Today’s guest post is written by Daniel Ternes from Sleep Hack Dojo. Until I read Daniel’s new guide, my one and only sleep hack, which I’d like to add here before Daniel shares his wealth of knowledge, has been the good old 20-minute power nap.

If you’re anything like me, you might take flights fairly frequently and deal with jet lag. You might find yourself out at the bar with friends until sunrise one morning and then realize you have a call with a client on the other side of the world at 8am! Or if you’re working for a startup, or working on launching your own products, you may spend weeks on end cramming and getting only 2–4 hours of sleep per night, staying loyal to your mission and jumping right back on the laptop in a haze within minutes of waking.

Sometimes there are just extreme circumstances beyond our control. So how do you make it work?

More than five years ago, a friend introduced me to this audio technology called brainwave entrainment. I’ll leave it up to you if you want to research more about it, but it utilizes different frequencies to coax your brain into different states, including relaxation and deep sleep, among others, and I can tell you this: it has worked like magic for me ever since I started using it.

Some people do a daily siesta—but I only take a power nap when I feel very tired in the afternoon or early evening, when I know I need to recharge my mind. When I feel drained like this, I just find a place that’s reasonably quiet and away from other people (your car will do during a lunch or afternoon break from work), take a couple slow deep breaths, put on a 10- or 20-minute power nap audio track on my iPod (these brainwave entrainment audio tracks require that you wear earbuds/headphones), close my eyes and just stay relaxed and tell myself not to open my eyes no matter what.

The brainwave entrainment music that I’ve used for over five years is from Dr. Jeffrey Thompson if you want to learn more about him and search for his Ultimate Nap CD (he’s got a wide variety of other sleep-enhancing music as well). You might wonder, well how do you fall asleep and get rest in such a short amount of time? As I said, I just force myself to keep my eyes closed no matter what happens around me, and try to relax, and almost without fail in hundreds of uses, I have always fallen asleep within the first moments, and the audio track gently brings you out of your nap, feeling rested and refreshed.

If you burn the candle at both ends, I highly recommend you look into brainwave entrainment to supplement the wealth of knowledge Daniel is about to share with you below. Until I read his guide Sleep Hack Dojo, I really didn’t have a thorough understanding of sleep. For something we spend a third of our lives doing, most people sure don’t know very much about sleep at all.

The quality of our sleep really is a huge deciding factor in our moods, our energy, our productivity, and ultimately our success at work and elsewhere, so it’s worth investing some time and energy to understand it better. So today Daniel has been kind enough to share a comprehensive primer on sleep hacking with us here at Thrilling Heroics. Enter Daniel:

An Introduction to Sleep Optimization

Do you want to make your sleep more refreshing and be more productive, concentrated and creative during the day? No problem! You’re in the right place to learn it.

This post will teach you the basics of improving your sleep quality—applying the techniques below will make your sleep more energizing and enjoyable and thereby increase your daytime productivity.

So let’s get started!

Step 1: Lead a Healthy Lifestyle

The first thing you need to do is to improve your general lifestyle. Most of you probably already lead a healthy lifestyle, so I’ll just give a short primer here for those who don’t. In essence, you already know what you have to do.

Steps to Take:

• Improve your diet: Don’t eat highly-processed food. Cut out sweets. Eat more natural. Learn to cook and say goodbye to fast-food. There are tons of resources on this, so do some research on your own and find out what’s okay and what isn’t.
• Exercise: Just about anything is fine. Join a gym and do some weight training. Swimming is great, as is jogging. Maybe pick some sports or other fun activities like dancing. The most effective and simplest thing you can do is just walking. Take a short 30-minute walk through nature every day, it really pays off.

Step 2: Create a Good Sleep Environment

This is often overlooked. But think about it: if you work on a cluttered desk, you’re not very likely to get much done. If you sleep in a cluttered environment, you’re not likely to get quality sleep.

So what makes a good sleep environment?

