Last night I was on the phone for two hours with US banks, meaning I didn’t get to sleep until after 1 a.m. I woke up today groggy, tired, and already slightly suffering from Raging Expat Syndrome. I left to go to work, driving out into traffic that usually aggravates me,¹ actively reminding myself that my physical state will leave me prone to being impatient and extra critical of my host culture.

As I drove, I realized that one of the key tools in an expat’s bag of cultural adaptation is, unexpectedly, ample amounts of sleep. I’ve written previously about how sleep is fundamental to learning a language. Sleep is so fundamental that you can’t learn a language without ample amounts of sleep. But the benefits of sleep go much deeper than language learning, though: your mental, emotional, and physical health are all closely tied to the amount and quality of your sleep.

In today’s article, I’ll explore some of the benefits of sleep for expats and then share tips for improving sleep that multiple sleep experts recommend. My sleep, mood, and expat life have improved by paying attention to these tips and I hope yours will too!

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Why sleep is crucial for expats

I think we’re all aware of how crucial sleep is, and I don’t want to insult your intelligence by suggesting you may not know some of those benefits. However, having read Why We Sleep by sleep specialist Dr. Matthew Walker, I realized how little I actually knew about how amazing sleep is for our physical, mental, and emotional health. Rather than going into all the details, though, I’m going to suggest you read Why We Sleep, since it’s absolutely fascinating. Instead, I’ll summarize a few benefits of sleep and offer some commentary on how the benefits of sleep are especially important for expats.

1. Improved adaptability. Being well rested enables you to approach challenges and differences with a positive attitude and with emotional resilience. Just think of how poorly a 6 year old responds to a stressor when they’re crazy tired. Adults are better at not throwing tantrums, but the emotional and mental strain of the stressor is the same. Sleep is crucial to your ability to adapt and flex to a new environment with grace.
2. Reduced stress. Sleep powerfully reduces the stress you feel, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. If you’re experiencing high amounts of stress as an expat, you need rest and sleep. You know this from your personal experience: you feel less stressed when you wake up. There’s even links between sleep and mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. If you’re feeling stressed or easily triggered by things in your host culture, that’s a clear sign you need to prioritize your sleep.
3. Stronger bodies. You likely know this is true of your muscles—sleep helps them repair—but you may not know it’s true of your immune system. Our expat immune systems face local germs and viruses that we didn’t grow up with. Sleep not only helps you recover if you’re sick—we all know that one—but it also prevents you from getting sick in the first place.
4. Better language and culture learning. This one is so important, I wrote an entire article on it: Pillow Talk – How Sleep Solidifies Language Learning. You simply can’t learn a language if you’re not getting ample amounts of sleep.
5. Mental energy and alertness. Whether you’re doing business or non-profit work, life as an expat taxes your mind and energy more than life in your passport country. Sleep is crucial for restoring your mental energy so that you can enter another round of negotiations in the local language, understand your doctor’s instructions, hang out with your friends, or figure out how to pay a parking ticket.

These are just some of the benefits to expats of sleep, in addition to all the incredible benefits of sleep to people in general.

How to sleep better

I hope the small sample above has reminded you of the importance of ample quality sleep. Experts have consistently agreed that adult humans need about 8 hours of sleep.² Most people aren’t getting that much and you probably aren’t yourself, if you’re accurately tracking your sleep. Getting more and better sleep will require being in bed long enough to get 8 hours of sleep. That will most likely take some adjustment of your schedule and life and that part may be hard.

The good news is, though, that there are some really good and easy steps you can take to improve the quality of your sleep and make sure that the hours you are in bed truly count. In the last two years, one of the categories of my reading has been on health, as I seek to grow in my understanding, discipline, and health. I’ve compiled for your benefit the suggestions on how to improve your sleep from four different sources:

• Dr. Matthew Walker, sleep researcher at UC Berkeley, in his fantastic book Why We Sleep.
• Dr. Peter Attia, MD, former physician at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health, in his excellent book Outlive.
• Dr. Greg Wells, MD, Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Hospital for Sick Children and author of the book, The Ripple Effect.
• The National Institute of Health (NIH) Sleep Foundation, in their publication Tips for Getting a Good Night’s Sleep.

