Improving Sleep For Productivity

Residents living near certain data centers in places like Virginia, Texas, Ireland, and the United Kingdom have complained about symptoms including: Sleep disruption, Headaches, Stress and anxiety, Fatigue, Difficulty concentrating, and Irritability https://lnkd.in/gR4G9Jzk https://lnkd.in/gigtx3Pw https://lnkd.in/gZ5v3NTT https://lnkd.in/g3Cv9BMK https://lnkd.in/gyahfKH4 https://lnkd.in/g2hVjU93 https://lnkd.in/g3rmtqN9 https://lnkd.in/gUBFeMa8 Many of these complaints are linked to constant noise, especially low-frequency noise from cooling systems, fans, transformers, and backup power equipment. Some residents describe a persistent hum or vibration that is particularly noticeable at night. The strongest scientific evidence points to noise exposure as the most plausible mechanism. We already know from decades of research that chronic environmental noise can affect sleep quality, stress hormones, cardiovascular health, and cognitive performance. Similar concerns have been raised around airports, highways, industrial facilities, and wind turbines. Paul Héroux, associate Professor of Medicine at McGill University, has warned that high levels of infrasound may affect the nervous system and heart function. He argues that sound, electric fields, and magnetic fields of similar frequencies can have overlapping biological effects because they introduce disruptive forms of energy into living systems. Recent research has found that chronic environmental noise exposure can affect children especially hard. Long-term noise exposure can lead to poorer cognitive performance, reduced reading comprehension, concentration difficulties, higher stress levels, and behavioral challenges. The debate is no longer just about technology or infrastructure; it is about the environments we are creating and whether the hidden costs of constant industrial noise are being adequately considered for the people who live nearby. What is unfolding in our world continually shows what we value as a society. It's not human health or human well being, it is the expansion of economies, war power and technology at all costs. Our views of progress are too narrow. ✓Read and learn more: https://lnkd.in/g2p2hCeE https://lnkd.in/gSv-sBN7 https://lnkd.in/gSRYWWir https://lnkd.in/g_patRxQ https://lnkd.in/g-SkafXs https://lnkd.in/gf6bNMCD https://lnkd.in/gt5UHvjG https://lnkd.in/gSv-sBN7 https://lnkd.in/gE6VRzjE https://lnkd.in/gv22hVGi ✓Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publications: https://lnkd.in/gAPF5jiM https://lnkd.in/gyKch8Q6 https://lnkd.in/gAPF5jiM https://lnkd.in/g5bAXuUd https://lnkd.in/gw7kq9Zy https://lnkd.in/ghFEyz_J https://lnkd.in/gmDnYEsM https://lnkd.in/gT-z6Ccd https://lnkd.in/gZEijY_S https://lnkd.in/g7VFGTXy https://lnkd.in/gYsfxqCq https://lnkd.in/gENwMSFv https://lnkd.in/gNHqAumb https://lnkd.in/gqZUW9EQ https://lnkd.in/gX5nqa9P https://lnkd.in/gcimp-WP https://lnkd.in/gghxBUKS

I spent weeks going through 3 independent validation studies comparing 10 wearables to polysomnography. The headline number everyone quotes (91-98% sleep sensitivity) is basically meaningless. Here's what actually matters: Wake detection: the thing that tells you how accurately your device catches when you were lying awake in the middle of the night: Google Pixel Watch: 23% Apple Watch S8: 45-52% Fitbit Sense 2: 27-67% Oura Ring Gen3: 38-68% Total sleep time is overestimated by almost every device: Withings: +39 min Garmin: +38 min WHOOP: +24 min Apple Watch: +19 min Fitbit: +6 min (most accurate) Deep sleep is the hardest to classify. Oura detects 77-79% of it, but flags 80% false positives. If you're making health decisions based on sleep stages from a wearable, this is worth reading before interpreting your next "sleep score." Full breakdown in the newsletter: https://lnkd.in/d2bP34RK And because no post of mine feels complete without one: a little hand-drawn figure below. Subscribe in the comments if you don't want to miss next posts.

