Top 10 Habits Wrecking Oregon Men’s Sleep

Testosterone is produced largely during sleep. In a University of Chicago study, healthy young men restricted to five hours a night for one week saw daytime testosterone fall 10 to 15 percent, which the authors noted is what 10 to 15 years of normal aging does. It was a small study, ten men in a lab, so treat the exact number as a signal rather than a law. The direction is not in dispute. Here is what most often causes the lost sleep.

Alcohol in the evening. It puts you under fast and then fragments the back half of the night, wrecking exactly the REM sleep testosterone depends on. The most common single cause on this list.
Untreated snoring. Loud snoring with pauses is sleep apnea until proven otherwise. A meta-analysis found men with obstructive sleep apnea have significantly lower testosterone than men without it, and population studies have long estimated that the large majority of cases are never diagnosed. If one item on this list is worth a doctor visit, it is this one.
A wandering wake-up time. Your body cares more about a consistent wake time than a consistent bedtime. Weekend drift of two hours is jet lag you gave yourself.
Caffeine after 2 p.m. Caffeine has a half-life around five hours, so a 3 p.m. coffee still has a meaningful dose working at midnight. In a controlled study, 400 mg of caffeine taken six hours before bed measurably cut total sleep time, and the subjects could not tell.
A warm bedroom. Core temperature has to drop for sleep to start. Somewhere in the 60s beats the 70s, and it is free.
No morning light. In an Oregon winter you can go weeks without a real light signal. The dose that sets your clock is outdoor light in the first hour up, or a 10,000-lux lamp if the sun is not cooperating.
Late heavy training. A hard 9 p.m. session leaves core temperature and adrenaline elevated well past bedtime.
The phone in bed. Less about blue light than about the content. Nothing on that screen is designed to help you stop.
Eating a large meal within two hours of bed. Digestion raises core temperature and reflux gets worse lying down.
Lying in bed awake trying harder. After twenty minutes, get up, keep the lights low, do something dull, and go back when you are sleepy. Staying put teaches your brain that bed is where you are frustrated.

Where to start

Pick the alcohol one and the wake time one. Give it two weeks. Those two produce more measurable change than the other eight combined, and neither costs anything.

Top 10 Habits Wrecking Oregon Men’s Sleep

Where to start

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