How optimizing my sleep is making me limitless

You've heard your whole life that you should get eight hours of sleep every single night. It's advice so common that even your grandma has probably told you that at least three times. But that advice has always annoyed me somewhat because it's like, yeah, obviously I should get eight hours of sleep every single night. But how realistic is that?

I'm sure there are plenty of successful people in the world. In fact, I've heard of some successful people in the world who sleep less than eight hours a night, and they seem to be doing just fine. Besides, in my own life, I've had plenty of great days on six hours of sleep, six and a half hours of sleep, and I've probably had a bunch of really bad days on eight or nine hours of sleep. So how important is getting eight hours of sleep really? Does it matter that much?

So in this video, we're gonna get to the bottom of it. I partnered up with this company called Sleep Number that makes these super advanced smart beds that track every aspect of your sleep, and they agreed to send me one and use it for this experiment as long as I give them a shout out, etc., etc. So over the past three weeks, I've been sleeping in this bed exclusively, and it's been tracking every aspect of my sleep in detail: how much restful sleep I got, how many times I exited the bed, how many times I wet the Vietnam.

And while all this tracking was going on in the background, I was just living my life, and every single day I was vlogging how I felt. You know, how's my energy levels? How is my general productivity and mental clarity? And it wasn't until the very end of the experiment that I actually went back, reviewed the footage, and paired the footage up with my actual sleep data to see if there was any correlation between my energy levels, my overall will to live, and the amount that I slept.

And the results blew my mind, and it completely changed the way I view sleep in general. I'm sure you'll find it extremely fascinating as well. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

So I basically just woke up. Um, I don't feel that good. Um, yeah, if I were to guess, I had six and a half hours of sleep, which isn't terrible, right? By any means, I'll have a good day today. We did not have a good day today. I just felt brain dead. Okay, so brain dead was the common theme today. I probably slept very poorly, or my sleep quality wasn't very good: 73. It took me an hour and 50 minutes to fall asleep. I was only restful for five hours and 49 minutes, restless for 40 minutes.

Sub six hours of sleep, this is what I look like, and this is how I operate on sub six hours. Today it's 3:44 p.m. I feel pretty good, not fantastic. I wouldn't say I'm teeming with energy like a hive full of caffeinated bees. I've had worse days. Yeah, so I'm going to assume I didn't sleep fantastically, like probably sub seven hours I'm out of sleep.

Let's see. Yeah, see like I got an 83 sleep IQ score, and I think the thing that's propping up my sleep IQ score is that I had absolutely no bed exits or restless sleep until the very end. But still, look at that: six hours and 37 minutes of sleep. It's still sub seven hours, so you know I'm not feeling great. I'm also quite alarmed by the time it took for me to fall asleep: two hours and 10 minutes. So that was probably on my phone for a long time. I was exposed to a lot of blue lights.

Let's keep going. What's up? Um, I slept with my contacts in last night. Oh my, I look awful! I look like awful, like my, I'm the same person. It's a slower day. I'm gonna play some video games. I also was trying my blue blockers last night, so there wasn't a lot of blue light getting in. Yeah, I look so bad. Like, look at me! This is like degenerate me.

So we can learn a lot from this. I look bad. So was it the sleep? Was it the quality of sleep? Or was it the fact that I slept with my contacts in? 77. I got six and a half hours of sleep again. Well, I went to bed at 3:30 a.m. like, that's just not okay. And I woke up at 11. This is not the face of somebody who is teeming with energy, who's excited about life and who has drive and charisma. Like, oh, look at that.

So I ate a bunch of pizza last night. Terrible idea, and I slept awfully. I look 45 years old today! I look 45 years old every day, and I'm gonna see how productive I can be. I'm in a rut. I'm glad we have this as a control; you can see the difference between like how I'm operating and like how I look and how I'm talking in this versus like right now.

11:02 p.m. So this is later that day. I don’t know what happened to me, and now it is 11 p.m., and I'm absolutely begged. I'm looking forward to just being a good person. That's so sad. Clearly, I was wiped. 68. Once again, man, I'm loving these six and a half, six hour, 45 minutes of sleep.

So apparently, I was restless for an hour and a half, and that's what happens to me when I eat pizza, dude! When I eat pizza before bed, gobble, gobble, gobble! I always have to like wake up later in the night to like burp myself as if I'm an infant. Six and a half hours of sleep is not enough for me to feel snappy, even though I feel like it is every single morning.