Sleep is the brain’s most powerful performance tool, and most people treat it like a negotiable expense. Neuroscience is blunt: when you cut sleep, the brain shifts into survival mode. Astrocytes prune more synapses. Microglia stay activated. The glymphatic “night shift” that clears waste runs poorly. You don’t just feel tired. You lose clarity, memory consolidation, and emotional control. Decisions get riskier. Empathy gets thinner. Creativity shrinks. It’s not hours you’re sacrificing. It’s executive function. High performance isn’t willpower, it’s architecture. The brain thrives in rhythm, not chaos. Try this for 7 days: • Wake at the same time daily (weekends too). Let bedtime adjust earlier. • Light before phone: 5–10 minutes of outdoor light upon waking. • Caffeine curfew: none after 2 PM. • Protect one 90-minute deep-work block after your best sleep. • Swap micro-scrolls for a 10–20 minute early-afternoon nap. • Dim lights and screens 60–90 minutes before bed. • Run a 10–15 minute wind-down ritual (shower/stretch/paper journal, same order every night). Small rituals, massive neurological returns. Leaders don’t optimize sleep because it’s soft; they optimize it because it’s leverage. Start tonight. ♻️ Kindly repost to share with others Follow Benjamin B. Bargetzi for more on Neuroscience, Psychology & Future Tech

For years, I felt guilty every time I slept only 6 hours. Turns out, the 8-hour rule never had solid science backing it. When I started researching sleep seven years ago, I discovered something that changed everything: the 8-hour rule isn't based on individual needs. Here's what recent sleep research actually shows: Sleep needs vary by person → Some people genuinely need 9 hours to function optimally  → Others thrive on 6-7 hours  → It depends on genetics, age, lifestyle, and health Quality beats quantity What matters more than hours? Sleep cycles. One complete sleep cycle takes 90 minutes. You go through light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. The magic happens when you complete 4-5 full cycles—that's about 6-7.5 hours for most people. Waking up mid-cycle makes you feel tired, even if you've been in bed for 8+ hours. The real markers of good sleep: → Waking up without an alarm feeling refreshed  → No afternoon energy crashes  → Ability to focus throughout the day  → Falling asleep within 15-20 minutes What I learned building The Sleep Company: After talking to thousands of customers, I realized most people obsess over sleep duration but ignore sleep quality. They'll force themselves to lie in bed for 8 hours on an uncomfortable mattress, in a hot room, checking their phones, and wonder why they're still tired. The solution isn't more hours. It's a better sleep environment, consistent sleep schedule, and the right support for your body. Stop chasing an arbitrary number. Start tracking how you actually feel. How many hours do you sleep, and do you wake up feeling refreshed?

Over the past couple of years, I've interviewed several sleep professors and physicians. They've shared a LOT of sleep tips with me. Being the lab rat psychologist I am, I tested them all. On myself. At this point, I have tried everything short of sleeping upside down like a bat. Many sleep tips failed to shift the dial. But three strategies genuinely transformed my sleep. Tip #1: Sleep LESS to sleep better This one surprised me. When I was struggling with insomnia, I was told: the worst thing you can do is spend more time in bed. Instead, less time in bed is the trick. Sleep restriction therapy (which I wrote about in The Health Habit) works like this: If you're only sleeping 6 hours but spending 9 hours in bed, restrict your bed time to 6 hours. Your sleep efficiency skyrockets. Then gradually increase it over the course of a few weeks. Tip #2: The 3-2-1 Rule 3 hours before bed: No more food 2 hours before bed: No more work 1 hour before bed: No screens (Kindle doesn't count) "But Amantha, I need to scroll the socials at 11pm!" (Said no well-rested person ever). Tip #3: Wake within the same 30-minute window every day Yes, even on weekends. I can hear you groaning. Let me explain. This is the cure to "social jetlag". Your circadian rhythm doesn't care that it's Saturday. When you sleep in for "just 2 more hours," you're essentially giving yourself jet lag. I wake between 6-6:30am every single day. No exceptions. The payoff? I fall asleep easily, wake naturally, and haven't needed an alarm in months (except when I have a ridiculously early How I Work podcast interview to get up for). What's your most effective sleep hack? Or are you still searching for the holy grail of good sleep? #SleepScience #ProductivityHacks #EvidenceBasedWellbeing