• Light: Your bedroom should be dark. In an ideal world you would be able to fall asleep in darkness and rise with the morning sun. Call yourself lucky if there’s no streetlight in front of your window. For the rest of us, that means that we have to wear a sleeping mask or close our shutters.
• Sounds: These have effects very similar to light. Our modern world is full with sounds disrupting our sleep. Motorcycles, drunk people screaming around, music, etc. Your ideal sleep environment should be quiet and wake you with soft and natural sounds (bird songs are ideal) in the morning.
• Stand-by lights: Turn off as many electronics as possible. Stand-by lights are a total sleep-killer.
• Associations: If possible, use your bed only for sleep. This forms a clear association in your brain. Your body will associate lying in bed with falling asleep. If you watch TV, eat, or work in your bed, it will blur the association.

Step 3: Establish a Bedtime Routine

Our 21st-century lifestyle demands something along the lines of a bedtime routine. Why is that? Because our daily life is rushed.

If you quit work at 5:00 PM, have dinner with friends or family and spend the evening in a leisurely fashion (without digital entertainment), then you don’t need a bedtime routine.

But if you spend your time like most of us do, you lack a transitional period. Most of us go straight from our laptops into bed. We often even work until late at night and only quit when we’re falling asleep and so immediately go to bed.

Steps to take:

• Limit exposure to screens: Just set a time limit for the use of screens. Ten or eleven PM are great times for this. Stop using anything that has a screen (computers, TVs, smartphones) after that time. I only make one exception: reading on the Kindle is fine.
• Relax your body: After you’ve turned off all your screens, you should do something relaxing to disconnect from the stress and worries of your daily work. Here are some examples: take a walk, do some Yoga or Tai Chi, meditate, take a cold shower.
• Take a look at the bigger picture: Now that you’re relaxed, you can go back to your work. Not directly to your work itself but to your work on a meta-level. What do you want to achieve tomorrow, next week, or in your life as a whole? What have you done today that you can be proud of? What are you thankful for? If you have a diary, this is the optimal time to write in it.
• Drift off: Just relax and do whatever you want. Leave your worries behind. For some of us that means meditating, for others it means reading a novel or listening to music and daydreaming. Just do something that completely relaxes you. [This is also a great time for some aerobic after-hours activities to help you unwind from the day, if you're lucky enough to have a sparring partner! –Cody]

These are just some general ideas of what you should do as a bedtime routine. None of the things here is mandatory, but they offer a good guideline of what a bedtime routine should look like. Try out a variety of different activities and find out what works best for you.

Step 4: Go to Bed

If you did everything right, you should go to bed in a sleep-friendly environment. You should be relaxed and calm, distanced from your work. You hopefully ate healthy and nutritious during the day and did some light exercise, so you should feel very good.

If the conditions are right, you should fall asleep within 15 to 20 minutes. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes you still have a lot of things on your mind. You’re worried, excited, nervous, or for no particular reason you just can’t fall asleep.

There are two things you can do in this situation:

1. Get back up, take another walk or read a book. Just stay awake (don’t become too active) until you’re sleepy. Then go back to bed.

2. Use the List Technique to fall asleep quickly. What is the List Technique? It’s a very powerful technique I created that will make you fall asleep very quickly. Here’s how it works:

Think of a topic—such as animals, books, movies, historical figures, or so on—and go through the alphabet and name one thing for each letter. If you reach Z, go back to the first step and choose a new topic.

So your mind will go “A… antelope, B… bear, C… chameleon, D… hmmm, animal with D?… hmmm dolphin? yeah, dolphin, E …”

You get the idea. You will quickly doze off. Do this a few times to fall asleep and then try it during the day. You will be amazed how much faster your mind works when you’re wide awake.

The technique is very valuable and is one of the best ways I know to fall asleep. The letters A–F might be easy, but when you reach letters like J and start thinking about things that start with J, your mind will wind down very fast and you’ll be asleep in no time.

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In his definitive guidebook on sleep, Daniel explains everything you need to know about what sleep is and why we need it, the many ways in which you can improve your sleep and optimize your sleeping conditions, methods for more effectively waking up early, and all about how to experiment with lucid dreaming and polyphasic sleep (if you’re ready to take your hacking to the extreme). It will teach you how you can sleep less, but get the right kind of sleep so that you feel more rested and retain more energy to get you through the day.