I'm like, oh, I got six and a half hours, but as the day goes on, it's proving to be like not a great day. Okay, today I feel good! I actually feel like I got sleep finally! It feels like I got high quality sleep. I notice a world of difference. I don't know if you guys are noticing; words are coming to my mouth faster. I don't look so out of it, even though this is not a great frame to pause on. My brain feels clearer, and I'm just more motivated to do difficult things.

Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. Update: I just did a-roll! Holy [ __ ] did I have energy! Speaking, like words were just coming to me! I had energy to say what I meant and mean what I say! It was a great experience! You can tell, like I can tell.

Anyways, I still once again don't look great, but my brain power is so much better! Holy smokes! What a good night's sleep! 7 hours and 55 minutes of sleep! So I basically got eight hours, a 95 sleep score! My mind is kind of blown right now because you don't think that the difference between six and a half hours of sleep and eight hours of sleep is that vast, but clearly we can see that I'm like two different people!

This is way cooler than I thought it would be! Honestly, what did we get the next day? Hello there! Um, I feel really good today! Right now, I feel like alert. I feel awake. I feel stable! I like this feeling! This is probably like the best or second best that I've felt. I probably got like 89, 90 in this one.

Let's see. 96. It was my best one! That's crazy! 7.59. So I got eight hours of sleep again! That's the difference! Holy smokes! The two times that I've felt really good, and I'm like I feel good, I can do it today, both times it's because I got eight hours of sleep! It's no joke!

Let's see how I continue to do as the days go on. I feel a little too good. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've been being productive! Yeah, like mental clarity is just insane right now. Hmm, did I just get like insane sleep last night? I feel really good! I had energy for days today! I had energy to spare! I had energy!

Yeah, I was super productive! Hi, welcome to Chili's! My energy levels are still fantastic, and I'm going to bed now, 12 p.m. No, 12 a.m.! That's how time works! But now I'm gonna go to sleep and hopefully it's a good sleep again.

All right, the reveal! Drum roll please! 85! This sleep score isn't as good as the day before, but this is the first time ever that I had two good nights in a row. So I think that's the difference here. Hey, um, I played hockey last... Why did my skin look so bad? I played hockey last night. Um, didn't go so well!

I just looked bad! Don't I look bad today? 68. I wasn't expecting the correlation to be this tight! The correlation is tight! So let's see what the next day was like. I just want to say today was an absolute disaster! I feel like I barely had any sleep. I basically didn't do anything today—like, it was wild! I was brain dead! 64 and a half hours of sleep— it makes sense!

Yeah, so this is how you want to live your life, Joey: get bad sleep. Hey, guys, I feel really good today! Yesterday was an absolute disaster! I didn't do anything! Today it feels completely different! It feels like I actually have energy! I have mental clarity! And I'm making good headway on my projects! I would be shocked if I didn't sleep well the night before.

90. Guys, I don't know what to say at this point anymore. Just stop the video! What else do I need to say? My entire energy, my enthusiasm about life, my ability to get things done, the confidence in myself to be able to get things done: it skyrockets when I sleep better!

And all throughout my life, I've had this understanding that like, oh, as long as I get six hours of sleep I'm functional. But what that really means is like I'm barely surviving. And on six hours of sleep, my willpower goes down, I make worse decisions, and I don't take care of myself and play more video games, which results in worse sleep, which results in perpetuating that type of sub-optimal lifestyle.

If you can find a way to sleep better, then all of a sudden you have a different aura about yourself, and you're able to make better decisions that will influence better sleep going forward. So I think it's becoming far too clear that having a lot of good quality sleep, you know, optimizing your sleep is crucial to feeling good.

But if I just ended the video here and just said getting good sleep is good for you, it would be kind of a useless video. It'd still be kind of interesting to see how important it is, but I don't want you to walk away from this video just being like, "Man, I just got to get better sleep," but I have no idea how.

So here are some tips that I learned through this experiment that will help you get as much high-quality sleep as possible so that you can go and transform your life. Tip number one is that you need to get off your phone while you're in bed. I noticed that there was a huge correlation between the amount of time I was spending on my phone blasting my brain with blue light and the quality of sleep I got because of it.

Being on your phone while you're trying to go to sleep ruins your sleep for two reasons. Number one is that it stops you from actually falling asleep, and it cuts into the potential time window that you should be sleeping, and instead you're replacing that with being on your phone. And as we learned, there's a gigantic difference between six and a half and seven and a half hours of sleep.

