My Sleep Stack: A Work in Progress

This is what "setting the scene for sleep" actually looks like.

Here on Pushing Fitty I’ve covered a lot of ground on fitness, and to some degree nutrition, but there’s one modality I haven’t touched yet that’s honestly just as important: sleep. We all know it matters, but actually getting it right is a completely different matter.

Like a lot of women I know, I go through bouts of insomnia. And as we all know, insomnia isn’t just one thing, it shows up in different guises: trouble falling asleep in the first place, trouble staying asleep once you’re finally under, or the broken kind, waking up at the witching hour of 3am and then lying there fighting to get back to sleep. For me, that usually looks like getting up, going to the bathroom, and then struggling to get back to sleep for another hour, hour and a half, lots of tossing and turning before I’m finally back under.

And I don’t think this is just a perimenopause or menopause thing, though I’m squarely in that camp too. Women’s sleep gets disrupted by hormonal fluctuation across pretty much our entire lives, our cycle, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause. Lucky them, our male counterparts get to walk around relatively hormonally stable most of their lives. We don’t get that luxury, and I think our sleep pays for it more than we talk about.

Genuinely wish this was a skill I could master. We all know what 7 to 8 hours does for us: energized, clear-headed, sharp, able to actually think. Get less than that, especially under 6, and it’s the complete opposite, foggy, toxic, short-tempered, definitely not operating at your best. And that’s just the short-term cost. There’s growing long-term evidence too, of which Alzheimer’s and dementia more broadly are only one part. Dr. Christin Glorioso, MD PhD, a physician and researcher on brain aging and dementia prevention, has pointed to sleep as one of the concrete, modifiable levers, alongside things like exercise and stress, that meaningfully affects long-term dementia risk, more on the deeper mechanism behind that later.

Which is exactly why I think we need to retire one saying in particular, especially in hustle culture broadly, corporate, start-up, entrepreneurial, that gets repeated like a badge of honor: “sleep when you’re dead.” The truth is closer to the opposite: if you don’t get enough sleep, consistently, you’re genuinely more likely to end up dead sooner, not later. Multiple large studies now link chronic short sleep to meaningfully higher all-cause mortality risk, tied to weakened immune function, elevated inflammation, and greater risk of cardiovascular disease. “Sleep when you’re dead” isn’t tough-guy wisdom, it’s a fairly direct route to getting there faster.

But danger isn’t the only piece of this I want to name. For a lot of us, this isn’t about not wanting to sleep. I was talking to a friend recently who deals with chronic insomnia, and it struck me how often people frame it as something the person is doing to themselves, that it’s all in your head, that you’re somehow causing your own sleeplessness. But sometimes the want is completely there, and despite how much you want it, your body just isn’t willing to cooperate. That gap between wanting and your body actually being willing deserves a lot more compassion, for yourself and for anyone else dealing with it, than it usually gets.

I’m a certified PT, but I’m not a certified nutritionist, and I’m definitely not a doctor. So when it comes to sleep, I rely on listening to the people who actually live and breathe this stuff, experts like Dr. Matthew Walker and Dr. Michael Breus, and I try to put their tips and tricks into practice. Some of it works for me. Some of it doesn’t, not because the advice itself is wrong, but because biologically we’re all wired a little differently, so there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Most of what they teach is sound, logical, well-researched advice, worth trying even if it doesn’t land the same way for you as it does for someone else.

Same Time, Every Damn Day

We know this from many of the great sleep experts out there: going to bed and waking up at the same time every day is one of the most critical things you can do for your sleep. Here’s the part that genuinely surprised me when I first came across this advice: getting up at the same time matters more than going to bed at the same time. Your circadian rhythm is anchored by your wake time, not your bedtime, it’s what sets the whole rhythm in motion for the day ahead.

That’s exactly why sleeping in on weekends to “catch up” doesn’t work the way people think it does. There’s actually a name for what it does to you: social jet lag. Go to bed at 11pm and wake at 8am all week, then stay up until 3am and sleep until noon on Saturday, and your body experiences something close to actual jet lag, even though you never left your bed. Your circadian rhythm doesn’t know the difference between a shifted time zone and a shifted weekend schedule, it just registers the disruption. So a consistent wake time, weekdays and weekends both, does more for your sleep than obsessing over the exact minute you fall asleep each night.

Let There Be Light

Another thing that helps set that same circadian rhythm: get light into your eyes early in the morning, ideally within the first hour of waking, and directly outdoors if you can manage it. This is one of the strongest signals your circadian rhythm responds to, it tells your body clock the day has officially started. That single signal ripples through the whole system, it’s part of what helps melatonin rise again at the right time that night, putting your whole rhythm back into a kind of homeostasis rather than fighting itself. Even on a cloudy day, outdoor light is dramatically brighter than anything indoors, so it still counts, you don’t need direct sun for it to work.