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS, our paper on data analytics approaches for monitoring sleep patterns using a soft, wireless electronic device designed with a high-bandwidth accelerometer and configured to gently mount on the suprasternal notch – an information-rich anatomical location for recording diverse mechano-acoustic activities, from subtle vibrations of the skin to bulk movements of the body. Digital filtering of the resulting data yields a broad range of characteristic features associated with heart rate, respiratory rate, respiratory sounds, body orientation and many others. This paper focuses on advanced machine learning algorithms that operate not only on these features but also on the raw data and an associated collection derived quantities. Training relies on recordings from human subjects in a sleep laboratory, where clinical-grade polysomnography systems and scoring by professional sleep clinicians set the ground truth. The resulting technology – soft, skin-interfaced sensors and machine learning algorithms – determine sleep patterns with fidelity that lies beyond that of traditional wrist or finger-mounted wearables. One interesting and intuitive finding - especially for anyone who has had children – is that respiratory sounds, rates, durations, depths and their temporal variations are powerful indicators of sleep onset and quality, yet not typically captured directly with home sleep monitors. Prof. Yayun Du (former postdoc, now on the faculty at Vanderbilt University), Jianyu Gu (former MS student, now a PhD student at Dartmouth College with former postdoc Prof. Wei Ouyang) and Shiyuan Duan (former MS student, now a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with former postdoc Prof. Cunjiang Yu) and Jacob Trueb (software engineer and data scientist at our Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics) contributed equally to this project. Deeply grateful to them for their excellent work, and to our main clinical collaborator on this project – Dr. Charles Davies, head of Sleep Medicine at Carle Hospital. We also thank senior colleagues Prof. Yonggang Huang (Northwestern University) and Dr. Andrew N. Carr (Procter & Gamble) for their important contributions. On-going work involves the use of this system to quantify sleep in pediatric patients, including those with Down syndrome, in collaborations with clinicians and sleep medicine experts at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago – Dr. Debra Weese-Mayer and Dr. Ilya Khaytin.  Looking forward to publishing the results of these studies in the near future! https://lnkd.in/gnPk-K7h

I’m a pediatric ophthalmologist, and I made this exact screen-time mistake with my own babies. When my three kids were infants, I always had HGTV playing in the background. This was about 15 years ago, before we had the research we do now. My thinking was simple: they’re doing tummy time facing the floor… they aren’t even looking at the TV. So I assumed it didn’t matter. I was wrong. In my work, I spend a lot of time looking at the research around children’s vision, development, and digital exposure. A large 2022 review (Guellai et al.) examined how the context of screens affects infants—especially background television. When you look at the sleep data, the findings are striking: • In 4-month-old infants, just one hour of screen exposure is associated with ~13 minutes less nighttime sleep. • In babies 6 months and younger, screen exposure correlates with reduced daytime naps—they simply have a harder time settling. • It’s not only blue light affecting melatonin. Infants are biologically wired to orient toward movement and changing light, which creates cognitive and physiological arousal even if they aren’t directly watching. • Studies also show that even passive device presence in the sleep environment (for example, a phone on the nightstand) is associated with inadequate sleep duration. The important nuance here: this isn’t about guilt or perfection. Most parents are just trying to get through the day. But if a baby seems unusually wired, overstimulated, or constantly fighting sleep, it may be worth experimenting with what I call a “zero-screen environment” during sleep windows - turning off background TV and minimizing device exposure nearby. Sometimes the smallest environmental changes make the biggest difference for an infant nervous system that’s still learning how to settle. For the parents and clinicians here: Have you noticed changes in infant sleep or behavior when background screens are removed? I’m always curious what others are seeing in real life alongside the research.

