Health is based on three pillars: sleep, nutrition and fitness. I chat with some of the most interesting people I know to discover more about their Health Stacks: the behaviors and products they use to stay healthy and fit.
Recently, I had an hour-long Zoom conversation with Simon Huck. Simon is the founder of JUDY, an emergency preparedness brand that offers emergency kits to families across the country. I spoke with Simon about his health and sleep journey over the past few years.
Highlights
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Simon started his health journey when he moved to New York City at 20 years old
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Simon talks candidly about his struggles with insomnia, and how he has overcome his sleep struggles
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Eating healthy and reducing sugar intake have been a huge game changer for Simon’s overall wellbeing and sleep hygiene
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Simon uses his workouts to unplug from the world and views them as a treat
How I started my health journey
I used to tell people, “Oh, I’ve always been healthy,” but that really wasn’t the case. I always had a sweet tooth growing up so I did not eat as healthy as I do now. In college, there wasn’t really a workout culture, so I found myself not working out regularly. It wasn’t until I was 20 year old that I had my fitness “make-over” when I moved to New York City and realized that people in this city are in such good shape. I really didn’t take my health and fitness seriously until I started living in New York.
My biggest health struggle
It is definitely sleep and I could talk about it forever because it has been such a challenge for me. I have worked with doctors, specialists, and experts all over the world to try to fix my sleep.
After 25 years of battling with insomnia, I am now a recovered insomniac. For the longest time, it was something that really controlled my life because I was so anxious about not getting sufficient sleep. Now I’m in a much better place, but it took years and a lot of hard work.
My main problem with sleep stemmed from anxiety. I’ve never been a person that could fall asleep right away. A big challenge for me was having anxious thoughts, primarily about work. Even if I were to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, my anxious thoughts would start and wouldn’t be able to shut them off by the time I got back into bed. Thus, I would be up for hours. I realized that I needed to cleanse myself of this anxiety and maintain a regular sleep schedule if I was ever going to fix my insomnia.
In the beginning, I tried everything to fix my sleep. I am the person who invested thousands and thousands of dollars in every sleep voodoo magic trick you could do. When I first started dating Phil, my fiance, I was moving apartments and I had to get a new mattress. I bought eight different mattresses and I kept shuffling them. I’d have them stacked in my living room and I would just shuffle them out to try and figure out which mattress would give me the best sleep and finally landed on one that worked… I am the case study for bad sleep and I think mattresses are important.
My first attempts to try to help my anxiety and sleep involved using Calm and Headspace. I practiced some of their anti-anxiety meditations, and those were helpful for clearing my mind before bed. I’ve been slacking these last two years, though. Some people find it easy to meditate, but as someone who is really anxious, I find that meditation makes me feel worse on occasion. Personally, I don’t think meditation is mandatory for good sleep. However, meditation does seem to work for a lot of people, especially my friends who suffer from anxiety like me.
After trying meditation, I looked into therapy programs to help my sleep since my issues stemmed from anxiety. One program I tried was CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia). CBT-I wasn’t unsuccessful, but I had problems committing to it. I wanted to do something personalized and within my own control, and I didn’t want to have to go to a doctor once a week. Along with those reasons, I also did not want to completely change my lifestyle in order for the program to work. I have a major sweet tooth and continued to drink alcohol, but I wasn’t ready to give those things up, even though I knew it was affecting my sleep and the potential positive effects of the CBT-I program. How could I complain about not sleeping when I’m having sugar filled cocktails three times a week, or when I’m having a chocolate multiple times a week? There are a lot of habits in our own control that can improve our sleep, but a lot of people don’t want to give up things, such as sugary foods and cocktails. Even though I did not continue CBT-I, it taught me that my sleep problems weren’t going to be fixed until I started to make lifestyle choices. Because of this, I basically just went completely boring, sober, and sugar-free for eight months and it did wonders for my sleep.
During the time of making big lifestyle changes, I was not particularly fun. To improve my sleep, I had to get rid of alcohol entirely (even though prior to that, I was only drinking on a Friday or Saturday night). Drinking messes with your sleep rhythm and sleep hygiene for days. I find I’m still dealing with a hangover on a Wednesday if I was out drinking on a Saturday. Living in New York City, it can be hard to have proper sleep hygiene since there’s a lot of people out there who are really living big on the weekends. It’s important to be disciplined because big weekends out will affect your sleep for the entire week.
Once I made those lifestyle changes, my sleep started to improve drastically. Aside from lifestyle changes, I went to Mount Sinai and I participated in several sleep studies. They were moderately helpful, but the biggest game changer for my sleep came from a book I read called The Sleep Solution by Dr. Chris Winter, a sleep expert. It’s a great book for anyone out there who is struggling with sleep. His book changed my life and mindset about sleep. I send it as a Christmas gift to all of my insomniac friends out there. Dr. Winter taught me to treat my sleep like I treat my bicep or any other muscle in my body – I have to work at it and condition it and over time, it will get better.
One of the key takeaways I had during my sleep journey was that when I start something, I need to follow through and not get discouraged. The biggest thing I see with my friends who are struggling with their sleep is that they try something for three days and then they’ll say, “It’s not working.” I’ll think, “Well, nothing works in three days.”
“We’re so used to instant gratification and things being fixed overnight, that we don’t have patience when it comes to fixing things like sleep.”
Something I like to keep in mind about sleep is that no one in the history of the world has ever died because they didn’t sleep well. Non-sleepers are functioning. They’re going to Wall Street every day, they’re acting in movies, they’re nurses and doctors, and there are functioning people all around the world who do not sleep well. A lot of people don’t sleep and they’re still able to do their job every day so it’s not the end of the world for them. I used to have horrible anxiety if I didn’t sleep much the night before. Now I know that if I only get a few hours of sleep, it won’t be the best day, but I’ll get through it. I used to cancel meetings because I was sleep deprived, but I don’t do that anymore. Now, I don’t cancel my workout, I don’t cancel my social plans, and I make no changes for my lack of sleep. It’s allowed me to persevere. Plus, the more