Each of those sources had a list of tips to improve your sleep. While the lists differed in some ways, there was broad agreement about some of the big steps to take to improve your sleep. What I’ve done is broken these tips out into ones mentioned by all four authors and those mentioned by three of the authors. By following the advice that all authors agree upon, you’ll get the most “bang for your buck” in improving your sleep. I hope you find this as helpful as it was for me!

Four-source tips

Here are sleep suggestions that all four sources listed in their suggestions for improving your sleep. The order presented here is my own (they all had them in different orders), but there is agreement among the sources that these techniques are the most useful for falling asleep fast and staying asleep.

1. Cool your bedroom

I would never have guessed that one of the most important things you can do to improve your sleep is to have a cool bedroom, but it is a consistent finding in research. The reason for this is that your body’s core temperature actually has to drop 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit (c. 1 degree Celsius) in order to initiate sleep. A hot room prevents your body from cooling its core, thereby delaying the onset of sleep.

Dr. Wells recommends your room be 19 degrees Celsius (mid-60s, Fahrenheit). Dr. Walker concurs, saying that if you wear “standard” bedding and clothing, the target temperature is 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Too cold can also be a problem, but most people’s rooms are too warm.

2. Take a hot bath before bed

I did not know this tip, until I learned about sleep, but a hot bath, sauna, hot tub, or even a hot foot bath before you go to bed will help you fall asleep faster. This may seem counterintuitive since I just said your body’s core temperature needs to fall in order to go to sleep. Actually, the reason a hot bath helps you sleep is due to this exact reason. When you take a hot bath, your blood vessels near the surface of your skin expand. This allows your body to rapidly dissipate its core heat faster.

When sleep test subjects wore special clothes that warmed their hands and feet, thus allowing the body to get rid of its heat, they fell asleep “20 percent faster than was usual” (Dr. Walker, Why We Sleep, p. 278). Hands and feet are especially important here, because of their high density of blood vessels.

Every author mentioned this, so my wife and I bought a foot bath to use in the moments before going to bed. It is incredibly relaxing and helps drop our core temperature.

3. Relax before bedtime

This shouldn’t be a surprise and is consistent with what you know in your own life. The more active you are before bed, the harder it is to sleep. Fighting with your spouse, talking to a difficult client, arguing a point on social media, or playing a video game all engage your brain and stir it up, making it much harder to sleep.

Some people have a pattern of meditation or prayer before going to bed. Others read, or listen to music. The key is that you want to do something that is passive rather than active. Reading a book or listening to music were commonly recommended suggestions. Just make sure the book is relaxing (like fiction; not horror or a “thinking” book) and the music is soothing (like classical; not death metal). Watching TV is a typical thing people do to relax before going to bed, but all authors specifically recommended against watching TV, for reasons I’ll discuss below.

4. Avoid caffeine

I’d bet good money you expected this one, and with good reason. We’ve all experienced caffeine too late at night and then being unable to sleep afterwards. What I didn’t know, and you likely don’t, is just how long caffeine stays in your system. The amount of time it takes your body to remove half the caffeine from your system depends on each person, but it generally is 5-7 hours(Dr. Walker, Why We Sleep, p. 27). Put differently, this means that half the caffeine from your cup of coffee or soda is still circulating in your body 5-7 hours later. Have a coffee, soda, or energy drink at 4pm? About half the caffeine it contains is still in your body at 11pm when you’re trying to go to sleep.

You’ll need to figure out what “avoid caffeine” looks like in your life, with your schedule, and with your own body’s response to caffeine, but you likely need to stop drinking caffeine earlier than you think. Unfortunately, if you’re unable to sleep at 11pm, you’re unlikely to blame it on a cup of coffee you had at 4pm, even if that’s the likely culprit. Experiment. I’ve learned noon is pretty much my “cut-off” hour; if I have caffeine after noon, I can tell its effect on my sleep.

