By Robert Heller, MD — Co-Founder and Medical Director, Juvelixir®
Almost nobody ever came to me with a Tuesday problem.
They came in tired, and when I asked how they were sleeping I would hear that the weekdays were more or less fine — up at six, down around eleven, not wonderful, not a complaint. Then I would ask what happened on the weekend, and the whole shape of the thing would change.
Saturday: bed at one, up at ten. Sunday: bed at midnight, awake at three, staring at the ceiling, up at nine feeling worse than on any workday. Monday: unusable. Tuesday: recovering. By Wednesday they were themselves again, which left roughly three good days in seven, and they had come to see me about Wednesday.
The gap is the finding, not the hours
I stopped counting how many hours people slept fairly early on. The total was the number everybody volunteered and the least useful thing they told me.
What I started asking for instead was two numbers: the hour you get up on a workday, and the hour you get up on a Sunday. The distance between them was, in my experience, the single most informative sleep measurement I could collect in an exam room. An hour, and I rarely saw much trouble. Three hours, and I could usually predict the rest of the conversation before it happened.
The reason is unglamorous. A body keeps time. It does not know that Saturday is different, and it takes several days to be talked out of a schedule it has been keeping all week. A person who shifts by three hours every weekend spends a good part of the following week explaining themselves to their own clock.
Why the bedtime is the wrong lever
Everyone tries to fix this at night, and night is the hardest place to fix anything. You cannot decide to be sleepy at eleven. You can only arrange to have been awake since a reasonable hour.
So I asked for one thing, and only one: hold the wake time. Get up on the weekend within about an hour of when you get up on a Tuesday. Not the same minute — within an hour. Go to bed when you like. If Friday runs late, let it run late and still get up.
Two supporting pieces made it survivable. Get outside within the first hour, whatever the weather, even briefly; light early in the day does more to set the clock than anything you can do at eleven at night. And if you need the sleep back, take it as an early-afternoon nap of twenty or thirty minutes rather than as three extra hours on Sunday morning. A short nap costs you nothing that night. A long lie-in costs you Monday.
What I did not ask for
Perfection, a tracker, or a device that scores you at breakfast. I have watched a fair number of patients become worse sleepers by taking up the measurement of their sleep, and I have never once seen a number on a screen make a person sleepier.
One habit, on one hinge — the hour you get up — is enough to move most of what can be moved from a column.
Where a supplement fits into this
Not here. Nothing in Juvelixir® is intended to help you sleep, and a formula that suggested it could would be telling you something about the company rather than about your night. It is a dietary supplement — nutritional support taken consistently, on top of a foundation that is already doing its work.
And if the trouble has lasted months, if you are sleepy at the wheel, or if someone who sleeps near you has noticed loud snoring or pauses in your breathing, please bring that to your own physician rather than to an article. Some of the most useful appointments of my career started with exactly that sentence.
Read the anchor entry — what sixty years in practice taught me about supplements →
These statements have not been evaluate by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for general educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Individual experiences vary. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist before starting any new supplement or making changes to your diet, exercise, or sleep routine, especially if you take medication, have a health condition, or are pregnant or nursing.