Best Sleep State Before Going to Bed

Habits and habitats shape human behavior. We have covered how to create a sleep-friendly environment. Put your body in the best sleep state before going to bed. Therefore, even practicing can help calm your mind and prepare you for a good night’s sleep.

Putting everything together in a concise manner will serve you best long-term. In order to free up space for other activities, your brain loves to fall into patterns. We are more likely to succeed and be more productive if we have more unconscious competencies.

How does an unconscious competency work? To learn a new skill or habit, there are four stages.

1. Unconscious incompetence — The act of doing something wrong without even realizing you’re doing it

2. Conscious incompetence — It’s when you know you’re doing something wrong, but you don’t know what it is.

3. Conscious competence — In order to do something right, you must consciously pay attention to how you do it

4. Unconscious competence — There are times when you’re doing something right without even thinking about it.

   

The first step toward conscious competence comes when you apply what you learn. Your efforts will have to be conscious and deliberate if you want to do them right. It’s like learning to drive for the first time.

As soon as you get into your car, you have a checklist: adjust the seat, mirrors, seat belt, etc. It’s important that you get them right. You are hyper-aware while driving. Be extra careful, keep your eyes moving, and monitor road signs, and other cars.

Take a look back a few months later. In the blink of an eye, you’re in your car, the key in the ignition, and you’re on your way. You’re not reckless by any means, but you’ve automated the checklist. Even without your conscious awareness, your brain recognizes that the seat and mirror are in the right place.

It is possible to get into your car and drive for 20 minutes without thinking twice about it. Furthermore, you might not even remember all of the steps you took to get to where you were going. The reason is not that you were hypnotized by an evil mutant, but that driving has become an unconscious competence that frees up your brain for other tasks.

When there’s an irregularity or a problem, your conscious mind can step in, but this activity is largely on cruise control. It’s simply a matter of ritualizing things, just like when you first learn how to drive, to get amazing sleep every night.

Rituals come from the Latin word RITUS, which means “a proven way of doing something”. Essentially, rituals are a sequence of steps you perform in order to get into a certain frame of mind, mood, or state. You can wind down and prepare your body for the best sleep possible if you have a regular bedtime ritual, regardless of whether you have had sleep problems in the past.

It is important to practice a bedtime ritual in order to train the brain to recognize when it is time to sleep and when it is time to wake. In time, parents have appreciated the power of bedtime rituals for their children because they program the brain and internal body clock to get used to a set routine.”

An example would be taking a warm bath, putting on pajamas, reading a bedtime story, listening to relaxing music, or simply tucking in and kissing your child on the forehead. It doesn’t take long for your kids to drift off to sleep if you establish a consistent bedtime ritual.

These systematic activities have completely conditioned their minds and bodies to sleep immediately afterward. We’re really just big adult babies, and our basic programming is still the same, as I said before. It’s just a matter of learning how to tap into it.

According to Dr. Lawrence Epstein of Harvard Medical School, “Our bodies crave routine and predictability.”

You establish a clear association between specific activities and sleep by creating a pre-sleep ritual. In order to get a good night’s sleep, you should include common and effective activities in your evening ritual.

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