5. Limit naps

Walker & NIH both say not to nap after 3pm; Attia says to avoid daytime naps entirely and Walker notes that’s the right course of action if you’re having trouble sleeping. Wells says not to take a nap longer than 20 minutes. Though all 4 sources differ in the specifics, the reason they all advise caution about naps is because daytime napping relieves some of the “sleep pressure” that we feel. That hormonally-driven sleep pressure is a crucial factor in our ability to go to sleep. If you relieve some of that pressure through a daytime nap, especially a late-daytime nap, you’re removing the sleep pressure which is one of the number one drivers of your ability to fall asleep. The later the nap, the longer you have to stay up in order to feel tired enough to fall asleep.

6. Make your room super dark

We all know that falling asleep in bright sunlight is difficult. Our bodies are attuned to the rising and setting of the sun. When light fades, our bodies produce melatonin, the “sleep hormone” which enables our bodies to fall asleep. The brighter light that we experience and the longer we experience that bright light into the night, the longer it takes for our body to finally release the melatonin that we need in order to sleep.

You may know all of the above. I bet you didn’t know just how sensitive the release of melatonin is to light. Consider that researchers found “even the light from an alarm clock is enough to reduce your melatonin levels” (Dr. Wells, The Ripple Effect, p. 49). An alarm clock’s light—that’s all it takes to delay the release of melatonin and, in turn, delay sleep.

Dr. Walker notes our sensitivity to light with the incredible finding that “Even a hint of dim light—8 to 10 lux—has been show to delay the release of nighttime melatonin in humans” (Dr. Walker, Why We Sleep, p.268). To put this in perspective, a “typical” candle emits 12-15 lux. Even just a candle’s amount of light is enough to delay the release of melatonin in your body, thereby delaying sleep.

So, in the hours before going to bed, you want “mood lighting” in your home, rather than powerful overhead lights. Your bedroom at sleeping time should be dark. Really, really dark. Dr. Attia suggests:

Make it dark enough that you can’t see your hand in front of your face with your eyes open

Dr. Peter Attia, Outlive, p. 375

That is super dark. You’ll likely need to get blackout curtains in order to get your room this dark. I did. Then I realized that my air purifier and many electrical outlets had a tiny indicator light that was lighting up my room. I put a bit of electrical tape over each light, and now our room is truly dark.

7. Eliminate electronics before sleep

The last advice that every author specifically mentioned was to not use electronic devices or TV in the last hour before you go to bed, including e-readers like Kindles. Attia even suggests two hours, though the others all said one. There’s many reasons why this is the case, here are just some of them:

First, they’re interactive and can be typically anxiety-inducing. While you can do passive things on your phone (e.g. watch movies or Tiktoks), one swipe of the finger away gets you into debates with idiots on the internet, battles in a game, answering emails, or planning a meeting. That’s the opposite of the quiet, relaxing, restful activities you want before bedtime.

Second, and worse for your sleep, a phone’s screen is bright. Incredibly bright. At max brightness, phones typically emit over 1,000 lux. Remember that just 10 lux delays the release of melatonin. Even fully dimmed, your phone or TV is pumping a lot of light straight into your eyes, tricking your brain into thinking it’s still daytime. The result is a delayed release of melatonin and delayed onset of sleep.

Third, and even worse, the light coming from electronic devices is almost always LED light. That’s fine in the daytime, but LED light has a lot of light that is in the “blue” spectrum of light. That blue light mimics the color of light from the sun in the middle of the day, not the orangish-red light of the sun at sunset. So, not only does the amount of light trick your body into thinking it’s daytime, but the color of the light also makes your body think it’s still high noon

Dr. Walker writes, ‘Evening blue LED light has a more harmful impact on human nighttime melatonin suppression than the warm, yellow light from old incandescent bulbs, even when their lux intensities are matched’ (Why We Sleep, p. 268, emphasis added). This makes a phone or TV’s light levels specifically worse than the same amount of light from a non-LED source.

