Vanessa Hill shares 3 rules for better sleep
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What I find in the sleep industry is that there are a lot of these products that have marketing messages behind them and a lot of advertising dollars that are telling people like buy this $100 pair of blue light blocking glasses and it will fix your sleep.

Hey there, I'm Matt D'Avella and welcome to my short form podcast, Three Rules. Each episode, I ask a guest to share three rules that help them find success and happiness. Today, I'm joined by Vanessa Hill, a behavioral scientist, educator, and creator behind the popular YouTube channel, BrainCraft. With a background in sleep research and science communication, Vanessa has helped millions better understand the psychology behind rest, habits, and decision-making.

Today, she's sharing her three rules for better sleep. And I can say firsthand that these rules have really helped me improve my own sleep since doing the interview. We're going to be talking about three rules for sleep with this episode. What's rule number one?

So my first rule is don't focus on the number of hours that you get at night. There is a big focus on this where a lot of people think you should get eight hours sleep, which isn't necessarily the case. The official recommendations are between seven to nine hours if you are

a healthy midlife at all. But as you age, it's normal to get six hours sleep and the recommendations somewhat change. If you're younger, if you're say in your late teens or 20 years old, you may get 10 hours sleep and that is perfectly normal for you. But there's a lot of focus on the duration of sleep. And I would like people to think more about the quality of their sleep. Is there a minimum you would say where it's like,

Less than four for people who aren't parents. Yeah, I would say the official recommendation would be less than seven is considered inadequate sleep is what you would say in the research. But I would make a case that if you get six and a half hours of really good quality sleep, that can often make you feel better during the day than getting eight or eight and a half hours of crappy sleep. What do you think causes most people to have crappy quality sleep?

So a lot of it is related to things that we eat and drink. Not necessarily caffeine. Alcohol is a big one. So if you are having like three or four drinks right before you go to bed, that can result in you being in a light sleep for a lot of the night. Like alcohol can suppress REM sleep, but there's all different kinds of substances like caffeine and alcohol that can result in us being in a lighter sleep.

overnight, that's a big one. Another one is actually consistency. So a lot of people will think about the duration of the hours, but not necessarily the time that you're going to bed and the time that you're waking up. And consistency is really, really important. There was actually a study that came out last year in the journal sleep, which is one of the best journals in the field that analyze data from the UK biobank, which is this repository of

all of this data of you know hundreds of thousands of people and they found that when you're looking at mortality which is a bit grim except something that we use in research they found that sleep regularity was a more of a predictor of longer life than sleep duration why do you think that is why do you think the consistency actually

There's this thing called social jet lag, where you can essentially jet lag yourself and experience the effects of jet lag by going to bed and getting up at different times on the weekend versus weekdays.

So there's this phenomenon where people say you might go to bed at 10 o'clock when you have to get up for work Monday to Friday. And then on the weekend, you're going to like go out with your mates, have a few drinks, whatever it may be. You're going to bed at 1am or 2am. There's a four hour difference then between when you're going to bed on the weekends and during the week. So it's almost like you have changed time zones by four hours and you experience all of those effects that you would when you're jet lagged. You're fatigued. You have this

fog. You're hungry at random times, which can, you know, not be good for your metabolic health, like eating dinner four hours difference from day to day. So I think that's why. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Social jet lag is really interesting. Like a lot of people don't think about it, but going to bed at the same time on the weekend and during the week is really good for your health. It is a bit boring, I will say. Like a lot of people,

But you want to go out and party or something? The best thing that you can do for your sleep is just being boring. Yeah, sure. Yeah, like no alcohol, fewer social interactions, just living the quiet life, I suppose. Let's go to rule number two. Uh,

Rule number two is that technology can be kind of helpful. Is this coming back to me watching The Office? It is coming back to you watching The Office. So technology can be kind of helpful. What I mean by this is that you can use technology as a sleep aid to help you fall asleep. But what I find is that there's a lot of people who really demonize technology around bedtime.

and say you shouldn't have your phone in your bedroom. You shouldn't have a TV in your bedroom. These things are really bad for your sleep. But that's not always necessarily the case. In my own research, I do a lot of research on bedtime procrastination, which is a pretty random phenomenon to get into as a researcher. Is this the revenge bedtime procrastination? Yeah, I've heard about that.