H2O Before Joe

In a similar vein to getting light into your eyes first thing, another way to help put your body into that proper circadian rhythm, which in turn helps you actually fall asleep well at night, is clearing the sleep out of your system first thing in the morning. I’ve swapped my old wake-up-and-immediately-have-coffee routine for water and mint tea first, then my actual first coffee an hour, hour and a half later. This one I’ve picked up from Andrew Huberman: during sleep, a compound called adenosine builds up in your body, and it’s part of what makes you feel groggy when you first wake. Drinking water helps flush some of that out of your system, so you come into alertness a bit sooner rather than forcing it artificially with caffeine the moment you wake up.

To be clear, I am not giving up coffee. I love it too much for that. I’ve just delayed the first cup, based on the actual evidence, rather than reaching for it the second I wake up.

Know When to Fold ’Em

On the coffee front, delaying that first cup is only half of it, when you have your last one matters just as much. I stop all caffeinated drinks, which for me is just coffee, by 1pm. The reason is straightforward: caffeine has a half-life of roughly 5 hours, meaning half of what you drank is still in your system 5 hours later, and it can take up to 10 hours to clear completely. Have a coffee at 4pm and there’s a meaningful amount of it still active in your body well past midnight, whether or not you feel it. And that’s the part that catches people out, caffeine disrupts sleep quality and reduces deep sleep even when you don’t consciously feel wired. I used to drink coffee much later in the day, and by the time night came around I didn’t feel tired at all, but that just showed the caffeine was still in my system doing its work, whether I felt it or not.

Worth knowing too, not all coffee is created equal. My drink of choice is a flat white, which typically runs on a double shot of espresso, somewhere around 130 to 150mg of caffeine. A single espresso has roughly half that, around 65 to 75mg. So if you’re someone who switches to a single espresso later in the day thinking you’ve made the lighter choice, you actually have, it’s a real difference, not just a smaller cup.

The Nightcap That Isn’t

I’ve written about this one already, in the piece about the twenty-five years and the same Levi’s, so I won’t repeat the full case here. But it belongs in this list too, because its effect on sleep specifically is worse than most people realise. Most of us already know the obvious version of this: a heavy night of drinking means a rough night’s sleep, dehydrated, broken, waking up feeling like it wasn’t sleep at all. But there’s a more specific mechanism behind it too. Alcohol can help you fall asleep faster, but it fragments sleep with brief awakenings you don’t consciously register, and it’s one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep there is, the stage of sleep where your brain does a lot of its memory processing and emotional regulation, and where most of your dreaming happens. So even if you nod off faster, the rest of that night’s sleep is pretty broken, and it doesn’t just cost you that night, it carries into the next day too.

Bedrooms Are for Sleeping (Radical, I Know)

This is the one every sleep expert, Walker included, repeats constantly, and it’s probably the one most of us know and ignore in equal measure. Screens before bed disrupt sleep, blue light suppresses melatonin production, and scrolling right up until the lights go off is about as far from a wind-down routine as you can get. I include myself in that. I know this. I don’t always practice it. If I’m honest, most of us treat our bedrooms as an extension of the living room, phone in hand, TV on, rather than the one space meant purely for sleep. The advice most experts actually give goes further than just switching off before bed, they say keep devices, phone, tablet, laptop, out of the bedroom entirely. That one’s harder than it sounds, especially when you wake in the middle of the night and the phone’s right there on the nightstand. I’ve absolutely been guilty of reaching for it at 3am, telling myself I’m just checking the time, and then twenty minutes later I’m scrolling. The usual advice is a “digital sunset,” screens off roughly an hour before bed, but even something far less disciplined than that, just not scrolling, or playing Wordle, Quordle, and Octordle, the second you crawl into bed, would probably help more than most of us give it credit for.

The Early Bird Special, Sort Of

Every brilliant mind in this space says the same thing: eat dinner earlier, keep it light, give your body a few hours to digest before you lie down. I wish I honoured this one more than I do. The honest truth is, eating dinner at 7 or even 8pm in Spain is basically the early bird special, dinner here often doesn’t start until 9 or 10. That said, I have noticed something on weekends, when I have a later, heavier lunch and a lighter bite at night, I genuinely feel better for it. So: do as I say on this one, not as I do, most nights anyway.

