Sleep Hack Boosts Memory and Alertness
Sometimes you wake up from a deep sleep feeling groggy—even after a full night’s rest.
Have you ever wondered why that is?
No matter how many hours you’re in bed, you might not be getting the quality sleep needed to feel alert.
And that doesn’t just leave you feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus in the morning. It can have a negative impact on your memory or ability to learn.
Fortunately, THIS simple sleep hack can improve your alertness AND cognitive function the next day.
There are a lot of factors that go into a good night’s rest. Today I’m just going to focus on one of them:
DARKNESS.
Being asleep is NOT enough to gain all of the benefits of sleep.
Research has shown that even being exposed to a small amount of room light BEFORE bed can decrease the DURATION of melatonin by as much as 90 percent—and can SUPPRESS levels by about 50 percent.
Even after you’re asleep, if your brain detects just a small amount of light it can suppress melatonin.
This kind of ambient light could come from street lights, the TV, or light from your electronic devices.
Darkness is also necessary for keeping levels of cortisol low, which helps calm your brain at night.
So what is the sleep hack?
According to a new study, it’s wearing an eye mask to remove all light stimulation.
For the study, 89 patients wore an eye mask for two days and then did two days of testing.
During the control week they spent five nights sleeping without an eye mask, followed by two more days of testing.
The participants did BETTER after 5 nights of wearing a mask on:
- Learning performance
- Behavioral alertness
- Sustained attention
Ultimately, these results mean that sleeping in total darkness leads to better episodic memory encoding and alertness. In other words, your memory is better and you feel more awake.
A similar follow-up study produced nearly identical results. So we know these findings are solid.
EEGs revealed that wearing a mask led to longer slow-wave sleep time, which is likely responsible for the improvements in memory.
That’s because slow-wave sleep restores your brain’s ability to encode new information.
You don’t have to wear an eye mask to achieve these results, of course. But you DO need to sleep in total darkness.
P.S. There’s ANOTHER light-linked trick that can help you sleep well at night. But it’ NOT what you might expect. In fact, it has to do with exposing yourself to MORE light. I explain HERE in my earlier free report.
Source:
“Wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep improves episodic learning and alertness,” Sleep, 2022;, zsac305, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsac305