So, what do you do? Dr. Attia’s rule in Outlive is to not use electronics for two hours before bedtime. That’s quite a tall order, I know, but it is what the science suggests—and there are some great ways to help make this part of the habit of your life.

• Set up your phone to change its color automatically. Set up Night Shift on iPhone or Night Mode on Android. This uses software to make the color of your screen to have more of the orange-red light and less of the harmful blue light. I haven’t seen scientific evidence on this (yet), but the theory is that this reduces the delayed release of melatonin from blue light.
• Set your phone dimness really low. Not just as low as it can go typically, but using accessibility features to get it even dimmer than normal. Here’s how to do it on iPhone (I don’t know if it’s possible on Android).
• Use aggressive Focus Modes to get you off your phone. Both iPhone and Android support “Focus Modes” which allow you to change the home screens, notifications, and more on your phones. I have mine set up so that, one hour before my bedtime:
  • All notifications are silenced
  • Movies, games, social media, & other distracting apps are timed out & can’t be used³
  • The only apps that are accessible are ones I need for communications or emergencies. But they’re all “boring” apps, so there’s no draw to get on my phone.

Those Focus Modes have been quite helpful for me, forcing me off my phone into something that is more relaxing and less disruptive to my sleep, typically reading a physical book while my feet are soaking in a hot bath. It’s a powerful, relaxing, soothing combination that enables great sleep.

There you go, seven tips that all these different authors agreed upon and suggested as making the biggest difference to your sleep. If you want to get better with your sleep, start with these Magnificent Seven.

Three-source tips

Not all of the advice was universally mentioned by the authors I mention; there were a few points of sleep advice that three of the four recommended, but one author didn’t. Interestingly enough, it typically was Dr. Wells who didn’t mention the advice and he’s the most general-practitioner of all four sources. In other words, the more someone specialized in sleep, the more likely they were to make the following additional recommendations:

8. Sleep on a regular schedule

Dr. Walker, NIH, and Dr. Attia all highly recommended sleeping on a regular schedule of going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. In fact, NIH wrote, “If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it” (NIH). Dr. Walker notes that sleeping on a schedule “is one of the most consistent and effective ways of helping people with insomnia get better sleep” (Why We Sleep, p.280).

This includes weekends. I know folks like to sleep in on the weekends, but this actually makes it harder to sleep well the rest of the week. Better than sleeping in on the weekends is to get enough sleep each day of the week that you don’t “need” to sleep in on the weekend because you’re well rested. Dr. Attia suggests that, if you have to adjust part of your schedule, it’s better to change when you go to bed rather than when you wake up.

9. Avoid alcohol

Dr. Walker, NIH, and Dr. Attia are all in agreement about the effects of alcohol on sleep and their recommendation to avoid alcohol. I was surprised to read this, given how commonly people have a night cap before bed, but the evidence is overwhelming that drinking alcohol at night is one of the worst things you can do to your sleep. If you enjoy alcohol at night, I suggest you read the extensive discussion Dr. Walker gives in his book Why We Sleep, complete with multiple studies and lots of research.

Here’s a few highlights:

Many individuals believe alcohol helps them to fall asleep more easily, or even offers sounder sleep throughout the night. Both are resolutely untrue…Alcohol sedates you out of wakefulness, but it does not induce natural sleep. The electrical brainwave state you enter via alcohol is not that of natural sleep; rather, it is akin to a light form of anesthesia.

Dr. Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, 271, emphasis added.

In particular, alcohol often suppressed REM sleep, which is the period of sleep in which your brain learns a language (see more in my article here. If you’re learning a language and drinking alcohol, you’re dramatically hurting your ability to learn a language.⁴

Dr. Walker concludes:

The politically incorrect advice I would (of course never) give is this: go to the pub for a drink in the morning. That way, the alcohol will be out of your system before sleep. It is hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol’s harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise would be doing you, and the science, a disservice.