Here’s the nuance though, and it goes both ways. Eating too little at night can backfire just as much as eating too much. I know this first-hand from a calorie cut I did and wrote about, almost a decade ago now, I was waking up almost every night simply because I was hungry, my body didn’t have enough fuel in it to get through the night undisturbed. Go to bed under-fuelled and you risk that same blood sugar dip that triggers middle-of-the-night wake-ups. But go too heavy the other direction, especially with something like red meat, which takes real effort for your body to break down, and you’re putting your digestive system on overtime right when it should be winding down for the night, which disrupts sleep just as effectively from the opposite end. So it’s not “eat as little as possible, as early as possible.” It’s about landing somewhere in the middle, enough food, not too much, roughly 3 hours before bed as a general guide, with enough time to actually digest it properly.

Liquids matter too, separately from food. The general guidance is to stop drinking anything significant in the two hours before bed, mainly to avoid being up and down to the bathroom all night, which is its own kind of sleep disruption. This one gets more relevant as we age, not less, our bodies actually produce less of the hormone that helps us retain fluid overnight as we get older, which is part of why needing the loo in the middle of the night becomes more common with age, not just a habit thing.

Setting the Scene for Sleep

Two more basics, and I’ve got one of them mostly sorted. Sleeping in a genuinely dark room matters, and in Spain, I have proper blackout shutters. However, I remember living in places before this where curtains let in more light than I realised, streetlight, early morning sun, all of it working against you without you noticing. The darker the better, and if your current setup lets light creep in, investing in real blackout blinds is one of the more worthwhile purchases you can make for your sleep.

Cool matters just as much, if not more. The science backs this up clearly, you sleep better in a colder room, ideally around 18°C. And for women in perimenopause and menopause, this one hits differently. Declining oestrogen makes your internal thermostat, the hypothalamus, hypersensitive to even small changes in temperature, which is a big part of why hot flashes and night sweats show up in the first place. So keeping your room properly cool isn’t a nice-to-have at this stage of life, it’s closer to a necessity. A shower before bed to bring your body temperature down helps too. I haven’t taken the plunge yet, but cooling sheets, or the ones that actively adjust to your temperature, are probably a good investment, especially if you’re someone who runs hot at night while your partner runs cold. I’ve actually managed to sidestep the duvet tug-of-war that many of us out there experience: we sleep with two separate duvets instead of sharing one, mine much lighter, his much heavier. It works better for two reasons, you’re not fighting over the covers, and each duvet is actually tailored to your own body temperature rather than a compromise that suits neither of you.

Sleep position matters too, and this is another one straight from Dr. Breus. Stomach sleeping is the one he’s unambiguous about, it’s genuinely the worst position, it flattens your spine’s natural curve and puts real strain on your neck and lower back over time, and only around 7% of people actually sleep this way. Beyond that, it depends on what you’re optimising for: he specifically recommends the left side for digestion, since your large intestine runs right to left, so left-side sleeping works with your body’s natural digestive flow rather than against it, and it’s associated with less acid reflux than sleeping on your right. And your pillow should actually match whatever position you sleep in, not just be whatever you’ve had for the last five years. Side sleepers need a firmer, thicker pillow to properly fill the gap between your ear and your shoulder. Back sleepers do better with something lower profile. Stomach sleepers barely need one at all, and Breus actually suggests tucking a thin one under your stomach instead, to help your lower back. Small thing, but it’s an easy one to get wrong for years without realising it.

Train Hard, Sleep Better

Of course exercise had to factor into this. Now in my forties, I feel the difference almost immediately between days I train and days I don’t. Even on the days I have to will myself to go, I go anyway, because I know it more or less guarantees a better night’s sleep. That guarantee isn’t quite as reliable as it used to be, though, in my late thirties it felt near-automatic, train hard, sleep well, simple as that, now it’s more of a strong likelihood than a sure thing. But if I skip it, it’s probably not going to be a great night, and that’s not me talking myself into a story, it’s just what I’ve noticed, consistently, over years. If I’m sedentary most of the day, stuck at my desk in front of a computer, those are reliably the nights I sleep worst.

There's a genuine question worth naming honestly here too: does when you exercise matter, evening versus earlier in the day? I train in the evenings myself, so I went looking. The honest answer, per a 2023 systematic review in Physical Activity and Nutrition, is that it's less about the clock than people assume. Long-term morning exercise does tend to lower cortisol after waking and improve sleep quality. But evening exercise on its own wasn't found to significantly harm sleep either, what actually matters more is intensity and duration. Longer, high-intensity sessions can prevent the body temperature drop your body needs to fall asleep well, evening or not. So the real question isn't morning versus evening, it's whether your evening session is intense enough, or close enough to bedtime, to keep your body running hot when it should be winding down. My advice: pay attention to your own body. If evening HIIT leaves you wired, that's real information, even without a tidy study to back it up.

