Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to setting up your day and there are multiple ways we can help our bodies to switch off before hitting the hay.
Dave Asprey, an entrepreneur and the co-founder of TrueDark glasses, advocates for one particular bedroom tip that can make you feel like ‘a new person’ in the morning.
Bedroom change you need to make to boost your sleep and mental health
The four-time bestselling science author appeared on the Project Life Mastery podcast hosted by Stefan James to explain further.
“Blackout your windows,” Asprey begins.
He then references a 2017 study conducted by Japanese researchers which found that sleeping in a room with more than 5 lux of light (the equivalent of a dark street with lamp posts) led to a “significantly higher depression risk.”
“So, you need to black your room out,” Asprey emphasizes. “Blackout your curtains and if you have to, just to try this for a night, put up aluminum foil, your neighbors will hate you.”
As well as blocking light entering the bedroom from outside, you need to consider the light that might be coming from sources within the room as well.
“Then you go through, and this is critically important, every LED in your room, especially the green, blue and yellow,” he explains. “You’ve got to put a little piece of electrical tape over them or just unplug them [the devices creating this light].”
“When you open your eyes, you should see nothing. You shouldn’t see your alarm clock, nothing,” he says. “Sleeping in a black room, you wouldn’t even believe how you feel in the morning.”
Study finds a dark room is better for sleeping
The study that Dave Asprey mentions during the podcast conversation was published in 2017 by a group of Japanese researchers at Nara Medical University School of Medicine led by Dr Kenji Obayashi.
Researchers charted the sleeping habits of a total sample of 863 adults with an average age of 71.5.
The results of the study found that 36.2% of people sleeping in rooms with more than 5 lux of light experienced disturbances in their sleep while just 28.5% of participants experienced disturbances in rooms with less than 5 lux of light.
Speaking to Time after the study was published, Dr Obayashi said, “The capacity for light reception of a 70-year-old is one-fifth of that of a teenager,” meaning that younger people will be more susceptible to nighttime disturbances from sleeping in a brighter room.
In 2022, Dr Obayashi and his fellow researchers published a follow-up study, this time featuring a sample of 2,947 adults.
This further study found that higher exposure to light at night was linked to a wider array of health problems than just depression and included the likes of obesity, dyslipidemia and systemic inflammation among others.
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