So while you're in bed, the best use of your time is to be asleep. Now this might be obvious, but you also might be thinking, well, I can't really go to sleep right away, and being on my phone kind of helps me burn some time so that when I feel that wave of sleep, I can ride it into La La Land, which I understand totally.

But it's a little bit silly if you think about it because the blue light from your phone messes with your circadian rhythm. It tells your brain subconsciously that it's daytime, so the likelihood that you'll actually feel this wave of sleep is reduced. And so many of us get trapped in this cycle of just waiting for this wave of sleep that never comes.

So if you're looking for something to do while you're waiting for that wave of sleep, then I highly recommend reading a book. It doesn't have to be super exciting; in fact, if it's kind of boring, it's probably better. You will be shocked as to how quickly it's just lights out when you start reading.

The second biggest tip I can give is to not drink caffeine past lunchtime, and there's a very specific reason for this. I've talked about it in previous videos. It's that the half-life of caffeine is between five and seven hours, and what that means is not that the caffeine goes away from your system in five to seven hours.

It means that half of the caffeine is still there after five to seven hours, and then it takes another five to seven hours for half of that amount of caffeine to leave your system. So if we average that time out to six hours, and you stop drinking caffeine at lunchtime, then by midnight you'll have about a quarter of the caffeine still in your system, which should be plenty of time for a lot of that caffeine to be flushed away, helping you feel drowsy when you're actually supposed to put your head on your pillow and get some high-quality sleep.

The third tip I have is to make your room colder. One thing that I noticed very clearly throughout this experiment was that when my room was hot and I was inclined to take off covers instead of put them on, I had way worse sleep. And I don't really know the science behind this, but you've probably noticed as well when you have nightmares, you usually wake up in a sweat.

And it gets me thinking, did you wake up in a sweat because of your nightmares, or were you having nightmares in the first place because you were sweating and you were super hot? Another thing that I noticed is that when my room is super cold, I really want to just bundle up and get warm. It's sort of the singular focus of my brain, and it almost has a meditation effect.

It brings your consciousness away from this cerebral cortex anxiety, "What did I do wrong earlier today?" And it brings your consciousness almost to this localized concern. It's like, "Oh, I need to get cozy! Oh, it's nice to be cozy! I think I'll fall asleep." You know, it kind of simplifies your brain into getting warm and falling asleep. It's perfect, so make your room colder.

Another tip I have is don't eat a bunch of pizza right before you go to bed. There wasn't much difference between eating a light snack and eating nothing before bed, but there was a huge difference between that and eating a ton before bed. So if I had a bunch of fried chicken or pizza right before bed, it ruined my quality of sleep.

It was really hard to get into deep sleep, and I had to keep on waking up multiple times to like burp myself. It's just not a fun time. So the bottom line is, if you have to sleep anyways, if it's a non-negotiable unavoidable part of being a human being, then why not find a way to make that better somehow so that the entire experience of living improves?

Because it's one to one: the better the sleep, the better you'll feel. Hopefully, this video made you think about why you should get better sleep and how you should get better sleep using some of the things that I learned through this sleep experiment.

So I hope that by using this information, you're able to find a good night's sleep tonight because I feel like you deserve it. A big thank you to Sleep Number for making this video possible, for providing me with this super high-tech smart bed, because without this tool, this experiment would not be possible.

The sheer detail of the sleep tracking technology present in this smart bed is second to none. It was so incredibly easy to figure out and problem-solve why I wasn't sleeping properly. Not only that, but the smart bed also makes it extremely easy to make modifications to help you get better sleep.

For instance, I found that I'm just a lot more comfortable and more likely to get into deep sleep when my head is slightly elevated, and I also prefer the bed to be just a little bit on the firmer side, which is easily adjustable in the app as well. And I remember there were two nights in particular where my feet were super cold; they were like ice bricks, and for some reason they just couldn't get warm.

But thankfully, I remembered that there's also built-in foot warmers. Basically, this smart bed does all the heavy lifting for you so you can just focus on getting a good night's sleep so that you can tackle the next day with energy.

So if you're interested in checking out the smart bed that I used for this experiment, use my link in the description below, check out the Sleep Number 360 smart bed, and thanks again to Sleep Number for sponsoring this video. If you liked this video, then make sure that you actually hit the like button! It helps a tremendous amount! It helps the video rank better, it helps push this video onto people's home pages, helping them out, which also helps me out, so it's a win-win for everybody involved.

If you're lurking here and this is the billionth time that you've seen my face, then consider hitting that subscribe button. Other than that, I hope you enjoyed this one, guys! Thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video!