As he’s just made the guide available to the public for the first time, everyone who purchases Sleep Hack Dojo in August 2011 gets free access to SleepHack Dojo Premium. This means you just pay the normal price for SleepHack Dojo Basic ($44), but you’ll get lifelong access to all the promotional materials from SleepHack Dojo Premium ($67)! That saves you $21, so get in while the offer is good!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Sleep Hacking: How to Party Like a Rockstar, Get 2 Hours of Sleep a Night & Then Go to Work Building a Business

So New Girl ripped my heart out. Given, we’ve only been dating for two months, and I knew this moment had to come. Unfortunately we were doomed from the beginning. I don’t know what I expected to happen, because I’m leaving for Southeast Asia for a year and she has an acting career to concentrate on when she graduates college. I knew New Girl wasn’t the one, but she was definitely a kindred spirit—you know, someone that you connect with from the moment you meet them (we could always tell what was going on in each others’ head). I had no expectation that she would wait around for me for the year while I’m abroad, but I thought we were at least on the same page in wanting to enjoy this while it lasted.

NG spent a week in Mexico with her sister and her sister’s fiancee. When she came back she was a completely different person than the one I dropped off at the airport.

I’d had all this anticipation for Sunday night—waiting all week for her to return, making big plans to show her a great time for the next two weeks; I even designed a website for her acting portfolio while she was gone!

I know travel changes you (otherwise I wouldn’t be spending a year abroad) but six days apart shouldn’t make someone go from the “honey, baby, I love you” end of the spectrum to wanting nothing to do with you. I have my ideas about what happened, but frankly I don’t expect her to give me the explanation I deserve. I haven’t even heard her voice since Sunday night. I had to push her to tell me that we were actually broken up—and via text message no less!

I dunno what the hell is wrong with her, I just know how it feels. It feels like being effin’ dead inside. I can’t breathe, I can’t eat or sleep at times. I feel as though, once again, the world has proven to me that I can’t count on anybody but myself. At least NG’s given me my reason to move back.

Before the breakup, I almost settled for that sense of security. I mean, we were really happy. She’s a great girl, and we had a fantastic time together. When you’re with someone who makes you feel great, when you have someone to “come home to” and share life’s challenges with, it makes all the other shit almost bearable. But now I am reminded of why I wanted to get out of here in the first place.

I know I have a great life here in the States, but I’m also tired as shit of it. I have a few fantastic, close friends and some really supportive family, but I’m jaded. I’m a workaholic, which makes me stressed out and out-of-touch. I am often crushed to see how quickly some people can turn around and treat others like human trash, and without thinking twice about it. We are lucky in the U.S. to have so many freedoms, so much comfort and security, but a lot of people seem very unhappy—and I’ve long been one of them.

So this is why I’m leaving home for a while. I feel jaded with life here, and I don’t know why I’m here. I often feel like I wasn’t meant to be here—in this time, or on this planet, or something. I just don’t fit in. I don’t see anything I’d be interested in spending the next 60 years on. I’m just not into it. And I know I can’t expect life to be that different anywhere else, but I have to look around and see what else there is.

I’m not trying to get your sympathy vote or sell you a sad story. I know there are plenty of people out there in the world who have had it much rougher than I have. But after being in one place for all 24 years of my life, I can’t look around without being reminded of past failures, deceit, rejection, and so on, and this is just my way of dealing with the emotional baggage.

This is the point:

I should have started a lot sooner, but the idea is to sell everything I own, hit the road with a backpack, a laptop, and a week’s worth of clothing, and start fresh somewhere new. Piece by piece, I’m either selling or giving away everything that represents my old life. I’m going to go somewhere as different as I can possibly find—for a year, or however long it takes—with no set agenda. We’ll see what opportunities present themselves and where life takes me. I’ll be back, but for now I have to do this while I still can—while I’m not in a relationship, have no kids, no mortgage, no car payment…

Some people call it a quarterlife crisis! But it’s time for me to let go of all the reminders of a past life and move on to see what else life has to offer me.

