at that, start off, hey, I’m going to start off maybe doing that 20 minutes before I go to bed, and then a half an hour, and then 40 minutes, and then 50 minutes. If you’re measuring your sleep, which again I recommend that you all should be measuring your sleep, you can see how these things are having a positive effect on your sleep. It is so critical to be getting back that two hours of sleep that we are designed to have and should be having.
