There Is No Life Hack to Getting Good Sleep
For a lot of things, a "life hack" is useful. But for good sleep, the key is in how you spend the day before the restful sleep. When you do it this way, sleep comes as soon as your head touches the pillow. Read on to find out more!
CARE
Nicole Lasam
3/8/20253 min read
Living in the city has its perks, but it also has its downside. The city tends to be awake till the wee hours of the morning, and motorists outside seem always to be inspired to rev their engines as loudly as they can when they find themselves plying through the empty roads. It’s gotten so bad that at one point I noticed signboards put up by the residential communities which said, “People here sleep too. Please drive quietly.” Well… it was something to that effect.
Sleep is a wonderful thing that the body does to repair itself. That’s why we need at least seven hours of quality sleep every night. But did you know that, according to a 2023 study, Filipinos are the most sleepless people in Asia? In the study, 56% percent of Filipinos had less than seven hours of sleep a day.
Such studies don’t record the reason why those who don’t get good quality sleep sleep the way they do. Could it be because they work two or three jobs? Could they be too busy partying to sleep? Could they be simply unable to sleep due to having an inadequate bed, or something more psychological like regrets, fears, or other such troubles? Could they have sleep or breathing disorders?
Make a (concrete) resolution to sleep better
If you’re not getting enough sleep at night, it might be good to examine how you sleep. Short of having a sleep study done (which can find out if there are breathing problems that prevent deep sleep from happening), you can check your sleeping posture, whether your mouth is open and you breathe through it, or the conditions in your bedroom, etc.
Then examine what you do in a day. Do you exercise before going to bed? Drink coffee at 4pm? Some seemingly ordinary habits like eating a midnight snack or watching a late night movie can keep you from getting the deep sleep you need.
The resolution to sleep better is thus not just a vague “I will sleep better” but must be a concrete change in routine. This article on CNET is a good example of concretizing sleep resolutions. Their proposed “10-3-2-1-0 sleep hack” is a pre-sleep routine that involves avoiding caffeine 10 hours before bed, food and alcohol 3 hours before bed, work 2 hours before bed, and screens 1 hour before bed. The 0 stands for the number of times you should hit the snooze button in your alarm clock the next day.
No need for a hack, really!
If you don’t know where to start, a hack like this is a good way to do it. But the truth of the matter is that sleep comes best when you’ve done your best for the day. A friend of mine once described to me how she manages to sleep so well at night. Her advice is simple: do the work you ought to do at the time set to do them, rest by doing another useful activity (not mindlessly scrolling, for instance), and—out of love—look out for what others need, and help them, too.
When you’re busy doing this, you can really go to bed and find deep sleep waiting. That’s because the “non-trick” to getting good sleep is to expend all the energy—be “squeezed out like a lemon” as St. Josemaria Escriva would say—for the body to naturally go into a mode that is intended to repair itself. And the way to do this is simply not thinking only of yourself, but thinking of others, too. This goes against many individualistic ideas I’ve seen being spread around through the media, in culture, and in society. Caring more for others’ wellbeing leaves little room to be self-absorbed, which makes one regretful (“I wish I did/said/made this instead of that!”), indignant (when thoughts of being slighted keep “worming” in your head), or jealous (and thinking of ways to one-up whoever is the flavor of the month).
And maybe if more people cared for others, no one would need to put up a sign outside to say the engine-revving in the middle of the night is particularly annoying to mothers whose children can’t have a full night’s sleep because of some motorist outside who thought he owned the road.