Here’s how you can help:

I leave in 11 days! I have already sold a ton of my furniture and stuff. And I am listing a whole bunch more on Craigslist, but time is running out and I also just don’t have the energy or emotional capacity to get a fair price for all my things, what with all the travel planning, running my business, and the breakup running through my head at all times! Please checkout some of the stuff I have below. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, please get in touch. I just need to rid myself of as many material possessions as I can for now, and if I can give them a happy new home, or help you guys get your hands on some things that you might find useful, then that’d be great. For local Sacramento-area friends or family, of course I’m willing to give you some of this stuff for cheap or free if you’re interested, so let me know (that excludes the car or the iMac, now!):

• 1998 Pontiac Sunfire GT (5-speed) – $1500 OBO
  
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac – 2GB Memory/500GB Hard Drive, Loaded with Software, Latest Mac OSX, just bought in February – Asking $1100 OBO
• Men’s Research Dynamics Mountain bike – $45
• Bench Press + 100lb weights set – $40
• Mexican Classic Acoustic (Paracho) Guitar – $35
• 2 box speakers – $20
• VCR – FREE for local friends
• A buncha DVDs and Books I’m getting rid of – Also free for local friends if you want to look through them

I will write more soon about my trip and what I hope to get out of it, but for now, thanks for your support and your help!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Selling All My Belongings

It’s been a long time since I wrote about sustainability, but it is one issue that will challenge Generation Y like no other generation yet. I’ve shied away from it because I got tired of reporting on news that always seemed to be negative. I got tired of feeling like a doomsayer, which—unfortunately—is what a lot of environmentalists come off sounding like. But Wired Magazine’s 15th anniversary issue has stirred up a lot of talk in the global warming circles that caught my attention yesterday.

Despite the fact that the discussion can be a depressing one, and the options can at times seen hopeless, it remains that climate change is a huge, looming threat for human society, and it will have a huge influence especially on those of us who will still be around in 30 to 50 years. A lot of my peers are passionate about green living and sustainability, and that’s encouraging, because the choices we make with our daily lives, and more importantly the advances we make in science and industry in our lifetimes will have a large influence on whether our planet will sustain human life for the next several hundred years.

I’m not here to argue how much human behavior has impacted global warming—that’s a moot point if you ask me. In my opinion, yes, climate change—to some extent—is inevitable, even without the impact of human society. But the fact still remains that we must either learn to deal with global warming one way or another, or our species may not be able to survive on this changing planet. Regardless of who’s fault it is, our generation has an opportunity to make some big changes. And the difference between failure and success could be several million human lifetimes. I’d rather see our generation preserve the Earth as a hospitable place for our children and grandchildren.

Wired’s latest cover story asks environmentalists, and all the rest of us, to rethink what the green movement means. The writers propose ten controversial “solutions” that run counterintuitive to traditional environmental agendas, citing that “winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism’s sacred cows.” Here they are: Wired’s ten unconventional remedies for global warming. Click through to learn more.

Wired’s 10 Green Heresies

1. Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle
2. Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C02 Than Heating
3. Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet than Organics
4. Harvest Old-Growth Forests That Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming
5. Coal-Coughing Industrial Giant China Actually Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Technology
6. Bio-Engineered Crops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
7. Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But a Carbon Tax Would Work Better
8. Face It. Nuclear is the Most Sustainable Source of Industrial-Scale Energy
9. No-Brainer: Test-Drive a Used Car Instead of That New Hybrid
10. Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

The Wired blog is attracting a lot of discussion—most of it negative. I can sympathize with those who place a great deal of value on conventional environmentalist tenets like conservation and energy efficiency, but I think it’s important to recognize that only a very small percentage of the population is ready to embrace the “less is more” mentality. As the article states, “We must accept that the world’s fastest-growing economies won’t forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science.” All across the world, as societies become more affluent, they become more materialistic and they consume more resources and energy. Changing that intrinsic human behavior will prove to be a much more difficult challenge than adapting to it. It’s time to find solutions that can work in our business-centric, materialistic world. That’s the real world.

What do you guys think? Am I off my rocker for embracing used cars and nukes? Do you think Generation Y stands a chance of turning the world sustainable? How do you hope to contribute? Or do you still think all this global warming stuff is bunk?

[source: Wired.com]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 10 Controversial Climate Change Fixes to Spark Discussion—From Wired.com