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Sleeping in Total Darkness

Eric D. on 9th Sep 2019

Hey guys, Eric here from DubsLabs and welcome to another episode of Sleep Hacks. Today, I wanted to talk to you about blackout curtains. These are something I added into my life only about a year ago and it's been a game changer for me. Not only do I have blackout curtains, but I've also put black tape over the lights on my air conditioner and on my smoke detector, and here's why.

In our brains, we have what's called the Pineal gland, and the pineal gland is responsible for releasing and regulating melatonin. Now, supposedly, what happens is when we have light in our bedroom, it kind of messes with our Pineal gland's ability to produce the correct amount of melatonin that we need for a good night's sleep. So by blocking out all sources of light so that is 100% dark in your bedroom, it allows your Pineal gland to produce the optimum amount of melatonin for the best night's sleep. I tried this, it works. It's amazing.

Blackout curtains are cheap. For a good night's sleep, it's going to have such a big compounding effect over time. It's a little work to put them up but I did it myself with a screwdriver and a tape measure. It was a nice little afternoon job. But one thing I want to stress is complete absolute darkness is the best. Not only do I have blackout curtains and tape over all the lights in my bedroom, but I also wear an eye mask every night as well just because once the sun starts coming up, if I'm trying to sleep past sunrise a little bit, that sun can still creep in around the blackout curtains, they're not 100% blackout and so I have that eye mask there to stop any extra little light from coming into the bedroom. What's great though is that once I remove my eye mask, my alarm goes off, I remove my eye mask and that little bit of light in the room really helps me wake up a lot faster. Aside from these things aside from blackout curtains in the tape, I actually also use what's called a Philips wake light and it's actually an alarm clock that mimics the sun so that when my alarm goes off, the light turns on and it gradually gets brighter and brighter and brighter. So it's the color of the sunrise and then it gradually becomes the color of like the full sun and so I get all those blue light rays kind of in my face and it helps me wake up feeling way less groggy way faster than usual. It is absolutely amazing. It's been a total game changer.

So that's all I got for now. If you liked this video, please subscribe and tell your friends. Thank you.