Improve your sleep: 3 tips with the most impactful ROI for entrepreneurs.

It’s Sunday; you are planning your week and decide to change your sleeping habit: you will wake up at 6 am to be more productive and get more work done to make the impact you want. You’re super excited because you know that when you wake up early, you have more focus in the day and because of this ca, you can finally scale your business. You’re preparing the whole week on this and can’t wait to start. But then it happens;

6 am rolls around. It’s dark and cold outside. You feel tired. “15 minutes won’t hurt”, your brain tells you. So you decide to snooze for only 15 minutes. Sixty minutes later, you finally get out of bed. You feel worse than yesterday. All the excitement is gone. You broke your promise. You even questioned how other entrepreneurs manage this and still jump out of bed at 5 am, full of energy. Does this sound familiar? It’s not your fault; 

It’s the quality of your sleep. By improving your sleep, you’ll feel more energised and focused and are more productive during the day. Personally, in the past, I had much trouble with quality sleeping, lots of light sleep, awakenings throughout the night and difficulty falling asleep. This causes me to feel intense brain fog in the afternoons, low energy and a lack of focus on my business. I’m writing this at 5:13 am and have already been up for 1 hour. In the screenshot I just took, you can see my deep and REM sleep percentage with the wake-up time. 

Let’s find out how you can sleep more productive to feel more energy and focus throughout the day, shall we?

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Discovering your chronotype

The first step we implement with our clients to make their sleep more productive is discovering their chronotype. However, before we dive deeper into which chronotype you are, it t’s important crucial to have general knowledge about your internal clock: your circadian rhythm.

Every cell in our body has a 24 hour24-hour clock that regulates your focus, attention, energy and thus productivity (hormones and neurotransmitters are held, which cause these states of our mind and body). The very first thing we need to do to improve our sleep sounds very simplistic, but many entrepreneurs get this wrong;

We need to tell our body when it needs to be awake and when it needs to go to sleep. In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the first practical electric incandescent lamp (= lightbulb). Since then, we have had the privilege to see the light whenever we want. Which is great, but not for our sleeping patterns. Light is one of the essential things after rhythm that will tell your body when it needs to be awake and when it needs to sleep. But before we dive deeper into light, we want to say a stronger signal to our body to regulate our clock. That’s why we need to;

Stabilise our rhythm. That’s where your sleep chronotype comes it. Are you an evening person? Or more a morning type? At first, I always believed that this was something we kept telling ourselves but that it wasn’t real. Until I read multiple books on sleep which dive deeper into our DNA and ancestors in correlation with sleepers, I discovered the following: we have a gene that regulates this rhythm (PER3) which causes our body to secret melatonin (= messenger for falling asleep). It makes sense if we look at it from an evolution standpoint:

1. 55% of the people belong to the ‘day-people’. This is the bear chronotype.
2. 15% belong to the morning people who hunt and, most of the time, lead the tribe. This is the lion chronotype.
3. 15% are creative evening people. Called the wolf chronotype
4. 10%, a small percentage, are people with sleep disturbance. Those are the dolphins.

So the first thing we need to do to improve our sleeping patterns is to sync this internal clock to our chronotype and give the right signs at the right time. Via thepowerofwhenquiz.com, you can discover your chronotype in 5 minutes. In the future, I will write a blog post on the different schedules we implement with our clients based on this chronotype. So let’s get some practical steps:

1. Discover your sleep chronotype
2. Determine your sleeping time based on this rhythm rhythm
3. Decide the time you want to start your wind-down routine (this one is game-changed, don’t miss this)
4. See what is practically possible in your busy lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

Based on the above, we want to start with the essential thing that will give you the most significant ROI in your sleep:

Determine the time you want to be asleep, the time you start your routine and make it practically stable in your lifestyle. 

Great one. Good job.

This very simplistic first step will already give you a boost in your sleep over the next few days, which will cause you to feel more energised and focused. So what do we do in this evening routine? Let’s find out the most essential the essential thing in this ritual;

Managing your lights

Let’s take back control, shall we? We want to implement simple light management hacks based on your chronotype to leverage the rhythm that we want to leverage, tell our bodies to sleep, be awake, and become more productive with work. The most practical tip with this is the following;

1. Based on your earlier determined rhythm, manage the lights you see. That means;
2. one hour before bed, no screens
3. One hour before bed, a red-blue light blocker (I use true dark)
4. three hours before bed, a transparent transparent transparent transparent blue light blocker
5. one hour before bed, no overhead lights, only candles or bonus tip: red book lamps with a clipper

I know. You’ll look pretty funny. But the effects on sleep are intense. Especially when leading a business which gives you a lot of many responsibilities, you need to be aware of your sleeping habits to be the best leader you can be daily. The same you want to do in the mornings after waking up to tell our clocks that we need to be awake (= alert, focused and energised)

1. When possible, go outside. The sunlight has ana much bigger,r more significant impact on our clocks than internal lighting. This is measured in something called LUX that you can forget for now. Just know that this kind of lighting we can’t see with our eyes determines the intensity of it.
2. I use an Elgato Key light for working in the mornings; you can adjust the temperature to a natural sunrise. 
3. Go outside multiple times throughout the day: when you have meetings, calls, etc. Try to do them out. 

If you implement these two ‘hacks’ alone, you’ll be shocked with the effects you feel daily, which have second-order consequences on your family, business and well-being. So let’s look at the third most significant ROI, shall we?

Optimise your bedroom

This one is very diverse. I’ll try to keep it short and practical. Your sleeping environment is next to light and rhythm, the most critical factor in the quality of your sleep. What is so great about optimising your bedroom; is that it doesn’t cost any time in the long run. It’s just implementing it, and you’ll feel the effects. Of course, this differs if you travel a lot, a little bit later. So, what are some things we need to ensure our sleeping environment is based on ROI?

1. Quality, memory foam mattress (I use Mattsleeps)
2. Memory foam pillow
3. Dark room; blackout curtains. Possibly with automatic openers for a natural wake-up
4. Air quality; humidifier and (HEPA) air filter
5. Sound; use earplugs or make sure your room is quiet. If you live in a busy area, you can use a white noise machine to help you sleep with fewer disturbances.
6. Temperature; 16-18 degrees works the best. Bonus points if you can automate the temperature to go up during the morning when you want to wake up.

To provide you with the paper we send our clients to improve their sleep environment with all the tested and recommended tools also when travelling, send me the message ‘BEDROOM’ for the free paper. This will change your energy for the better.

Allright, that’s it. We’ve covered the three most significant ROI hacks to implement in your busy lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

Peakclub specialises in optimising busy professionals’ sleep, energy and productivity so they can make the impact they want and not be held back by fatigue and brain fog. Everything we do focuses on ROI; we track your data based on accuracy and importance and give you simple to implement feedback based on this data.

So you can focus on the things that matter, your business and relationships, and feel energetic.

Over the last three years, we’ve watched what over 200+ 7-figure business owners with a solid business and crazy amounts of focus are doing in their lifestyles to maintain this success.

And we found some exciting things that you won’t have thought of;

We’ve structured them in a sheet with the ten biggest quick wins with instant results for focus and concentration and decided to give this away for free.