Yeah. And I do it quite often. Yeah, when you delay your bedtime intentionally. So I researched this. I have done all different types of studies on it. And one study I did, we sat down and we interviewed a bunch of people to find like, why do people do this to better understand their behavior? Are there any themes that come out of all these interviews that we do?

And one that came up with every single person that we spoke to was that they needed wind down time and they needed me time before they go to bed to help them unwind and de-stress. And it actually helped them sleep better if they had time to wind down. The problem with bedtime procrastination is that you get into this habitual behavior where you're doing this and you can't stop. So there's no end point to you actually having this wind down and this wind down turns into this

maladaptive thing where you can't stop and it's kind of impacting your sleep overall. But to have some structured technology time in the evening or before you go to bed, not necessarily bad. One thing that I will say in addition to my own research, there are some other studies that have been done on blue light. And there was a review study that came out last year that looked at all of these studies that exist that have looked at the impact of

blue light on the quality of sleep and people falling asleep. And what they found was it has a really small impact on people's sleep. So people think that blue light is a villain for sleep. They buy light blocking glasses. And what I would say is that your ceiling lights are probably worse for your sleep than watching The Office on your phone or something 30 minutes before you go to bed. It's not about that.

Is it that it's not about the temperature of the light, but more about the amount of light that you're getting? Yeah, correct. There was this really interesting study done at Monash University in Melbourne a few years ago by a guy called Sean Kane, who researches indoor light. And they had a bunch of people wear these clip-on light monitors around the house. And what they found was that in about half of the people that they measured, the ceiling lights were so bright that they suppressed their melatonin by 50%, by around 50%.

What kind of psychos like use the overhead lights anyway? That's just like, it's like bright down lights before you're going to bed. Like when the sun is setting, turn on a lamp, buy a lamp. Go to Ikea, use Amazon, whatever it may be, but buy a lamp and buy an alarm clock. So you're not using your alarm on your phone. The two best pieces of advice I give to people about sleep.

So the people that are wearing these like, like really dumb glasses, like that's not really doing anything, is it? Like, it's just, it's more of like a fashion statement. Not that much. And what I find in the sleep industry is that there are a lot of these products that have marketing messages behind them and a lot of advertising dollars that are telling people like buy this one,

100 pair of blue light blocking glasses and it will fix your sleep where the things that will fix your sleep are actually quite simple they're hard to put into practice but having a lamp figuring out a way that you can de-stress before bed rethinking how you're using technology

In research, there's this concept called active or passive technology. Active technology is where you're using social media, you're playing video games, you're doing things that are engaging your brain that are quite intense and like arousing your thoughts.

Passive technology are things like watching The Office, listening to audiobooks. So I always like to encourage people to find their passive tech. Like what is it that soothes you, that can switch your brain off? Is it ASMR videos? Is it a certain podcast? Like I really love falling asleep to the voice of Ira Glass, which is perhaps an insult to

I find it quite soothing. So finding that thing for you can really help you de-stress because stress is such a common cause of people not being able to fall asleep, having insomnia, waking up during the night. So if we can really manage and tackle our stress, it can really help sleep. And technology can be a tool that we can use to help us with that.

I'm going to be back with the third and final rule in a moment. But first, one of the ways I'm supporting this podcast is through Patreon. By becoming a patron, you get access to the full unedited episodes of the show. I actually had this experience when I'd been a content creator for about seven years where I went back to do a PhD because I had comments on sleep videos that I couldn't answer. And I feel like I'm probably the only person in the world who is crazy enough

to go so deep down a rabbit hole to do a PhD because they couldn't respond to people's YouTube comments. As a patron, you'll also get additional unused footage from my YouTube videos and access to a members-only area where you can ask me questions for my Patreon-exclusive AMA podcast.

And most importantly, you'll feel good knowing that you're supporting a creator you like. And really, what other incentive do you need? Simply go to patreon.com slash mattdavella to support the show. That's patreon.com slash mattdavella. There's a link down in the description below. Thanks for considering. Let's move on to rule number three. What?

Rule number three, give yourself a break. Sleep can be really hard. People think that because sleep is this biological process, we do it every day, it should be easy. But getting a good night's sleep can be really, really difficult. And people often have unrealistic expectations around what their sleep should be, that they should be getting eight hours of uninterrupted blissful sleep. It is normal to wake up a couple of times during the night. It can be normal for you to take

30 minutes to fall asleep. I think that especially with social media, we see these perfectionistic types of content and we're like, oh, my sleep is bad when actually your sleep might be perfectly normal.