Sauna: The Finishing Touch to the Day

Sauna access isn’t something everyone has on tap, but it’s not exactly rare either, plenty of gyms have one. I don’t get to use one daily, but on the occasions I do, I notice a real difference in my sleep that night. I should honestly make more of an effort to do it more often. There’s a decent mechanism behind why it works too, heat exposure raises your core body temperature, but the real benefit comes after you step out, your body cools down faster and further than it would have on its own, and that temperature drop is one of the strongest signals your brain uses to initiate sleep. It’s not hard clinical proof, but a global survey found over 80% of regular users reported improved sleep, and that matches what I notice myself. Timing matters: roughly 1 to 2 hours before bed seems to be the sweet spot, going straight from sauna to bed while you’re still warm can actually delay sleep rather than help it.

My Nightly Cocktail (The Non-Alcoholic Kind)

As part of my night routine, I take magnesium glycinate. The mechanism is solid: magnesium supports GABA, the brain’s main calming neurotransmitter, and the glycine component adds its own independent relaxing effect, including a small drop in core body temperature, which, as we’ve already covered, is exactly what your body needs to initiate sleep.

I also eat a kiwi most nights, which sounds like a strange addition until you know why. Kiwifruit has real research behind it for sleep, likely mediated through serotonin metabolism, and it’s something I picked up after hearing Dr. Dawn Mussallem talk about it, an integrative oncologist, now Chief Medical Officer at Fountain Life, previously at the Mayo Clinic, whose guidance I’ve trusted for a while now. On occasion I’ll also have tart cherry juice, a friend of mine who’s a doctor in Montreal recommended it to me for exactly this reason. It’s one of the few natural food sources of melatonin, and a handful of small studies have shown real improvements in sleep duration and efficiency from it. The evidence base is still fairly early, not a huge body of research yet, but promising enough that I keep it in rotation.

When none of that is enough, and I’ve had a run of genuinely bad or broken nights, the kind where I feel completely shattered, non-functional, like I can’t think straight or hold a thought together, that’s when I’ll turn to melatonin or CBD oil. I try not to make this a habit, because relying on it regularly can throw off your body’s own natural rhythm rather than support it, but I’m human, and when I need my brain functioning and don’t want to feel toxic the next day, I’ll use it.

I’m also lucky enough to live somewhere with real access to herbalists, so I’ve had a personalised tea blend made for me, natural roots and tinctures aimed at sleep. It’s honestly hit or miss. But there’s a real advantage to going the bespoke route: a lot of herbal products interact with medication, so having something made specifically for you means you know exactly what’s going into it, and there’s no risk of interactions or contraindications, rather than guessing with something off a shelf.

Are You a Lion or a Dolphin?

We’re all wired differently, full stop. We know that when it comes to our gut microbiomes, and the same applies to sleep. Dr. Michael Breus has a framework for this, four chronotypes, cutely named after animals: Lion, Bear, Wolf, and Dolphin. Lions are the early risers, up at dawn, sharpest in the morning, making up roughly 15-20% of people. Bears are the most common type by far, around 55%, following the sun fairly closely and doing well with a standard schedule. Wolves are the classic night owls, naturally more alert later in the day and evening, around 15% of people. And then there’s Dolphin, roughly 10% of people, modelled on real dolphins’ ability to stay alert even while sleeping. Human Dolphins are light, easily-disturbed sleepers, hypervigilant, prone to insomnia, and, fittingly, more likely to be perfectionists and slightly anxious by nature.

Breus is always careful to say none of the four is better or worse than the others, just different. If I’m honest, though, I think mine is the toughest of the bunch: Dolphin. Seems to be a running theme, I’m also AB blood type, if you’re wondering, yes, I collect rare categories. If you want to find out your own chronotype, there’s a quiz you can take on Dr. Breus’s Sleep Doctor site that tells you which one you are and what it actually means for how you should structure your day and your sleep. Small, slightly funny detail I came across while researching this: Breus himself is a Wolf, not a Dolphin. Even the man who built the whole framework doesn’t have my particular problem.

Still a Work in Progress

With all these tips and tricks of the trade, I’m still not a great sleeper. Some nights, all of this works, and I fall asleep easily and stay there. Other nights, none of it does, regardless of the herbal teas, the magnesium, the blackout shutters, all of it. That’s honestly just where I am with this.

What I am is intentional. I take this seriously, not because I expect to fix it, but because of how much it matters, for how I feel right now and for my health long-term. I do think I can get better at it, it’s a skill like anything else, something you can practice and improve. But better isn’t the same as great, and I don’t think this is ever going to be something I fully master. It’s probably always going to be a work in progress, and I think I need to actually accept that, rather than keep chasing some version of myself who has this fully figured out.