Well, you’re not alone.

Most people have trouble with at least one of these issues, and the problems aren’t getting any better. The recent technological boom in the last 20 years has done nothing but threaten our sleep even more.

Devices have become more mobile and functional in different settings which typically sees us invite them into the bedroom at night before bedtime.

The artificial light emitted from the screen, however, does nothing but delay our sleep from starting because it inhibits our body’s natural production of melatonin, needed to fall asleep at a consistent time.

Enter Nick Littlehales, an elite sleep coach, who has consulted too many high-level individuals and organizations to name them all.

Let’s just start with football clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City, and Liverpool. Some of the world’s best athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo and Roger Federer use his advice on a daily basis. Hugo Boss and Louis Vuitton have benefitted from his life-changing findings with sleep as well.

We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, right?

How Else Can We Sleep?

Littlehales is well aware of these modern sleep issues. He knows we all struggle to consistently get 8 hours of shuteye a night.

His diagnosis — we’re aiming for the wrong metric.

“Tap into your browser Circadian Rhythms to broaden your knowledge of this process that humans are completely synchronized with. Redefine your approach to sleeping as mental and physical recovery. You’ll realize it’s more natural to sleep in shorter periods more often than one main block at night.” — Nick Littlehales, in an interview with swanwicksleep.com.

He advises to sleep in shorter periods, more often. More specifically, he has recognized that humans take a total of 90 minutes to pass through all the five stages of sleep we go through.

He has also noted, as we touched on earlier, that the modern environment is changing and it is becoming harder and harder to achieve 8 hours of sleep a night consistently.

His idea to combat this is to sleep in 90 or 30 minute cycles.

This means you could sleep for 5 cycles of 90 minutes each throughout a full day, or if you want more sleep at night still, getting 4 cycles (total of 6 hours) or 3 cycles (total of 4.5 hours) nocturnally and filling in the midday and early evening with a couple 30-minute naps.

The purpose is to not have to rely on one 8-hour period that is almost sure to get interrupted by forces we don’t control.

Littlehales also takes into account that the athletes he coaches do a lot of traveling, some people’s jobs interfere with normal sleep and wake times, and young children will interrupt this long stint of sleep because they actually adhere to this cycles-approach to sleeping.

“Young families, of course, disrupt adult monophasic sleep-wake routines, because they sleep polyphasically. But if you have maintained a polyphasic approach throughout your life then newborns, infants have less influence.” — Nick Littlehales, in an interview with swanwicksleep.com.

You can essentially recover your poor sleep any time that you need to as long as your schedule permits it.

This is the purpose after all; you build your sleep routine around your life so they actually compliment each other.

Too many people walk around sleep-deprived day after day because their one chance at sleep was interrupted and it eats away at their well-being.

Personal Experience and Anecdotes

For myself, I typically have a hard time falling asleep at night because I get a lot of anxious thoughts as I’m trying to wind down.

On top of that, I will wake up in the middle of the night and have to lay there a while to doze off again. This happens a couple times a week.

To provide another sleep schedule example, I work from home and don’t have a set work schedule. I am also a night owl (another thing that is important to identify for Littlehales).

I have such a hard time waking up earlier in the morning. I find that the discomfort is simply never worth it. To be honest, I never feel good waking up earlier than 9:00–9:30am.

So I like to stay up later because that’s when I function well.

With my schedule, I wake up and start writing right away so I’m not distracted. After a long and intense writing session, I have to take a little break. This could be when I get a 90-minute cycle in.

In the middle of the day, I like to go to the gym. Then, I come back and have lunch and relax for a bit. This could be another chance to get a 90-minute cycle in. This would help me feel more rested and energized to tackle some more work later in the day.

I could feasibly get another 90-minute cycle in during the early evening, or I could just get 3 or 4 of these cycles in during the late night and early morning hours.

These examples should provide as reasonable templates for any kind of lifestyle that you live to make sure you’re always getting enough sleep.

With this approach, you have up to five chances to recover yourself adequately from an intense or stressful day.

Sleeping This Way May Be Most Natural and Effective

Nick proposes this polyphasic sleep schedule is how humans recover the best, physically and mentally.

According to him, our ancestors slept this way up until the invention of electricity and the lightbulb. It all comes back around to the advent of artificial light.

He also noted that there is a lot of pressure on people to perform today and to be a certain way which weighs on us heavily.

He says this is especially true with his professional athletes who have to avoid reading all the negative speculation written about them after big games or a poor performance in general.

“It’s too tempting just to see what might be out there. Their agents and their media people try to control it but, just like all of us, they like to tweet or put that picture up.” — Nick Littlehales, in an interview with the Guardian.

The modern pressures and expectations of today motivate us to disengage more frequently because they are major stressors.

With sleep being the ultimate tool we have for mental and physical recovery, what better proposition is there to disengage than to go take a 30-minute nap or 90-minute cycle?

You can return to your task much more capable than you were in your previous fatigued state.

The Takeaway

When asked by the Guardian about his thoughts on getting 8 hours of sleep a night, Littlehales responded with,

“Nobody gets it and nobody achieves it.”

Not to mention that not everyone needs 8 hours. Some people need more, some need less.

Instead of shooting for a consecutive 8 hours, start thinking of sleep as your recovery time and fill it into your lifestyle accordingly. 

This is Nick Littlehales’ overarching message whether you are an elite professional athlete or full-time employee sitting at a desk.

With five 90-minute sleep cycles his baseline recommendation, aim to get a few of those through the night and maybe one or two during the midday and early evening.

This, in Littlehales’ opinion, is the best sleep recipe for proper recovery.

He outlines all of his beliefs surrounding sleep and his personal sleep strategy for all his clients in his book, Sleep.