The Better Life Perspective
Better sleep does not necessarily begin with another complicated evening routine. Sometimes the more useful question is whether your body has actually been given a chance to move from the demands of the day into a state where sleep can happen naturally. One simple experiment is to spend a few quiet minutes before bed with your legs elevated, allowing the circulation to shift and the body to settle, then combine that with slow, controlled breathing. The science does not prove that this position will increase your deep sleep, but there are credible physiological reasons why reducing sympathetic activity and encouraging parasympathetic influence before bed may help. The more interesting question is how this works, but whether it means better sleep for you.
The Better Life Founders Journal
The Ten Minutes Before Bed That Seem to Be Creating Better Sleep
I’m always experimenting with the hacks and habits I find, the things that might make life work a little better, not because I believe every part of the day needs optimising and certainly not because I want my life to become one enormous health experiment, but because I’m naturally curious about the things that seem to help us feel better, think more clearly, recover more fully and ultimately enjoy life a little more.
Most of those experiments are fairly unremarkable, some make no noticeable difference at all, others work for a while and then seem to disappear from my routine, but every now and again something simple produces enough of a result that I start paying attention.
Putting my legs up before bed appears to be one of those things.
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Could the Last Ten Minutes of Your Days Create Better Nights?
Better Life starts with the problem you want to improve, then helps you test practical changes that fit the life you actually live.
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I originally came across the idea while reading about ways of helping the body move away from the more alert, sympathetic state that so many of us spend much of the day in and towards the calmer, parasympathetic state associated with rest and recovery.
The premise was straightforward enough to interest me: lie on your back, elevate your legs vertically against a wall or headboard, stay there for a few minutes and allow gravity to do the work.
Raising the legs changes the way blood is distributed through the body, with blood from the lower limbs shifting back towards the central circulation and increasing venous return to the heart, while research looking at passive leg raising has also observed changes in autonomic activity, including reduced sympathetic activity and greater parasympathetic influence.
In layman’s terms that means putting your feet up a wall will help your body to relax and switch off properly at the end of the day.
There was simply enough physiological reasoning behind the idea for me to think it was worth trying and then worth staying with.
I Started With Five Minutes
My first experiment could hardly have been simpler. Before getting properly into bed, I lay on my back, put my legs up against the wall and stayed there for five minutes.
No elaborate protocol, no expensive device, no supplement and no attempt to change seventeen different things at once, just five quiet minutes and a bit of curiosity.
Because I already track my sleep with a wearable, I also had something, imperfect though it is, that could help me look for patterns rather than relying entirely upon how I thought I felt.
After introducing those five minutes, my sleep scores began moving in the right direction and, more interestingly, the change appeared particularly noticeable in my estimated deep sleep.
There are some fairly enormous caveats here, because a wearable is not a sleep laboratory, consumer devices estimate sleep stages rather than measuring them with the accuracy of clinical polysomnography and our sleep changes from night to night for all sorts of reasons, from exercise and stress to food, alcohol, temperature, workload and any number of variables we may not even notice.
So, I had not discovered the long-lost secret to perfect deep sleep, but I had noticed something very interesting and interesting is often enough for me to run the next experiment.
Five Minutes Became Ten
I increased it to ten minutes, nothing dramatic, just a little longer lying there before sleep, legs elevated, phone out of the room and out of equation and everything else gradually becoming quieter.
Again, the sleep data appeared to improve.
At that point I became less interested in whether there was something mystic about the position itself and more interested in what those ten minutes might be doing to my overall state before sleep.
Most of us spend our days moving at a fairly relentless pace, dealing with messages, decisions, screens, conversations, problems, work and then usually a few more tv and phone screens for good measure, before expecting the body to go from all of that to unconsciousness simply because we have turned the bedroom light off.
Perhaps part of what I was benefiting from was simply creating a deliberate transition, a small buffer between being switched on and asking the body to switch off.
That made me wonder what would happen if I used those same ten minutes a little more deliberately.
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What Is Keeping Your System Switched On?
Coach Max can help you look at the habits, stress, timing and routines surrounding your sleep, then find practical changes worth testing rather than handing you another generic bedtime checklist.
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Then I Added Coherent Breathing
I already use slow, controlled breathing elsewhere in my days and the evidence behind this part is considerably stronger, with research into slow breathing repeatedly showing effects on autonomic regulation and heart-rate variability, including increased vagal, or parasympathetic, activity.
Put more simply, slow and comfortable breathing can help shift the body away from the physiological state associated with being alert, busy and ready to respond.
So, while lying there with my legs elevated, I began adding long, calm, slow, coherent breathing, nothing forced or complicated, simply slow and controlled breaths while allowing the rest of the day to fall away.
Once again, my sleep scores improved and deep sleep in particular appeared to move further in the right direction.
That was the point at which the experiment became a routine, not because I can prove that ten minutes of elevated legs and coherent breathing directly causes better sleep, because I can’t, but because I have now accumulated enough evidence from the study involving precisely one participant, me, to believe that it is currently helping.
The cost is ten minutes, it requires no equipment and, perhaps equally importantly, those ten minutes now feel rather pleasant.
The Experiment Matters More Than the Hack
There is a temptation in health and wellbeing to look for definitive answers, the perfect diet, the perfect morning routine, the perfect training programme or the perfect sleep protocol, but I am increasingly convinced that real life rarely works quite so neatly.
What seems considerably more useful is curiosity.
Find something with a sensible rationale behind it, understand enough of the evidence to know you are not simply following the latest internet fad, try it, pay attention, adjust it, keep it if it helps and drop it if it doesn’t and that is effectively what happened here.
Five minutes produced an interesting result, ten minutes appeared to produce better one, adding slow breathing seemed to improve things again, so I kept going with it.
Could something else have caused the change? Absolutely, will it work equally well for everybody? I do not know is the true answer. Might my results look different six months from now? Quite possibly.
None of that makes the experiment worthless, it simply makes it real.
And I think this is becoming an increasingly important part of how Neil and I think about Better Life.
We read widely, come across ideas that appear to have merit, try most of them ourselves and then keep adjusting, because the interesting question is rarely whether something works in theory, it is whether it makes your own life work and feel better in practice.
Try the Experiment, Not the Prescription
If your sleep could be better, you can simply try it. Become your own experiment of one.
Start with five minutes before bed, lie comfortably on your back, elevate your legs and allow yourself to stop doing things for a while, then, if you feel its benefitting you, try ten minutes and perhaps add some slow, relaxed breathing.
Pay attention not only to whatever your wearable tells you, if you use one, but to how you actually feel, whether you settle more quickly, whether you feel calmer, whether sleep feels different and whether you wake feeling more restored.
Better Life was never founded to be about telling everybody there is one correct way to live. We are constantly reading, trying things, adjusting them and occasionally finding something surprisingly useful and when we do, we will share it.
We are not standing on the mountaintop with all the answers, we are simply a few steps further along the trail, turning around occasionally and saying that something seems to be helping and you might want to try it too.
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What Might Help You Sleep Better?
Tell Coach Max what is happening with your sleep, what you have already tried and what normal evenings actually look like for you, then explore the changes most worth testing first.
EXPLORE BETTER SLEEP WITH BETTER LIFE →
The Better Life Founders Journal
Written after the entirely non-scientific discovery that putting your feet up a wall might really be the way to a better night’s sleep.