4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About a Good Night's Sleep

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4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A

Good Night’s Sleep

Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.

They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time itis.

But actually, it’s even worse than that.

In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythmgo completely haywire.

When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due tolousy sleep can have very bad results.

When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.

Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:

…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on daysfollowing an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs

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through a closed porthole before realizing his error.

So NASA started doing some serious research.

3 Big Insights On SleepThey quickly realized a few things:

1) You’re a slave to external cues

Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.


Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend

to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longereach night.

2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle

Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually yoursleep cycle can totally spin out of control.


If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body

temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-runningperiods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours perweek in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completelyaround the clock.

3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality

You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarilynotice your reduced performance the next day, either.


…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noisesperceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular

sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition orcomplete awakening.

This info is more valuable than you think. Why?

We’re All Astronauts Now

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As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom forLifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re all living more like astronauts now.

Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:

Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life.Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and

computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night andwarming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter andsocial interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live andsleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces onTV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to takeback control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is itany wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?

Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.

You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.

Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night,you’re legally drunk:

…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in anotherDinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of beinglegally drunk.

But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “ It’s not affecting me.”

Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, theirperformance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our ownsleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.

So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.

So what answers did NASA come up with?

What You Need To DoIn the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s addsome astronaut knowledge.

Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of thehull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:

Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem.Your body will push later if given the chance.

Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than

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an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.

If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights atnight. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.

Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t botheryou” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.

Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; setan alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.

Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:

A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set analarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off theTV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.

This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.

(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)

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I experimented on myself. Here are 4 things that did help me sleep.

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Tags:Posted On: September 26, 2013

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Written By: Eric Barker

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4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About a Good Night's Sleep