Sleep dark
Make the bedroom dark, and sleep on your side.
Do this
- Make the room as dark as you can. An eye mask is the cheap fix.
- Earplugs and a cool bed help if noise or heat wake you.
- Sleep on your side with your head slightly raised.
- If you wake in the night: ten long exhales, then the eye sequence below.
- After you get up, move: walk, shake out, skip rope. He says this helps drain fluid that pooled overnight.
On a bad day: Wear an eye mask.
- Move your eyes slowly to one side, then the other.
- Up, then down.
- Circle one way, then the other.
- Point them gently toward your nose without crossing them.
- Breathe out slowly. Repeat two or three times.
Why it works
Light reaches the body clock even through closed eyelids and keeps the body in a more alert state. For side sleeping, the argument is that the brain's overnight waste-clearing system drains better in that position. The eye sequence is meant to quiet the brain circuits that track where your limbs are, which he says is a step toward falling asleep.
What the research says
Darkness is well supported: one night of moderate room light measurably worsened heart rate and blood sugar control the next morning. Side sleeping is early: he calls the gain slight, and the key posture study was done in rats. His claim that it clears bags under the eyes has no study behind it that this app could find. The eye-movement trick has, by his own account, only indirect support, and this app found no trial of it.
- Mason et al., PNAS, 2022Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic functionOne night of sleep in 100 lux, compared with near darkness, raised night-time heart rate and next-morning insulin resistance in 20 young adults.
- Windred et al., PNAS, 2024Brighter nights and darker days predict higher mortality risk: A prospective analysis of personal light exposure in >88,000 individualsThe brightest nights went with 21–34% higher risk of death. Observational.
- Xie et al., Science, 2013Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brainIn mice, the space between brain cells widens during sleep and waste products clear about twice as fast.
- Lee et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2015The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic TransportAnaesthetised rats cleared tracer from the brain most efficiently lying on their side.
Watch out
Persistent insomnia, loud snoring or pauses in breathing deserve a doctor's visit, not a trick.