Dr. Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, p. 274.

10. Avoid large meals

A late-night meal starts up your body’s digestive functions and puts it in a non-restful state, but being hungry when going to bed can also keep you awake. Instead, Dr. Walker writes, “for healthy sleep, the scientific evidence suggests that you should avoid going to bed too full or too hungry” (Why We Sleep, p. 295).

11. Don’t exercise at night

Remember that your body’s core temperature has to drop in order to initiate sleep. Since exercise raises your body’s core temperature, that makes it hard to go to sleep. That’s why Dr. Walker, Dr. Attia, and NIH all suggest not exercising within 2-3 hours of going to bed.

12. Remove clocks from your bedroom

This tip surprised me, but Dr. Walker, Dr. Attia, and NIH all mentioned it specifically. Either remove clocks from your bedroom entirely or turn the clock face away so you can’t see it from your bed. The reason is that clock-watching tends to produce anxiety that you’re not going to sleep fast enough.

I discovered last night that you can set iPhone and Apple Watch to not display the clock at nighttime. You can find this setting in Settings>Focus>Sleep>Customize Screens settings, then turn off “Show time.”

Conclusion

While living as an expat presents its unique challenges, the power of adequate sleep in managing these challenges cannot be overstated. As we’ve explored, the benefits of proper sleep extend far beyond mere physical rest, encompassing improved adaptability, reduced stress, enhanced physical health, better language and cultural assimilation, and increased mental alertness. These advantages are particularly vital for expats. Sleep is crucial for long-term surviving and thriving as an expat.

Following the tips outline in this article will go a long way towards improving your sleep and thus improving your expat life. If you’d like to learn more, I highly recommend Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker. It’s fascinating. Alternatively, the Sleep Foundation (a division of NIH) runs a free 14-night sleep “course” to help you get better sleep which you can sign up for here.

Prioritizing sleep is not just a matter of health; it’s a crucial step in ensuring that your expat experience is as enriching and fulfilling as possible. Embrace these sleep tips, and you’ll find yourself more equipped to handle the demands and embrace the joys of your expat life. Happy sleeping!

Footnotes:

1. The blatant disregard for traffic laws is a frustration for me even on the best of days. ↩︎
2. If you’re not sure of how much sleep you’re getting, consider using a sleep tracking app or sleep-tracking device like an Apple Watch or Fitbit. If you want a low-cost (though inaccurate) method of tracking quantity, then start a stopwatch timer when you go to bed and turn it off when you wake up. If you’re interested in assessing your sleep quality, Dr. Peter Attia, MD, recommends a few resources in his excellent book Outlive, page 368. They are: the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index, the Epworth Sleepiness Scale and the Insomnia Severity Index. ↩︎
3. For even stronger protection, my wife has the password for my Focus Modes so that she needs to enter that password for me to enable an app. Sometimes I need to, but it adds enough friction that I’m likely to not enter it quickly and re-enable an app. ↩︎
4. Dr. Walker reports the results of a study of on the effects of alcohol on language learning. Participants were divided into three groups. They all learned the grammar of a fake language on the first day of the study. Then, group 1 slept normally, group 2 got a “little’ drunk” (with standardized & monitored blood alcohol levels) on the first night, and group 3 slept normally on nights one and two, but got the same amount of “a little drunk” on the third night. On day 7, when all were sober and the researchers tested their learning, the effects of alcohol could be seen. Group 1, which slept normally each night and had no alcohol, “remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge” (Why We Sleep, p. 273). Group 2, which was drunk the first night but not the next nights, forgot more than 50% of the original knowledge. Group 3, which had gotten 2 nights of normal sleep and then got drunk the third night, forgot 40% of what they had learned. Dr. Walker concludes: “The brain is not done processing that knowledge after the first night of sleep. Memories remain vulnerable to disruption of sleep (including that from alcohol) even up to three nights after learning” (Why We Sleep, p. 274). Even weekend drinking when you have no classes disrupts the learning you’ve accomplished during the week. ↩︎