When we travel from A to B in our car to a place that we don’t exactly have the map of our mind we use our navigation system. For every successful use of a navigation system we need three blocks of information:

• where we are right now (measured via GPS in your car)
• our destination (this is what we need to know and enter exactly)
• constant measurement and corrections if necessary (GPS measurement and corrections)

This is simply the general structure of change. We need to know where we are. We need to know where we want to go. And we need to measure our progress on the way and adapt if necessary.
Even though this week’s podcast episode is all about the measurement part I will give you a brief walk through all three parts here.

#1 Where are you right now?

The first thing that you want to do is to find out where you are really standing at the moment. Do an assessment. You will find lots of helpful information to get you there at #sleeptrust. A good idea would be to do an assessment of the following points:

• sleep duration
• quality of my sleep
• number of sleep interruptions
• alignment with biorhythm
• medication
• sleep duration

–

• anything else that you find to be important in regards to your present sleep

#2 Where do you want to go?

A good idea to get started with this is to have a look at your sleep assessment and to fill in your dream values. So let’s say you are getting 5 hours of sleep each night at present. However, your sleep goal might be to get up of 7 hours a night. Consequently defining your sleep goal is often simply the wish side of your assessment. As a result, your sleep goal will be very specific and lays a solid foundation to navigate towards.

Once you’ve got that part done I recommend to create a sleep-goal-card and to read this twice a day. You will find a complete walkthrough creating this here:

#3 Let’s start navigating

After getting the first steps right we have laid out a solid foundation for superb sleep. Finally, we reached this week’s topic – the navigation part.

What we want to do now is to create our own GPS system. Thus we want to start measuring our progress on a daily basis. Together with measuring the right things we will have the exact equivalent to a navigation system that we can rely on.

You can get started with a piece of paper and a pen. Simply start drawing a table on a sheet of paper put in two sorts of headlines:

1. Basic information, including the things that you want to measure from your assessment. As an example have a look at the following points to get the idea here:

• date
• bedtime
• wake up
• sleep duration
• sleep quality
• medication dose
• etc.

2. Things that you are testing at the moment, such as:

• dinner 4 hours before bedtime
• avoiding light-emitting screens 1 hour before bedtime
• usage of blue light reduced bulbs at night
• meditation practice
• bath
• etc.

In the first place, we want to make this a fun process. Subsequently, you want to pick things that are widely aligned with what you like. As we are talking about change – a certain degree of discomfort may be involved anyway.

A couple of things to consider

Finally, I want to give you three things that you should consider when you start your measurement process.

• get into the habit of measuring your progress daily
• pick things that you find to be most enjoyable first
• do not start with too many things together – doing everything is like doing nothing

Getting yourself on track to superb sleep can be challenging in the beginning. But reaping that energy/well being/health is well worth the effort. Always keep in mind that starting to measure what we are doing is core to any progress that is supposed to bring you (sleep)results.

Therefore start to measure your progress today and get support sharing your experience or questions with me and the community on Facebook and Instagram.

Have a superb sleep!