And I think that self-compassion is also really important. So there's a lot of research around self-compassion. So positive self-talk, giving yourself a break, being nice to yourself. It is linked to better sleep quality and better health overall. So giving yourself a break is actually really important in a way that is backed by research.

And for a lot of people, circumstances matter. People and you parents, people are shift workers. People are in these circumstances where they can't get a brilliant interrupted night's sleep. Like the recommendation for a shift worker, for example, is that you get seven to nine hours sleep

over a 24 hour period. So when I became a parent, that was what I had in mind. I was like, can I get seven hours of sleep over a 24 hour period? Like even if it's not at night, because that is my shift when I'm working with my baby, can I take a two hour nap during the day? Can I do that twice? Can I reach seven hours in some way?

And that was me. I didn't always do that, but I tried. And that was me being kind to myself, recognizing that sleep is hard. If you think about other areas of health, like physical activity, you wouldn't just try to run a marathon and think that, hey, I should be able to run this marathon because I'm a human. I have legs. I can walk. Why can't they run?

like 23 miles or I don't even know how long a marathon is. So obviously I haven't done one. But you wouldn't expect yourself to be able to do that. And a lot of people just expect themselves to be able to sleep well, but

a lot of people have to sleep train their children. Like that is a really common thing that happens. We set a bedtime for our kids and we're really strict about that. But as adults, we fall out of that. A lot of people don't have a bedtime, a bedtime routine. Like we just kind of sleep when we're tired and expect it to be good.

So sometimes sleep is something you really have to work at for it to be good. And I think a lot of people don't think about that or recognize that and they're too hard on themselves. And I think that matches up really well with rule number one as well, because I could see people if they have schedules that aren't very flexible and they're trying to stay consistent, I could see myself getting frustrated when I'm like, oh, if I have a weekend where we're out a little

bit late. Like it's okay. It's okay to have those like off nights where you're not necessarily following through with the best sleep hygiene. Yeah, definitely. I'm sure that your Instagram feed is just filled up with like a lot of sleep based stuff just based upon your work. Are there common myths or misconceptions that you see people sharing on social media about sleep where people are getting it wrong? Do you know

what really frustrates me, it's not necessarily getting it wrong, but it's just doing it in a way that is not helpful for people. So a lot of people know about sleep hygiene as this set of practices that can help you sleep better at night. So some of them include like limiting your caffeine and alcohol, not smoking at night, not using tech an hour before bed, things like this, having a comfortable bedroom environment that is dark and quiet, etc.

But what people will do is just share this list of like 10 sleep hygiene tips. And it's impossible for people to put that into practice. Like if your sleep is bad and you come across a doctor who is like always a dermatologist or something who is sharing these 10 sleep tips and they're in their scrubs

and they're like pointing to them doing a TikTok thing. It's really not helpful to tell people, oh, you're having a bad night's sleep. Easy. Here's how we can fix it. Don't use your phone an hour before bed. Don't drink coffee. Don't drink alcohol. Don't smoke. Don't eat dinner late. Like that's really hard for people to follow all of that advice. So what I like to tell people and would encourage other content creators to do is just start with,

one thing at a time. And as you would know, that is a way that you can make positive change in your life and build habits. Like start with one thing. If you identify, okay, is there one thing that is really stopping me from getting a good night's sleep and try to make small progress to fix that? And then if there's another thing, you can move on to that.

that. But there's no way that you can just completely overhaul your life to integrate 10 suggestions at once. I think this conversation is genuinely going to improve my sleep.

because one, I want to focus on trying to be more consistent, like when we can. And then two, it's like, yeah, it's just finding something, using technology to our advantage, like I've already been doing, but just feeling a bit better about it, which is rule number three. Amazing. Yeah. That makes me feel so good. Yeah. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to share before we go? And obviously I want to know where we should send people.

Yeah, sure. You can check out my YouTube channel, BrainCraft. I'm on Instagram as Nessie Hill. Thanks. Thanks.

Thanks for tuning in to Three Rules. Want to see every rule from the show? Get the full archive at mattdavella.com slash three rules. For my weekly bite-sized self-development emails where I share insightful lessons, practical tips, and personal experiments, sign up at mattdavella.com slash newsletter. And if you want to learn more about today's guest, check out the description for this episode. See you next time.