Q4 is where careers are made... and health quietly collapses. Working 55+ hours a week raises stroke risk by 35% and heart disease by 17% (WHO, 2021). Many of you reading this are doing 80+. The goal isn’t to slow down but to survive the pace without paying the price. Here’s your evidence-based Q4 survival plan; the same I share with execs running at 120% capacity. 𝟭. 𝗦𝗹𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗱𝗿𝘂𝗴. 55% of executives don’t get enough. Each 45 minutes of lost sleep cuts cognitive control by ~10%. Target: 6–7 hours minimum nightly + a 20-minute nap after lunch. Optimize: cool room (18–20°C), same wake time daily, no screens 90 min before bed. 𝟮. 𝗙𝘂𝗲𝗹 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗴𝘂𝗲. Long days = glucose chaos. Eat every 3–4 hours to stabilize energy. Focus on protein + healthy fats. Avoid simple carbs. Hydrate: at least 2.5–3L daily. Mild dehydration kills focus faster than caffeine fixes it. 𝟯. 𝗠𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁, 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿. 20–30 minutes of training a day: short, intense, and consistent beats heroic once-a-week efforts. Micro-move: walk during calls, do air squats between meetings. Weekend rule: recharge with longer outdoor sessions. 𝟰. 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗼. Breathing resets your nervous system faster than any pill. Try box breathing (4-4-4-4) or the 4-7-8 method between calls. Schedule micro-breaks every 90 minutes to prevent burnout buildup. Protect the final 30 minutes of your day: no screens, no Slack, no stimulation. 𝟱. 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲. Use HRV (Whoop, Garmin, Oura) as your early stress indicator. If your HRV tanks 3 days in a row, it’s not a badge of honor... it’s a warning. 𝟲. 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 (𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘆 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗵𝘆𝗽𝗲). Creatine: 5g daily – brain + muscle ATP buffer. Magnesium glycinate: 200–400mg – sleep and stress regulation. Omega-3s: 1–2g EPA/DHA – anti-inflammatory shield. Ashwagandha: 300–600mg – lowers cortisol. The truth? You can’t “outwork” biology. But you can design a system to sustain performance under pressure. Start small. Pick one pillar (sleep, movement, or nutrition) and lock it in for the next 30 days. Consistency beats optimization every single time. Q4 starts now. Don’t just deliver results. Outlast the chaos. Read the full framework in my newsletter the Upward ARC. Link in bio. #UpwardARC

Serious LinkedIn discussion time: What’s the best way to sleep on a red-eye flight? I humbly submit my approach below. I’ve spent years optimizing something that might be the most underrated business skill — actually getting rest on an overnight plane trip. Here’s my checklist: ✅ Prep before the airport: I do my full nighttime routine (e.g. brushing my teeth) at the airport so my brain is primed for “bedtime,” not “travel mode.” ✅ Pre-boarding: avoid bright lights including any screens. Yes, I’m that guy in sunglasses at the gate at 9PM (and yes, I look ridiculous). I also take melatonin about an hour before boarding. ✅ On the plane: go full sensory deprivation mode. I double up with ear plugs + noise-cancelling headphones. I put on a sleep sound playlist and a padded eye mask. (Make sure the shape is concave so you can blink under it.) My shoes are off and I drape a light blanket to mimic a sheet at home. ⏭️ Skip the in-flight meal. I typically go straight to sleep once I’m seated. ✅ On arrival: No coffee. Just water and a walk to reset my body clock. I also use this app called Timeshifter which was designed by astronauts. (It helps travelers adjust to different time zones.) Few things can sabotage your performance as badly as missing a full night’s sleep while stuck on a plane. With this routine, I typically get a solid few hours of sleep and can head straight into a morning meeting without feeling like a zombie. But there’s always room for improvement — I’d love to hear other red-eye sleep strategies for business travelers.

SCREEN TIME IN BED LINKED TO LESS SLEEP, HIGHER INSOMNIA RISK A new study of over 45,000 young adults found that using screens in bed increases the risk of insomnia by 59% and cuts sleep by 24 minutes. Surprisingly, the type of activity—whether social media, movies, or studying—didn’t make a difference; it was the screen time itself that mattered most. Researchers believe this is due to “time displacement,” where screens delay sleep by taking up rest time. The study suggests turning off screens at least 30–60 minutes before bed to protect sleep quality. 3 Key Factors: 1. 59% Insomnia Risk: One extra hour of screen time after bedtime raises insomnia odds by 59%. 2. Time, Not Type: All screen activities disrupt sleep equally, regardless of content. 3. Lost Sleep: Bedtime screen use shortens nightly sleep by an average of 24 minutes. Source: https://lnkd.in/gXgUHHyN