A little over a year ago I needed to wear glasses every day.
Today I put them on for the first time in weeks.
The biggest difference between now and then: My sleep schedule.
Let me tell you, my sleep schedule is incredibly consistent.
I go to bed at 9pm, and I wake up anywhere from 4:45 → 5:15am.
This varies a total of 30 minutes each way.
I’ve been sleeping like this for about a year now.
I wear my watch to bed, a fancy thing that monitors heart-rate and therefore tracks my sleep.
And while I wouldn’t put too much stock into the accuracy of the tracking on any given night, over the course of a year it’s demonstrated some pretty consistent trends.
In general, I front-load deep sleep earlier in the night, with REM sleep usually happening before I wake up.
This has been an extremely reliable trend for over a year now.
I have a slight stigmatism, fairly minor, making me farsighted- I can see far away, but its harder to see up close.
Last year I was well on my way from recovering from career burnout, and I just couldn’t see the tiny text on my screen.
I finally bit the bullet and purchased glasses when my partner saw my screen and blurted “Wow that text is huge!”
There was no denying it then.
I started wearing glasses, and I really wore them. I just embraced the glasses life so that I could own the glasses look. Maybe not the best motivating reason but hey, it worked for me.
And it was easier to see.
The thing is, I don’t know when I stopped wearing glasses.
It was a gradual thing, until I realized I hadn’t worn them in weeks.
I blame sleep.
I honestly believe that my super consistent sleep schedule as been fully integrated into my body’s ecosystem, and whatever internal healing processes exist in the body have been enabled by my sleep consistency.
Now, maybe this is all anecdotal tomfoolery, and I’m about use this tenuous correlation to make some really big casual leaps, but let me tell you my theory.
It takes 6 months for the body to entrain to a new behavioral paradigm.
If consistent sleep lead to improved eyesight, then my theory is that it took 6 months for my body to fully integrate the consistent sleep. Only then did my eyesight start improving.
6 months may be too long for this entrainment process, but its the general timeline that becomes important.
For instance, if I want to improve my feeding behaviors, then by this wild theory I must have multi-month timeline.
3 months to establish routine, 3 months for the body to shift long-term biological processes in response to the routine, 3 months before the results of those processes are distributed through your body.
What’s interesting about this approach is that it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong.
Because I have a high degree of certainty that approaching sleep, nutrition, and exercise with multi-month timeframes will be more effective than short-term timeframes or no timeframe at all.
And while six months might be on the long end of whatever improvement I want to make, six months seems like an excellent timeframe for a health improvement plan.
It’s a timeframe that optimizes for long-term progress over months, meaning bandaids or symptom relief won’t make the cut.
It also means I have time to adjust. It’s not cold-turkey no sugar, it’s approaching each meal with intention, eating slower, eating less. The by-product is less sugar because of the shift in mindset.
It also has pharmacological implications.
If I want to add thyroid supplementation, it gives me a timebox for this.
When I put it in a multi-month timebox, I get a bunch of things out of the box:
- How much money I expect this to cost over the six month period
- How I feel as I onboard the supplement
- How I feel as the supplementation is fully integrated
- Checkpoints for if I want to increase or decrease dosage
It becomes a project, a hobby. I can even start a spreadsheet of how I feel per day, leading to trends that reveal further optimizations.
The fact is, I don’t need my glasses as often as I did a year ago. The only real difference was a super consistent change in my sleep schedule.
So now I have a hypothesis about the length of time before a routine pays dividends.
And it’s made me the most excited about my personal health than I’ve been in a long time.